(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
[1]
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/geo/geohack.php