On 10/6/07, Aaron Schulz jschulz_4587@msn.com wrote:
In that case, even one change to a template would make it not show. I fear that on wikipedia, that condition would rarely show up, and I'm not sure it's worth the performance hit.
I just did a quick sample of en.wp articles. Most have a template of some kind, but most high-use templates are semi-protected, which means they're only likely to be edited by users in the editor group anyway. Those which aren't are typically not edited much at all. So how can you conclude that the "sighted and current" condition would rarely show up? Indeed, everything leads me to conclude that it's the _most common_ condition; it's the one that we want to achieve on everything through ever-improving patrolling mechanism.
To then not show a clear visual indication of the sighted status utterly confounds me from a usability perspective. You end up with an inconsistent UI where icons sometimes show up and sometimes don't with no clear reason why. And you want to explain this with: "Oh, BTW, if you look at the number of changes, and it's 0, then actually, not taking templates into account, the main body of the article has been sighted"? That's a usability nightmare. I found this issue so major that I wasn't even comfortable with taking the extension demo live before at least applying some band-aid.
I do agree that we should make sure it works correctly depending on the template status. Which performance hit are you worried about specifically? Shouldn't it just be a matter of looking up the flagging status of the templatelinks associated with the page in question?