On 10/29/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Traversing 30k+ revisions to get all the user names who have edited and article with a huge history is not reasonable.
I was actually going to suggest something similar to the "TDS Article Contribution Counter" on the tool server would be reasonable for identifying the top all-time contributors to a major article, but the bookmark i have for that is now giving me a 403-forbidden error. Is this for some reason more of a database hog than say, using interiot's tool to look up the edit count of a user who has made about "30k+ revisions" to various pages?
And even if it is a discouragingly "expensive" task for high-profile articles, here's one definition of "reasonable": a short list of the top five or so contributors (as suggested in GFDL section 4B), which could be cached at an interval proportionate to the total length of the history, i.e. greener articles would allow the "principal authors" list to be re-cached more frequently, something like [[George W. Bush]] much less so.
If in fact I'm hallucinating (must be that gray acid) and meta-data like this wouldn't actually put us any closer to obeying the GFDL, it would at least be interesting for casual research while browsing unfamiliar pages, and doing "&action=history&limit=5000" (or worse, loading one page of 50 at a time) to get an overall response to the mental question "lol, so whose work is this, really?" can be painful.
—C.W.