I'd like to understand how a wiki works, at least from a high level. When a user saves changes, does it always insert a new row in the database for that wiki article (10 revisions, 10 rows in the database).
I agree with all the answers. Wikis normally handle every edit as a new record inside the database.
You may be interested in checking out the full Layout of the MediaWiki database diagram, the wiki engine behind Wikipedia.
Note that the full text of each revision is stored in a MEDIUMBLOB
field in the text
table.