On 11/9/07, Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@home.nl wrote:
Thomas Dalton schreef:
I don't think there's an existing field you could use
You thought correctly, there isn't.
(perhaps the schema change should be adding a fairly large bit field to the articles/revisions table(s) so people can add properties like this without needing to add a new field each time, they could just change a text file somewhere which describes what all the bits mean).
Good idea, makes for much fewer schema changes in the future. The table we'll want this one in is the page table [1]. While we're at it, we could also condense page_is_new and page_is_redirect into this new page_flags bitfield.
Sounds problematic. There isn't a binary AND function in mysql, so looking for new/redirected pages (as is done in, for instance, special pages) would have performance issues if you condensed it into a bitfield. Lots of special pages would need to be updated, as well.
As for disambiguation pages, it's done best as an extension. Most wikis running MediaWiki will not want or need this functionality, and it's certainly an editorial tool more than a display tool. It's probably better implemented as some user-side javascript.