On Dec 7, 2003, at 12:56, Freerk wrote:
On http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Download and other wikipedia download sites I found a tutorial on updating my local database with the wikipedia mysql dump. It says afterwords you have to do a "php rebuildlinks.php". But why? Well, I assume it rebuilds some links but which ones? I thought everything is dynamic in the database, and the only links are in the cur_table, which I updated with a mysql command.
There are presently three link tables: 'links' tracks all "live" links from wikipages to other wikipages that do exist; 'brokenlinks' tracks "broken" links, those that go to pages that don't yet exist; 'imagelinks' tracks usage of images in wikipages.
There are a couple of uses for these tables: - enables "What links here" and "Related changes" to work, looking at incoming or outgoing links - provides the list of pages that use an image shown on an image's description page - allows making reports of pages that aren't linked (Orphans, Unused images) or are linked to but don't exist (Most wanted pages) - slightly speed up page rendering by avoiding individual checks for the existence of each linked page to determine how to render its link
(The latest software also adds a 'linkscc' table which caches data from the other three tables. This is used only for speeding rendering.)
If you import data to the cur table and don't rebuild the links, you won't be able to use "What links here", "Related changes", "Orphans", etc. If you don't want to, well I suppose that's okay...
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)