On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 12:11 AM, Ilmari Karonen
<nospam@vyznev.net> wrote:
In principle, it should also be possible to make a true live Wikimedia
edit counter: all you'd need to do is subscribe to the IRC RecentChanges
feed and condense it down to some suitably low-bandwidth, low-latency
format for transmitting to the browser. I'm not sure how practical that
would be with plain old AJAX, though (you really don't want to make a
new request for every edit), but Java or Flash or something like that
ought to handle it fine.
You could go the "half" way: make a php script that just makes a count(rev_id) on revisions (or whatever the table is named, haven't worked with MW DBs for ages) of all wikis, maybe make this run by a 10-second-cronjob and just write to a textfile. Then, your "livecounter" makes a request to this every 10 sec and can then see the current number of edits in 10sec based on the difference of revisions.
Sure, this doesn't take into account revision hiding, oversight and log entries, but this should be fairly accurate.
Marco