On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 5:55 AM, Alex Brollo <alex.brollo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Before I dig a little more into wiki mysteries, I was
absolutely sure that
wiki articles were stored into small pieces (paragraphs?) so that a small
edit into a long long page would take exactly the same disk space than a
small edit into a short page. But I discovered soon, that things are
different. :-)
Wikimedia stores diffs using delta compression, so actually this is
basically what happens. The size of the edit is what determines the
size of the stored diff, not the size of the page. (I don't know how
this works in detail, though.) IIRC, default MediaWiki doesn't work
this way.