Alex Brollo wrote:
It's strange (but I guess that there's a sound reason) that plain wikilinks point to a variable field of wiki records (the name of the page) while many troubles would be solved, if they could point to the invariable field of such records: the id. The obviuos restult is, that all links are broken (and need fixing) as soon as a page is "moved" (t.i. renamed).
My question is: which is the sound reason for this strange thing? There's some idea about fixing this?
Alex
That's how it used to be before 1.5 There was a links table [1] and a brokenlinks table [2].
Then if a page was created/deleted/renamed all entries referring to it (which could be large) would need to be migrated/updated.
Using the pagelinks table avoids all these problems (at the cost of some more space needed for existing links).
Also see [3] and [4].
1- http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Links_table 2- http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Brokenlinks_table 3- http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Database_layout 4- http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-May/017434.html