Erik Moeller wrote:
nice to see you here -- I enjoyed reading your
Linux/OSS-related papers. I
have to say that disabling link checking on the live Wikipedia, even for a
short time, is hardly acceptable. It is essential for both readers and
authors.
I know I expressed sympathy to disabling link checking yesterday or the
day before, but several developers have come out against it, and I'm now
swayed to the view that it's an essential, not a frill.
I now wonder about our usage patterns and whether it would be best to
update a cache at edit-time, rather than at read-time.
Changes in 'existence' (yes or no) come up infrequently. When someone
creates a brand new article, all other cached articles that are
affected by the change could be updated at that time. So a hundred
times a day (if that), we have to do a fancy cache update to change
affected other articles. But most edits don't affect other articles,
because they are edits to already existing pages.
Just an idea...