On 26/10/2007, jmerkey(a)wolfmountaingroup.com
<jmerkey(a)wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
I think needing 100MB of memory to run nested
templates and chewed up
stack space with PHP is somewhat excessive. I will use the 20071018
dumps
with these fixes, but look forward to a new enwiki dump with these
issues
at least understood and correctable.
You continue to assert that the dumps are at fault, when in fact the
problem (I agree it's a problem) lies at a higher level than the dumps
- it's in the actual content being used on Wikipedia et al. which is a
matter for the user base to discuss, come to terms with, and then
correct.
The "technical team" is not responsible for checking that content is
correct, nor is it responsible for checking page load times for each
article and pruning them in the dumps. If a page contains obvious
abuses of markup which cause significant problems for large numbers of
users, then we'll kill it off, but of course, we haven't had a large
number of reports of that in recent months, although as other threads
on the list imply, the problem is resurfacing, and will likely be
looked into.
We can't really help it if our users are silly enough to insist upon
abusing a markup language as if it were pure code, nor if they insist
upon continuing to use fragile-looking template constructs which will
end in tears. What we can do is to impose limits justified by
realistic limitations on processing capabilities, for example.
Please *stop* using language that asserts the fault lies at a
technical level, or that it's our fault. If you wish to complain about
the actions of the user base, then complain *to* the user base - you
might, for instance, wish to engage in some of the discussions
springing up over the problems, or start a dialogue on the talk pages
of some of the affected articles.
Rob Church
Rob,
I agree with all of what you said above. That being said, it is within
your realm of influence to code mediawiki to check templates with garbage
logic when the pages are saved and prevent template code from nesting
infinite levels of depth. You can set a limit of 3 levels deep or make
templates flat. It's gotten out of hand, and this is due to the design of
mediawiki allowing people to use templates as a programming language.
You guys can fix this by preventing folks from creating templates which
nest to infinity by simply not allowing them to run or preventing such
changes.
At any rate, I can get around it, and I will be writing a template
converter to read and cache these garbage templates and output static
tables if necessary so at least the content is usable. You people own the
dumps, you create them, you wrote MediaWiki and its YOUR STUFF. Whether
you wish to pass on the blame to others or not, the quality of all of it
lands squarely in the lap of MediaWiki and those who publish.
Jeff