Nicholas Knight wrote:
By now it's probably obvious where I'm going
with this. Could one of these
methods (either storing a parsed and non-parsed version or the approach I
took with "de-parsing") be used for some performance gain on Wikipedia's
webserver?
De-parsing strikes me as a rather odd way to do it. Furthermore, Jimbo
has often remarked that disk space is not a problem. (he may come to
regret that remark when we hit a million articles.... but hey! ;)
I would suggest we consider semi-parsing.
Save two versions of the article:
a) wikitext
b) the wikitext parsed into HTML, with wikilinks still as [[link]]. Note
that this would not be a fully-formed HTML document, just a fragment
since it would not have a head section or enclosing tags.
upon page read, it's b) that is inserted into the delivered page. Links
are parsed live, since their status as existing / stub / ghost depends
on the state of the database at that moment.
upon page edit, a) is sent to the edit box of the edit page