Hi David,
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. For readers, having to check pages via "trial and error", esp. on
link heavy lists where 10 or 90% of articles may already be written, is
very painful, aside from the irritation factors in normal articles. For
authors, link checking is essential to tell them whether what they were
trying to do worked -- is there an article at [[J.K. Rowling]], or at [[J.
K. Rowling]], or at [[Joanne K. Rowling]] ...
Having a clear and simple distinction - red=exists,blue=doesn't exist - is
one of the trademark signs of Wikipedia, helps people to understand the
very idea of an open growing encyclopedia, and is essential to its
operation. It is, in fact, essential to all wikis.
However, the shared memory idea sounds very reasonable. It would be
tremendously cool to store more than just 1/0 for each of these links in
the hash, and to store the byte size instead (we have to update the hash
on save anyway). Then we could use the stub checking feature without a bad
conscience (we currently have it disabled by default for performance
reasons), which adds a third link state for very short articles.
Regards,
Erik