On 20/06/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
Is this a significant performance issue? When editing the MediaWiki messages on enwiki, I've been habitually replacing [[X:Foo]] with [[{{ns:X}}:Foo]] to make it easier to copy the messages over to other projects with different namespace names. Should I only do this for {{ns:Project}}, on the assumption that the other namespaces will have the same names on most English projects? Or should I avoid using {{ns:}} entirely? Does it only matter for some messages?
As I understood from discussion with Domas, the problem was the double-brace substitution in messages used within the skins, that is; messages which are used on each page view. These go through the parser and impact performance.
Reducing these to using canonical namespace names helps, and doesn't harm the interface, since all those uses have corresponding "caption" messages.
With the odd message that is used often, but not on every view, e.g. "This page is protected, see [[{{ns:project}}:Protected page]] for help, it's not such a problem, and is in fact acceptable given that it improves the user experience. The messages I changed were redundantly using transformations.
Rob Church