On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 2:51 PM, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I actually
like the idea of an autosave, but I could see how it might
not be a high priority (and could eventually be something of resource
hog if people are allowed to leave a lot of uncommitted drafts lying
around).
Resource hog in what sense, disk space? I don't think disk space is a
big deal. You do know that we keep all the old revisions of articles,
right? :P
As I recall, someone did an analysis and reported that people click on
"edit" more than twice as often as they actually save an edit. If
half of all database text were abandoned drafts, that would be dumb.
Would WMF come tumbling down if the database doubled in size?
Probably not, but it would still be a dumb use of resources.
Historically, there has also been opposition to anything that would
allow people to store "private" content on Wikipedia. Of course both
issues could be dealt with if we just said unsaved drafts expired
after a month or something.
-Robert Rohde