Edward Z. Yang wrote:
I was surfing Wikipedia the other day, and at one
point, I had to use
VfD. My experience makes me shudder. But that's not my point.
In my opinion, the VfD is now beyond elegant implementation without
hardwired software help. As of now, Wikipedia:Vfd is simply a page with
lots of policy and lots of problems.
I agree. In fact, I've gone so far as to suggest the VfD automation task
to newbie developers as a potential first feature. Nobody has taken it
up yet. Your proposal looks solid and well thought out, although
ultimate design decisions should be made by the developer who writes the
code.
The negative is:
* This puts a greater strain on Wikipedia servers with the parsing and
output of these pages (which may require an entirely different sort of
caching system). It probably will come down to only a few possible ways
of viewing VfD to keep caching manageable.
VFD puts great strain on the server as it is, because the server is
forced to regularly render the whole page, consisting of a few megabytes
of HTML. If you can break it down into small sections, I think that will
be a win for performance, even if there is less opportunity for caching.
The other page that needs to be automated is the Village Pump. I'd like
to see a hybrid of a wiki interface and a bulletin board for that.
Divide the page into threads, show links to the most recent 50 threads
with links to the next 50, that sort of thing.
-- Tim Starling