"Brion Vibber" brion@pobox.com schrieb:
The problem is that pages are purged from the cache when *that page* is updated, but the Main Page on en.wikipedia.org has been restructured in a way that its content isn't *in* the page. The actual content is imported from other pages, and when those pages are edited, *those pages* are purged from the cache, but the Main Page isn't.
It's easy not to notice this if you're logged in or doing editing, since you'll have engaged a mode that only uses your browser's own cache and it's easy to reload, but visitors who have never logged in and not edited in this session will see the old cached version from the site-wide cache, which gets more and more out of date until somebody edits the page or does something else to purge it.
Tim's been working on a fix for this which will record the inclusion as a specially-marked link and then including pages can be purged when included pages are edited. I'm not sure if this is ready to go yet.
As far as I can see, one does not need to do such edits to get the cache 'corrected' - a forced reload while logged out seems to do the trick as well. I'm not sure about it, but I cannot remember any case that I did not get the newest version that way. Now this _could_ mean that there is simply nobody ever watching our Dutch frontpage, but I do hope that that's not what's the problem... At the very least, those who want to do an edit like mentioned above might try the logged out reload first to see whether an edit is necessary.
Andre Engels