https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21860
--- Comment #12 from Aaron Halfaker <aaron.halfa...@gmail.com> 2010-02-17 21:06:33 UTC --- I'm not sure how the conversation got steered to recent changes monitoring since I don't understand the usefulness of knowing when no-op edits are saved to articles, but I'd like to bring back the discussion of how a checksum could be used to quickly determine which revisions are reverts computationally. Reverts and reverting are functions of MediaWiki and the way it manages history. Research suggests that most reverts in the English Wikipedia are identity reverts[1] (reverts that can be detected by comparing checksums between revisions). Detecting identity reverts through the current API requires the retrieval of the complete text of the revisions which consumes appreciable disk access and network resources. With the addition of checksums, this expensive retrieval process could be forgone and writing tools that interact with MediaWiki's API would be easier and more straightforward. As for the possibility of collision, an MD5 checksum could contain 16^32 possible values which means that, so long as the realm of possible outputs is uniform, the probability of a collision is about 1 in sqrt(16^32)[2] or 1:18,446,744,073,709,552,000. 1. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240624.1240698 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_paradox -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the assignee for the bug. You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Wikibugs-l mailing list Wikibugs-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l
