[Wikimedia-l] Who invoked "principle of least surprise" for the image filter?

[Anthony]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 7:48 PM, Tobias Oelgarte
<tobias.oelgarte at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Am 19.06.2012 01:39, schrieb Anthony:
>
>> On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 9:25 AM, Tobias Oelgarte
>> <tobias.oelgarte at googlemail.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> Am 18.06.2012 14:49, schrieb Anthony:
>>>>
>>>> Have you ever tried to do this?  It's not as easy as you are making it
>>>> sound, at least it wasn't as of a few years ago, because Mediawiki is
>>>> tightly coupled to the specific database structure it uses.
>>>
>>> You don't need to interact with the database of Wikipedia itself. You can
>>> use the MediaWiki API which is quite stable and enough for this task. I
>>> don't speak about a complete mirror, i speak about a filtered _view_ for
>>> Wikipedia. You type in "http://www.mysavewiki.com/Banana" and the server
>>> delivers the recently approved and cached version of the article from
>>> Wikipedia if "Banana" is whitelisted.
>>
>> Are you talking about "remote loading"
>> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks#Remote_loading)?
>>  That's a good way to get your IP address banned.
>
> No. I don't talk about remote loading. I talk about caching. The server
> hosts the current version itself and only fetches it for an manual update.

Okay, so the server "hosts the current version itself".  Presumably
they are going to use Mediawiki to do this, unless you are suggesting
that they write their own custom wiki parser.  That Mediawiki that
they are running "is tightly coupled to the specific database
structure it uses", at least it was as of a few years ago.  What I
mean by this is that the parser loads from the database as it's
parsing.  It's not 1) load everything you need from the database, and
then 2) parse it.  You have to parse it in order to figure out what to
load, and parsing it means running Mediawiki.  I believe there were
some efforts made to fix this, so maybe it has been fixed.  I haven't
looked at it in years.