It strikes me that it would be a good idea to have some way of collapsing edits by the same author into one edit. That would prevent abuses by edit count warriors like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...&oldid=33218872and also clear out a bunch of useless versions from the database. Further, it wouldn't break the GFDL since the versions would all be by the same person.
Mashing edits (that are not sequential and by the same person) into one edit would make going through the history confusing and annoying, but history being clogged with minor changes is also annoying.
While it wouldn't help with edit counts, a perennial suggestion is diff based storage or compressing multiple revisions together (currently, revisions are the full text and optionally compressed individually). It results in less storage space used, with the cost of more processing to display a specific version.
Various links:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikite...ary/020711.htmlhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/History_compressionhttp://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikite...ber/031487.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_controlhttp://www.ccc.de/congress/2004/fahrplan/event/63
Indeed.... I have thought about this before but decided aginst a extension for the same reasons. History would become a real pain mainly because it would be out of order and not pretty.