[Mediawiki-l] Marking Changes in MediaWiki Pages

[Rob Church]

On 30/07/07, Norbert Hoeller <nhoeller at sinet.ca> wrote:
> Rob, what exactly is a 'full old version', how many does MediaWiki
> maintain, and how far back do they go?

MediaWiki stores the full text of each old version of a page, which,
depending upon the configuration, can be stored as-is, compressed,
concatenated together and compressed (most efficient). The text can
further be stored on an external storage cluster, which is a concept
we've not realised much past using clusters of cheaper application
servers running databases to hold the bulk text, although this seems
to be quite effective.

The software will keep old versions of a page forever. There are some
maintenance scripts (e.g. maintenance/deleteOldRevisions.php) which
are supposed to prune old versions, but these haven't been updated in
a little while, and might well violate current development best
practices/recommendations.


Rob Church