Rob Church wrote:
It's worth noting that someone else has registered an intention to do something similar and provide it as a script on the toolserver. That sounds infeasible to me, however, since we all know that, right now (and likely, for some considerable time), Zedler does not have access to the text of pages.
Well, my idea was simpler. While this new system would be superb in giving the attribution, and an exapmple of GFDL-compliance, on everyday use, you won't need to know 'who added each piece', but 'who added that quote' on Jimbo Wales user page (~3000 edits) OffTopic: interesting how Jimbo ip was hidden [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Jimbo_Wales&diff=7476787&...]
So you would ask 'when was this phrase [at revision y] introduced?', getting:
a) You must be wrong, article doesn't have such phrase b) Three edits before, by Foo [diff]
I don't think it to be very expensive. I calculate that most changes would have been introduced on last 10 edits (average 4 edits or so). Of course then you should try to guess if it was a blanking + reversion and complicate things a little more ;)
The worst case would be where the page has a lot of edits and the token has been there for a lot of edits. The first time it will be slow, but next times the cache will fast it a lot, so you'll have to go looking for another biggy article.
Your problem is that toolserver (zedler) doesn't have direct access to stored text due to external storage (which we were told will be solved..... one of this years) and text queries need to do a hit to the pmtpa server. Yeah, this can reduce perfomance, but -we only want raw text. No need to _stress_ wikimedia servers with page rendering. -if the revision was queried before, it will be cached on toolserver :-) -<s>we</s> I expect to need little revisions per query (as stated above).
It could be watched on real conditions the problems which may arise, or if it's needed to reduce frequence of queries/set a timewait. Until then, everything is speculation :-)
As a side note, there's currently a script on toolserver querying every change on wikipedia. Ask for some revisions when a user calls the php shouldn't matter in comparison ;-) External storage is a toolserver problem so i don't know why you complain to me so much about it. Morevoer, there're worse methods of implementating it, what about doing it on javascript? hahaha.
Platonides