On 04/04/2011, Charles Matthews <[email protected]> wrote: > Have a look at [[Template:Protected Areas of Massachusetts]], for > example. This nearly doubled in size early in 2011, with a couple of > hundred red links added. > > What we have here is "quadratic": if it is assumed all those redlinks > are articles that will get added (there may be no reason why not), and > that this footer is added to all those articles, the linkage created > grows as the square of the number of links. So a footer with a 1001 > links implies a million wikilinks. > > It would be sensible to have a guideline that says "break down footers > that have many links", to reduce the effect.
Do we actually have any thousand link footers? I'm pretty sure we don't. The principle is that it shouldn't be possible for a normal user to break or significantly slow the site, and I'm sure that even if a thousand link footer existed that the Wikipedia wouldn't break. And speaking as a techy guy, I know that the tech guys have lots of tricks they can do; so seriously don't worry about it. They could make something appear to be a million links, whereas internally in the database it's really only a thousand. They could cache the template in lots of crazy ways you wouldn't believe. But in any case a million things isn't actually that big; the database is currently what? Thousands of gigabytes? And growing all the time. A few footer templates like that wouldn't be *any* problem. A million things is still only a drop in a very big ocean. Basically, what matters here is readability and usefulness. > Charles -- -Ian Woollard _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
