On 04/04/2011, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@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