On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 4:59 AM, Alex Brollo <[email protected]> wrote: > Special pages, if I understand all their features, are special why: > # they come from a live API query; > # they cannot be managed/created/edited by users; > # they have no chronology (it would be nonsense).
Special pages are special because they don't have any contents stored at all, as such. When you view a special page, the software just executes a particular PHP script, which can be hardcoded to do absolutely anything. For instance, Special:MyPage just returns an HTTP redirect, not a page with contents. They don't have a history in general because they don't have any fixed contents at all -- the contents are generated on the fly in an arbitrary fashion. > It.source uses many "list pages", daily updated by a bot, containing other > project-specific queries. They are "normal" pages, and their chronology is > bot useless and heavy. DynamicPageList extension could solve in part such a > useless overload of web space, but its output can't be finely tuned. Storing many revisions in history is not expensive. Don't worry about it. There's no way any users, even admins, will ever be permitted to update pages without leaving any history -- it violates the principle of reversibility that underlies how wikis work. Is there some problem you have with these list pages other than the fact that they have lots of history that no one cares about? If not, this is useful to read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don't_worry_about_performance _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
