(sending this message again, as I somehow was unsubscribed from wikitech-l for a while. Damn computers;-)
Hi all,
a long time ago, en:User:Egil wrote a great MediaWiki extension to handle geographic coordinates, like ISBNs are handled by Special:Booksources, and ran it off his server. When said server broke down, and Egil was unreachable, I wrote a workaround [1] to run it as a standalone script, and put it on the toolsever as a temporary measure.
As it is tradition for temporary fixes, this one seems to have become permanent ;-) with ~640000 hits in October, making up >8% of toolserver traffic.
I wonder if this would be the time to add Egils extension to the standard Wikipedia extension set. This would not only look more seamless, and offer localized pages, but also take advantage of the usual caching mechanisms. AFAIK, all that needs to be done is adding the extension, copying the wikisource to a local page, and fix the geo templates. This could be done gradually; unless the templates are adapted, the default behaviour (using toolserver) won't change, even if the extension is activated.
Magnus