Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 8:27 PM, Q overlordq@gmail.com wrote:
I would have to suggest to not go the shared database route unless the code can be fixed so that shared databases actually work with all of the DB backends.
I don't see why it shouldn't be easy to get it working with all DB backends. But in any case, for Wikimedia use, a shared database backend is pretty much a must. Having the application servers make HTTP requests to each other to retrieve templates rather than accessing the database directly is just silly, and is going to perform badly.
He can internally call the api from the other wiki via FauxRequest.
Ideally the code should generalize to work with external wikis too, so that third parties can benefit from our templates as they do from our images. Maybe someday, a copy-pasted Wikipedia article will actually work . . . I can dream.
I'm afraid that it will produce the opposite. A third party downloads a xml dump for offline use but it doesn't work because it needs a dozen templates from meta (in the worst case, templates from a dozen other wikis).