On maintaining node history

[andygol]

Is it possible to preserve the edit history on more than one segment when splitting a way?

Short answer, this is not possible to achieve with the current version of the OSM API. When you split a Way into two or more parts, from the API perspective it looks like you remove some sets of nodes from the existing way and create new way reusing these (extracted from the origin way) nodes. The new way doesn’t have any history of edits because there’s no refs to ancestors features. PS One of the possible way for the API improvements

See similar discussion about tracking history of OSM features. It contains some suggestions for improvements.