Andre Engels wrote:
What I would in particular like, is to have the
ability to check
at once new messages on my User talk: in all languages, and having a
merged watchlist.
I think that is beyond what is discussed now but also a feature I would like -
it would propably also increase the number of people contributing to multiple
languages. But before you think about adding more and more tables to a system
getting more and more complex:
*Please* implement a *completely independent watchlist-server*. Since Wikipedia
is growing exponential modularizing it is the only way to survive. It could also
help attracting programmers that do not like to get into a big monolithic
program like MediaWiki that you can almost only use for Wikipedia.
A watchlist-server would only need to collect RSS-feeds of recent changes and
get watch/unwatch-this-page-messages of users - no work on the live database.
Maybe it could also collect "you-have-a-message"-notices, posts to the
mailinglists and even other weblogs and stuff. Each user gets his aggregated
feed of changes, new articles and what he wants - you can also deliver messages
about changes per mail and of course RSS. Not to speek about features like
* list of most-watched-articles
* diagram of current active in edits/minute at each wikipedia
* subscribing public pre-defined-watchlists
and even notices about articles that are watched by people that watch similar
articles like I do!
Well, we do not need all of this features right now but its much more likely to
get them implemented and running independent from the MediaWiki-codebase and the
Wikipedia-server that may switch them on and off.
By the way the search functionality can also be put on an independent server
with an independent database like every other read-only-tasks.
just my 2 cents
Jakob