There's been some discussion on a development mailing list regarding the namespace selector in contributions pages, which is expensive due to our schema arrangement.
One of our database administrators has posed this question, which I thought I'd forward to this list, since it's full of users.
Rob Church
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Domas Mituzas midom.lists@gmail.com Date: 23-May-2006 11:28 Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Special:Contributions: index missing? To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@wikimedia.org
Hi!
It can be a task for tool server, and can be as well derived from our xml dumps.
We have all that information in recentchanges (without an index for this exact operation), but even then, I'm not convinced it has to be used his way.
What is the point of per-namespace contribution feature on live site? What are the applications of it?
Domas
G'day Rob,
There's been some discussion on a development mailing list regarding the namespace selector in contributions pages, which is expensive due to our schema arrangement.
D'oh.
One of our database administrators has posed this question, which I thought I'd forward to this list, since it's full of users.
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From: Domas Mituzas midom.lists@gmail.com Date: 23-May-2006 11:28 Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Special:Contributions: index missing? To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@wikimedia.org
<snip/>
What is the point of per-namespace contribution feature on live site? What are the applications of it?
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It's damn useful to be able to filter down contributions to a particular namespace. For example, if I know a user has repeatedly violated copyrights, I can check all Image:-related edits without needing to wave through edits to the other namespaces, to ensure that all his copyvios are tracked down and destroyed.
On 5/23/06, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
It's damn useful to be able to filter down contributions to a particular namespace. For example, if I know a user has repeatedly violated copyrights, I can check all Image:-related edits without needing to wave through edits to the other namespaces, to ensure that all his copyvios are tracked down and destroyed.
The upload log would probably help with that one.
G'day geni,
On 5/23/06, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
It's damn useful to be able to filter down contributions to a particular namespace. For example, if I know a user has repeatedly violated copyrights, I can check all Image:-related edits without needing to wave through edits to the other namespaces, to ensure that all his copyvios are tracked down and destroyed.
The upload log would probably help with that one.
Good point. I had not considered that.
Okay ... suppose you have a good-hearted but bannibly misguided user repeatedly replacing {{nosource}} with {{fairuse}} ... or removing {{db|}} from abusive userboxen ... or creating exotic category structures and throwing articles into disarray ... or ...
On 5/23/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/23/06, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
It's damn useful to be able to filter down contributions to a particular namespace. For example, if I know a user has repeatedly violated copyrights, I can check all Image:-related edits without needing to wave through edits to the other namespaces, to ensure that all his copyvios are tracked down and destroyed.
The upload log would probably help with that one.
The log isn't too useful if they've changed the tags after uploading, or if they're applying copyright tags to images they haven't uploaded.
On 5/23/06, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
What is the point of per-namespace contribution feature on live site? What are the applications of it?
It would be good to encourage RfA voters to use it. They could then sample a couple of contriubtions of the candidate from each of the relevant spaces, rather than just going "OMFG 70% userspace edits!! '''oppose''' ~~~~"
Steve
Rob Church wrote:
There's been some discussion on a development mailing list regarding the namespace selector in contributions pages, which is expensive due to our schema arrangement. [...] What is the point of per-namespace contribution feature on live site? What are the applications of it?
What is the point in that question? If it is so database-intensive that it needs to be taken down, then surely it should be taken down even if it is useful. Conversely, if it is not database-intensive enough to be a real problem, then surely it doesn't hurt to have it even if it isn't useful.
Besides, it appears that few people have found a really good use for it; it can therefore be assumed that it will not be used very frequently, and therefore it will likely not have much database impact after all. :)
Timwi
On 6/8/06, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
What is the point in that question? If it is so database-intensive that it needs to be taken down, then surely it should be taken down even if it is useful. Conversely, if it is not database-intensive enough to be a real problem, then surely it doesn't hurt to have it even if it isn't useful.
Besides, it appears that few people have found a really good use for it; it can therefore be assumed that it will not be used very frequently, and therefore it will likely not have much database impact after all. :)
I use it. But it'd be nice if that, and similar options like "Hide my edits" on the watch list, could be made persistent across visits to the page, via a user pref.
Steve
Timwi wrote:
Rob Church wrote:
There's been some discussion on a development mailing list regarding the namespace selector in contributions pages, which is expensive due to our schema arrangement. [...] What is the point of per-namespace contribution feature on live site? What are the applications of it?
What is the point in that question? If it is so database-intensive that it needs to be taken down, then surely it should be taken down even if it is useful. Conversely, if it is not database-intensive enough to be a real problem, then surely it doesn't hurt to have it even if it isn't useful.
It may be in the between. Perhaps the load it causes might be just enough to make some other useful but nonessential feature infeasible with the current server resources. (Or maybe not, just speculating for the sake of it.)
Besides, it appears that few people have found a really good use for it; it can therefore be assumed that it will not be used very frequently, and therefore it will likely not have much database impact after all. :)
I certainly find it useful. And in any case, it can generally be assumed that if it's there, it will be used.
It's true that efficiently indexing that in such a way that page moves across namespaces remain O(1) is hard. However, it strikes me that, for most uses of that feature, we presumably aren't really interested in the current namespace of the page so much as in the namespace it was in when the contribution was named. If so, a simple solution presents itself: add a field to the revision table recording the _original_ namespace (and maybe pagename, while we're at it) of the revision as it was when it was created.
(The null revisions resulting from page moves should probably be considered to belong in the target namespace, especially since another revision is already created in the source namespace for the redirect.)