[WikiEN-l] Simple interface tweak?

Tue Dec 13 19:08:18 UTC 2005

On Tue, 13 Dec 2005 16:02:29 +0100, John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com> wrote:

> Andrea Forte wrote:
>
>> Has it ever been suggested before that a simple indicator of "how many
>> people are watching this article" could be a useful tool for:
>>
>> users who want to figure out what to trust
>> wikipedians who want to know where to spend their efforts
>> discouraging vandalism
>>
>> Has this been tried? Suggested? Debated?
>>
>> Just curious,
>>
>> Andrea
>>
> It's not exactly new, but I've never figured out why it hasn't been  
> explored further.

Main reason I believe is that page view logging is disabled for  
performance reasons. The only way to get such a feature to work would be  
to generate every page on the fly from the database on every view  
(otherwise the count would be out of date). As it is pages are cached by  
any number of Squid servers so the main database server have absolutely no  
idea how many people are watching any given page at any given time. If the  
caching was turned off the server(s) would probably outright die from  
overwork pretty much right away, it can barely cope as it is at peak times.

Aside from that I don't think the feature would be overly usefull. The  
best you can do is give a count of how many people have loaded the page  
within the last X minutes, there is no way to actualy tell if anyone is  
*actualy* viewing the page. I think a more meaningfull number would be the  
number of active (insert a convenient definition of active here) users  
have the page on theyr watchlist or something like that, but again you  
can't stick that on the page itself with the caching eneabled, otherwise  
it would only update every time someone edited the page (or did an  
action=purge on it). Maybe it could be put in an asosiated special page,  
kinda like Special:Whatlinkshere or some such though, they are not cached.

-- 
[[User:Sherool]]