Ricordisamoa wrote:
>It looks like the Purge extension
><https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Purge> for MediaWiki could be
>very useful to replace many similar gadgets on Wikimedia sites.
>New users often need to purge the server cache, and don't know how to do
>it. A simple link is way more helpful than "visit the history page and
>replace 'history' with 'purge'", etc. Also, a server-side extension has
>much better i18n support and works without JavaScript. Is anyone
>interested in getting it in?

Hi.

Rather than trying find ways to institutionalize the purge action, I'd
strongly prefer that we examine the purge action's current use-cases and
find ways to obviate them.

Purging should be an internal implementation detail and any time a user
feels that manually purging a page is required, MediaWiki has failed the
user. In this way, the lack of user interface exposure for the purge
action is basically intentional: we don't want to expose an action that
most users shouldn't ever need to take.

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T56902 has some additional thoughts on
deprecating the purge action in MediaWiki, as it's basically a hack. This
is _not_ to say that the underlying challenges here are trivial; in fact,
cache invalidation is regularly called one of the hardest problems in
computer science. However, in my opinion, a manual purge action is an
architectural blemish that we should seek to eliminate long-term.

MZMcBride



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