I think this comes back to thinking how the UX for this works - which needs some thought.  A revision number is fine as a 'thing' which happens to refer to a particular revision.  Its kind of (barely) ok, that two revision numbers can be compared such that higher numbers are later and vice versa.  But they don't really convey more information to users, unlike dates/times.
  
```
Page did not exist at %s.  It was subsequently created at %s.
```
Where both %s are dates.