Aryeh Gregor wrote: > The same could be said of practically any user-visible change. I > mean, maybe if we add a new special page we'll break some script that > was screen-scraping Special:SpecialPages. We can either freeze > MediaWiki and never change anything for fear that we'll break > something, or we can evaluate each potential change on the basis of > how likely it is to break anything. I can't see anything breaking too > badly if rev_len is reported in characters instead of bytes -- the > only place it's likely to be useful is in heuristics, and by their > nature, those won't break too badly if the numbers they're based on > change somewhat.
This is problematic logic for a few reasons. I see a change to the rev_len logic as being similar to a change in article count logic. The same arguments work in both places, specifically the "step problem" that will cause nasty jumps in graphs.[1] In some cases, as you've noted, we're talking about a change by a factor of three. Plenty of scripts rely on hard-coded values to determine size thresholds for certain behaviors. While these scripts may not have the best implementations, I don't think it's fair to say that they're worth breaking. The comparison to screen-scraping seems pretty spurious as well. The reason it's acceptable to break screen-scraping scripts is that there's a functioning API alternative that is designed for bots and scripts. One of the design principles is consistency. Altering a metric by up to a factor of three (and even worse, doing so in an unpredictable manner) breaks this consistency needlessly. Is it worth the cost to add 300 million+ rows to easily have character count? I don't know. Personally, I don't mind rev_len being in bytes; it makes more sense from a database and technical perspective to me. Admittedly, though, I deal mostly with English sites. MZMcBride [1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11868#c8 _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
