[WikiEN-l] Simple interface tweak?

Tue Dec 13 20:00:49 UTC 2005

On 13/12/05, Sherool <jamydlan at online.no> wrote:
> Main reason I believe is that page view logging is disabled for
> performance reasons.

I think you're confusing "viewing" with "watching" - you are
absolutely right that monitoring page *views* would be very hard, very
expensive, and of little value. But by "watching" what is meant is the
number of people on whose "watchlist" the page is; this would be
fairly easy to determine from the database (we already store
everyone's watchlists, obviously) and changes fairly rarely, so that
maybe caches could be invalidated when pages were watched/unwatched,
or maybe the count becoming "stale" wouldn't be such a problem
[especially if it was only ever a ball-park figure].

Meanwhile, I think a version of this may actually *already be
implemented* in the software, but switched off on Wikimedia sites,
probably for performance reasons. See
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=727 and
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3128

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]