Brion Vibber wrote:
- Checksums would be of fairly obvious benefit to verifying text storage
integrity within MediaWiki's own databases (though perhaps best sitting on or keyed to the text table...?) Default installs tend to use simple plain-text or gzipped storage, but big installs like Wikimedia's sites (and not necessarily just us!) optimize storage space by batch-compressing multiple text nodes into a local or remote blobs table.
I also considered the possibility of adding it on the text table. There it could go without a schema change, just as anoher field of the object. But it's too risky. We have already corrupted objects in the past. And it wouldn't be a check as good as bein in revision (eg. suppose that text_ids were mismatched).