On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 5:21 PM, Tim Starling <tstarl...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > I've always been opposed to that policy.
Are you aware of the completely insane things users have sometimes established as conventions or even policies based on nonsensical server-load grounds? Like on the Dutch Wikipedia, apparently new users were routinely being told to make as few edits as possible so that the servers wouldn't run out of disk space: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Don%27t_worry_about_performance#Too_many_edits An English Wikipedia user tried to argue for a couple of years that Wikipedia was becoming slow because of too many links between pages, and that something terrible would happen if templates didn't have fewer links in them (fortunately no one listened to him that I know of): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Don%27t_worry_about_performance#Reality_update_June.2F2009 There are probably even stupider things that I don't know about. Ideally users would understand the issues involved and make intelligent decisions about server load, but in practice the policy seems to prevent a lot more harm than it causes. Users are just not going to be able to figure out what causes server load without specific instruction by sysadmins. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
