Last modified: 2013-08-13 17:22:51 UTC
The stub link formatting user preference should be removed from MediaWiki core and either be placed into a MediaWiki extension or be implemented as a JavaScript script/gadget. The feature contributes to parser cache fragmentation, which is bad and to be avoided. It's an old, quirky feature that would likely never be implemented in MediaWiki core if were proposed today. It's merely a(n) historical artifact that it's currently in core and it shouldn't be any longer.
Does it actually contribute to parser cache fragmentation? I was under the impression it disabled the parser cache totally for users who used that option (Which probably is not the greatest thing either).
Well that's definitely worse. It could certainly be fairly easily implemented with JavaScript; I wonder if there's a CSS solution which doesn't involve a thousand CSS rules to highlight links under a kilobyte...
Bumping this down to enhancement -- as noted in prior discussions this is a goal but we won't want to kill it just yet until it's replaced with a clean way to do it. (More general article state like a 'Popups lite' might be nice.)
Do we have a status for "requested regression"?? :D
Statistics requested by Mark H: there are 18,412 users across all wikis who have the stubthreshold preference set. Unified accounts were not accounted for, so a user who has the preference set on multiple wikis is counted multiple times. Top 10 of wikis with most stubthreshold users: enwiki 4789 dewiki 1545 jawiki 1336 ruwiki 1179 ptwiki 791 eswiki 623 frwiki 530 plwiki 513 commonswiki 415 nlwiki 366
Doing this in JavaScript would be just evil. It's definitely the kind of feature that should be server-side. We could remove the cache impact with some work, if anyone cared. If the proposal is to just drop it completely, I'm not going to object, but no way should we move it to JS, for all sorts of reasons. (Of course, users could always reimplement it themselves in JS, and we can't stop them, but we don't have to encourage it.)
Although I use this feature, you have my vote to get it removed entirely.
Was it removed? I can't find it.
It is still in core MediaWiki, under Preferences > Appearance > Advanced options.
