[WikiEN-l] Linkage bloat

[Ian Woollard]

On 04/04/2011, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Have a look at [[Template:Protected Areas of Massachusetts]], for
> example. This nearly doubled in size early in 2011, with a couple of
> hundred red links added.
>
> What we have here is "quadratic": if it is assumed all those redlinks
> are articles that will get added (there may be no reason why not), and
> that this footer is added to all those articles, the linkage created
> grows as the square of the number of links. So a footer with a 1001
> links implies a million wikilinks.
>
> It would be sensible to have a guideline that says "break down footers
> that have many links", to reduce the effect.

Do we actually have any thousand link footers?

I'm pretty sure we don't.

The principle is that it shouldn't be possible for a normal user to
break or significantly slow the site, and I'm sure that even if a
thousand link footer existed that the Wikipedia wouldn't break. And
speaking as a techy guy, I know that the tech guys have lots of tricks
they can do; so seriously don't worry about it. They could make
something appear to be a million links, whereas internally in the
database it's really only a thousand. They could cache the template in
lots of crazy ways you wouldn't believe.

But in any case a million things isn't actually that big; the database
is currently what? Thousands of gigabytes? And growing all the time. A
few footer templates like that wouldn't be *any* problem. A million
things is still only a drop in a very big ocean.

Basically, what matters here is readability and usefulness.

> Charles

-- 
-Ian Woollard