On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 5:55 AM, Alex Brollo alex.brollo@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.