Dear Developers and fellow Wikipedians
I wrote this idea of Client Side Accelerated Wikifying up in
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_Avantgarde_Client_Side_Accelerated_Wi kifying or [[HACSAW]] for short
It would make wikifying articles more easy, intuitive, faster and more _accurate_ if implemented and I believe it is in the spirit of Wikipedia.
It could possibly reduce the load on the server because currently people have to fetch full rendered articles if they want to be sure they are linking to the correct article. Context is not always what you presume and HACSAW would take some of this "fetch-and-glance" load off the servers.
One of the biggest obstacles I see in implementing HACSAW is that it cannot be implemented as a browser plugin because that would seriously violate the egalitarian nature of Wikipedia due to people being divided into two groups: those who can get the plugin and those who cannot
A Java applet could be the solution, but I have no knowledge of how to make persistent client side data structures available to an applet.
If you have know-how on building applets that use persistent (browser and system shutdown persistance is needed) client side data storages please take a look at [[m:HACSAW]] and help us push the envelope further.
Kind regards and a big thanks for this great wiki implementation, Juxo
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org