On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 1:14 AM, Liangent liangent@gmail.com wrote:
Byte count is used. For example in Chinese Wikipedia, one of the criteria of "Did you know" articles is ">= 3000 bytes".
I mean, is byte count used for anything where character count couldn't be used just about as well? Like is there some code that uses rev_len to figure out whether an article can fit into a field limited to X bytes, or whatever? (That's probably unsafe anyway.)
On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 3:48 AM, Robert Ullmann rlullmann@gmail.com wrote:
The revision size (and page size, meaning that of last revision) in bytes, is available in the API. If you change the definition there is no telling what you will break.
The same could be said of practically any user-visible change. I mean, maybe if we add a new special page we'll break some script that was screen-scraping Special:SpecialPages. We can either freeze MediaWiki and never change anything for fear that we'll break something, or we can evaluate each potential change on the basis of how likely it is to break anything. I can't see anything breaking too badly if rev_len is reported in characters instead of bytes -- the only place it's likely to be useful is in heuristics, and by their nature, those won't break too badly if the numbers they're based on change somewhat.