Last modified: 2014-06-05 08:57:39 UTC
Users' system clocks are generally not synchronized with those of Wikimedia's servers, and there is frequently a delay; in particular, there can be periods of lag and then many revisions all being recieved at once. Assigning revisions the system time as of when they arrived is fine for knowing what edits were made in what order, but weirdness occurs when trying to use these edits' supposed timestamps in conjunction with actual timestamps fetched through the API (revisions in the wrong order, edit conflicts that aren't, and so forth). The only way around this is to ask the API what the revision's real timestamp is when doing anything with it, kind of negating the advantage of using the IRC feed in the first place.
Component -> RecentChanges
The IRC RC Feed is no longer in development (considered frozen for backwards compatibility). It's replacement[1] based on JSONRCFeedFormatter and MachineReadableRCFeedFormatter has a timestamp property[2] already. [1] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stream.wikimedia.org [2] https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki- core/blob/77f9979e/includes/rcfeed/MachineReadableRCFeedFormatter.php#L53