Edward Z. Yang wrote:
I was surfing Wikipedia the other day, and at one point, I had to use VfD. My experience makes me shudder. But that's not my point.
In my opinion, the VfD is now beyond elegant implementation without hardwired software help. As of now, Wikipedia:Vfd is simply a page with lots of policy and lots of problems.
I agree. In fact, I've gone so far as to suggest the VfD automation task to newbie developers as a potential first feature. Nobody has taken it up yet. Your proposal looks solid and well thought out, although ultimate design decisions should be made by the developer who writes the code.
The negative is:
- This puts a greater strain on Wikipedia servers with the parsing and
output of these pages (which may require an entirely different sort of caching system). It probably will come down to only a few possible ways of viewing VfD to keep caching manageable.
VFD puts great strain on the server as it is, because the server is forced to regularly render the whole page, consisting of a few megabytes of HTML. If you can break it down into small sections, I think that will be a win for performance, even if there is less opportunity for caching.
The other page that needs to be automated is the Village Pump. I'd like to see a hybrid of a wiki interface and a bulletin board for that. Divide the page into threads, show links to the most recent 50 threads with links to the next 50, that sort of thing.
-- Tim Starling