On Apr 21, 2004, at 19:29, Evan Prodromou wrote:
So, I'd like to add a little block of attribution data to each page (optional, per-installation; I'm guessing Wikipedia wouldn't use this). Something along the lines of:
This article last edited on April 21, 2004 by Evan Prodromou. Based on work by Alice Notaperson, Bob Alsonotaperson, users Crankshaft, Deckchair and Eggplant, and anonymous editors.For each (distinct) person who's listed in the old table, it'd show their real name if it's set, or their user name if not.
The clear problem with this is that it doesn't scale well. The list will increase and increase and increase on popular pages, and on some pages could literally contain hundreds, maybe thousands of distinct names. Not only will this add a huge amount of text to the output, but it will require trawling through thousands of history entries to get the info, making it a fairly expensive operation. This is already a potentially serious problem with the metadata return, but there it only has to be done on request.
It would probably be a good idea to limit it to the last N editors, where N is some sensible number.
getContributors would return an array of arrays, each of which would contain:
0. User ID 1. User account name 2. User real name, if set
That's probably reasonable.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)