Alex Brollo wrote:
Special pages, if I understand all their features, are
special why:
# they come from a live API query;
# they cannot be managed/created/edited by users;
# they have no chronology (it would be nonsense).
It.source uses many "list pages", daily updated by a bot, containing other
project-specific queries. They are "normal" pages, and their chronology is
bot useless and heavy. DynamicPageList extension could solve in part such a
useless overload of web space, but its output can't be finely tuned.
So, I imagine that it could be useful to have a "special namespace" for
"customable user-defined queries & lists", with only one special feature:
the lack of chronology stuff. I can imagine that a possible candidate for
such exotic, chronology-free pages could be Special: namespace itself;
obviously the name of user-created pages into Special: namespace should be
different from any "canonical" Special pages.
Am I mad?
Alex
There's no way admins would be allowed to run custom queries on WMF
sites. We have existing special pages disabled. Unreviewed queries won't
make into the cluster.
Now, if the query you want can be done efficiently, it could be added as
an extension.
Really I went back to
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/TablesWikipediaIT.htm, and list
pages ("Elenco...") have a history of less than 2Mby each. You're right.
If you want to reduce history size, you should begin by removing
date-changing edits [1]. If you really need to show a date there, you
can include a template from all the pages containing just the date where
all of them were last updated.
1- Eg. no changes on last 16 days, but the bot is dutifully copying the
page each day
http://it.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Wikisource%3AElenco_alfabetico_d…