On Tue, 13 Dec 2005 16:02:29 +0100, John Lee johnleemk@gawab.com wrote:
Andrea Forte wrote:
Has it ever been suggested before that a simple indicator of "how many people are watching this article" could be a useful tool for:
users who want to figure out what to trust wikipedians who want to know where to spend their efforts discouraging vandalism
Has this been tried? Suggested? Debated?
Just curious,
Andrea
It's not exactly new, but I've never figured out why it hasn't been explored further.
Main reason I believe is that page view logging is disabled for performance reasons. The only way to get such a feature to work would be to generate every page on the fly from the database on every view (otherwise the count would be out of date). As it is pages are cached by any number of Squid servers so the main database server have absolutely no idea how many people are watching any given page at any given time. If the caching was turned off the server(s) would probably outright die from overwork pretty much right away, it can barely cope as it is at peak times.
Aside from that I don't think the feature would be overly usefull. The best you can do is give a count of how many people have loaded the page within the last X minutes, there is no way to actualy tell if anyone is *actualy* viewing the page. I think a more meaningfull number would be the number of active (insert a convenient definition of active here) users have the page on theyr watchlist or something like that, but again you can't stick that on the page itself with the caching eneabled, otherwise it would only update every time someone edited the page (or did an action=purge on it). Maybe it could be put in an asosiated special page, kinda like Special:Whatlinkshere or some such though, they are not cached.