On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 4:59 AM, Alex Brollo alex.brollo@gmail.com wrote:

Special pages, if I understand all their features, are special why: # they come from a live API query; # they cannot be managed/created/edited by users; # they have no chronology (it would be nonsense).

Special pages are special because they don't have any contents stored at all, as such. When you view a special page, the software just executes a particular PHP script, which can be hardcoded to do absolutely anything. For instance, Special:MyPage just returns an HTTP redirect, not a page with contents. They don't have a history in general because they don't have any fixed contents at all -- the contents are generated on the fly in an arbitrary fashion.

It.source uses many "list pages", daily updated by a bot, containing other project-specific queries. They are "normal" pages, and their chronology is bot useless and heavy. DynamicPageList extension could solve in part such a useless overload of web space, but its output can't be finely tuned.

Storing many revisions in history is not expensive. Don't worry about it. There's no way any users, even admins, will ever be permitted to update pages without leaving any history -- it violates the principle of reversibility that underlies how wikis work. Is there some problem you have with these list pages other than the fact that they have lots of history that no one cares about? If not, this is useful to read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_worry_about_performance

Alex Brollo wrote:

Special pages, if I understand all their features, are special why: # they come from a live API query; # they cannot be managed/created/edited by users; # they have no chronology (it would be nonsense).

It.source uses many "list pages", daily updated by a bot, containing other project-specific queries. They are "normal" pages, and their chronology is bot useless and heavy. DynamicPageList extension could solve in part such a useless overload of web space, but its output can't be finely tuned.

So, I imagine that it could be useful to have a "special namespace" for "customable user-defined queries & lists", with only one special feature: the lack of chronology stuff. I can imagine that a possible candidate for such exotic, chronology-free pages could be Special: namespace itself; obviously the name of user-created pages into Special: namespace should be different from any "canonical" Special pages.

Am I mad?

Alex

There's no way admins would be allowed to run custom queries on WMF sites. We have existing special pages disabled. Unreviewed queries won't make into the cluster. Now, if the query you want can be done efficiently, it could be added as an extension.

Really I went back to http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/TablesWikipediaIT.htm, and list pages ("Elenco...") have a history of less than 2Mby each. You're right.

If you want to reduce history size, you should begin by removing date-changing edits [1]. If you really need to show a date there, you can include a template from all the pages containing just the date where all of them were last updated.

1- Eg. no changes on last 16 days, but the bot is dutifully copying the page each day http://it.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Wikisource%3AElenco_alfabetico_de...