On 9/16/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Would it be really stupid to ask why the URL sin't presented in this form
on
the actual page?
I'm sure Tim or Brion know the answer to this, but I'd hazard a guess that
the /w form bypasses the squid caches.
In general, reader activities have the /wiki form of the URL, and in those
cases it's okay if the reader sees a cached squid proxy copy of the page,
whereas editing activities (edit, history, what links here, and special
pages) tend to have the /w form of the URL. In those cases the request would
normally be performed by a script in realtime, and the squid proxies aren't
running PHP code and have no database access so they can't do that.
The squids are basically dumb mirrors that sit in between the reader and the
Wikipedia system and only fetch a page from the system if they have no
up-to-date copy in their cache.