On Wed, 30 Apr 2003 17:02:31 -0500 (CDT), John R. Owens jowens.wiki@ghiapet.homeip.net gave utterance to the following:
On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, Geoffrey Thomas wrote:
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 14:47:20 -0700 (PDT) From: Geoffrey Thomas geoffreyerffoeg@yahoo.com Subject: [Wikitech-l] Caching
A suggestion for caching: the home page, [[Main Page]], never should include links to nonexistent pages. Could that be cached (in standard stylesheet), e.g., as /index.html? I would think that page is accessed very frequently and that caching it would save some database work for other pages.
Actually, it seems to happen rather often that someone or something formerly rather obscure suddenly hits the headlines, or dies, and suddenly appears on the [[Main Page]]. Of course, usually at least a stub is made very soon after, but I don't think it qualifies as a "never". And it's good to be able to see whether or not the article does exist yet when you see the Main Page, of course. For instance, right now, the first two "Recent deaths" on the English Wikipedia, Bernard Katz & Nina Simone, both didn't have any page at all until they died.
I presume that it is one of the admin jobs to select and update the items that appear on the "In the news" "Recent deaths" etc. link lists. That is likely to happen twice a day at most, probably once. What would happen under a caching system is that the interface to gegenerate those components simply rewrites the cached version of the page. What we would lose with caching, however, is indicators such as the asterisk showing that someone has edited your talk page if you are logged in. Perhaps (if people don't scream blue murder about popups), logged in users could have a little popup console where these dynamic things happen. For Opera/Mozilla it could be written as a panel or sidebar.