Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:42 UTC
This is probably the wrong component, and I apologise for that. I was just wondering if it would be possible to instal a purge link of the form "&action=purge" in the interface, alongside "edit", "discussion" and "history". Since "edit" is just &action=edit, I don't imagine &action=purge would be too challenging to implement. This feature would just be useful for pages that are frequently updated; on Wikimedia pages nowadays, this feature is usually manually installed, and having it in the interface would eliminate this. I appreciate all development to this effect and understand if the software does not currently allow it.
I'd be a bit leery of this. While it's a common practice to use action=purge to force a re-render of pages when they are being cached, I'm not sure it's something we should *promote* the use of. In theory, when things change how a page is rendered, it should be updated. When it doesn't, that is a bug. Promoting people to use action=purge will make people more likely to just purge the cache and forget why it didn't show up right to begin with. In short: purge is a dirty hack around what should be happening automatically, and we shouldn't be encouraging its use (even though it's very helpful to have).
We really don't want to have to have a purge link in the standard interface, though; it's an internal detail which end-users should never actually have to push. Note there's a gadget for this on en.wikipedia.org, so power users can set it up for themselves if they do want it. Go to the Gadgets tab in [[Special:Preferences]] and click: 'Add a "*" tab to the top of the page, which purges the page's cache when followed.' Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Gadget-purgetab.js
