On Jan 20, 2008 8:18 PM, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/17/08, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
A couple times a year (such as about an hour ago) somebody does something like trying to delete the Wikipedia:Sandbox on en.wikipedia.org, which reaaalllly bogs down the server due to the large number of revisions.
This might not quite be relevant, but would it perhaps be possible to stop people saving to the sandbox? Since the advent of Preview, I don't really ever see a need to actually commit any changes there. Or perhaps old revisions (10 or more ago) could continually be deleted anyway. The old revisions aren't useful or interesting.
There is some merit to this idea. Consider a new type of "temporary page", which simply doesn't store revision histories, or only stores a very limited number of them. Pages like the sandbox, or discussion pages which are archived by copy+paste to other pages don't need to be storing extensive revision histories. Not storing revision histories would make deletion operations trivial, and would also save database space on storing revisions which are simply never viewed.
Since such pages will be relatively rare, and because not storing revisions has implications for licensing, the ability to mark them could be reserved to bureaucrats or others high up the permissions hierarchy.
--Andrew whitworth