[Wikipedia-l] Re: Modest proposals

[Jan Hidders]

From: "Uri Yanover" <uriyan_subscribe at yahoo.com>


> > 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.

And, of course, as Lee already pointed out, it also makes it less tempting
for the casual user. A very important argument.

> 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.

Perhaps the user wants this to happen, perhaps not. I suggest we first wait
and see how many people actually need such features.

> 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_.

Have you seen the parsing code? There is nothing _very light_ about it, at
the moment. I intend to improve that in the future, but found some other
problems I would like to solve first. Anyway, adding non-trivial features is
not going to make that job easier.

Kind regards,

-- Jan Hidders