[Wikipedia-l] Re: Modest proposals

Uri Yanover uriyan_subscribe at yahoo.com
Wed Feb 6 12:54:44 UTC 2002


> The gain is that the author has at edit time full control over where the
> link points to. With runtime lookup a link might change because a certain
> term was added to a certain namespace.
>
> -- Jan Hidders

Well, that's not a bug but a feature! The term will not be added 
to a certain namespace if there isn't already some disrepancy 
(and if the author means the other subject he will surely link 
to it explicitly, like [[Root (Botanics)]]) By doing the linking 
in runtime we could make sure that all links point at their 
most updated targets, which is an advantage. This is similar
to the reason why we use redirects.

As to runtime performance concerns, I'm sure that caching and/or
an optimised parser could do wonders in the Wikipedia case.
Wiki markup is _very light_.

Sincerely yours,
            Uri Yanover




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