Last modified: 2011-11-29 21:26:13 UTC
I propose the following enhancement: For any given article, under the heading "in other languages", show for each language the size of the article refered to. Rationale: Readers will be given a hint, whether articles in other languages are likely to contain additional information. Contributers will be given a hint, where they might find additional material, and which articles need substantial improvement. Corollary: This enhancement will not make sense, unless the size of the current article is indicated as well. Corollary: The number of pictures would be interesting as well. In conclusion, I could imagine the "in other languages" list containing entries like * English (519k, 3imgs) * Polski (185k, 5imgs)
The "other languages" section is already much too small. Cluttering it with this information seems not too useful. Additionally, this would require dozens of DB lookups, one for each language => severe performance impact
I request that this proposal be taken a little bit more serious. I suggest to first discuss whether the proposed enhancement would be useful. If the usefulness is agreed upon, I accept that performance issues may retard realisation; in the long run, however, I am confident that such issues can be resolved. I maintain that the enhancement would be useful. I would like to hear the opion of people who regularly consult WP in different languages (if this is not the right place for such a discussion, please redirect me). The reason why I maintain the usefulness of the proposed enhancement is quite simple: Unless you are an active contributor, you mainly look into the "other languages" section if you want additional information. Precisely in this case, you might want to see on the first glance which of the WP's you are able to read is likely to provide substantial contents. @cluttering: could be resolved by customisation.
The change that you propose requires to query each of the interwiki linked articles from the database. Seeing that we will likely split databases to several servers soon to handle the load, this is a VERY expensive operation. Connect to foreign language DB server, load article from disk, parse the article to get the images. Seeing that it now takes about half a second to parse a page, do you have any idea how long it would take to parse the about 50 interwiki links on en:Main page? Furthermore, please provide a screen shot of how this will look like (ugly, I assume). For some languages, we already have problems showing the language names. For most of the languages, the (52kb, 5imgs) would go to a seperate line, doubling the length of the "other languages" section, reducing its use.
If the length of some language names is a problem even now, then replace *Alemannisch *Bahasa Indonesia by *als (46B, 0i) *id (3k, 5i) and let the full name of the language appear as you move the mouse onto an entry. Should many users prefer the current style, one could easily introduce an additional switch in preferences>misc. I do not understand why parsing would be necessary on every READ access. Why not parse and save the current length and number of images after each WRITE access. (By the way, this might provide very useful information for the change log. For instance, If you see that an article went from some k down to 30B, you know at once that it has been replaced by a redirect.)
This is very unlikely to be done, for the reasons stated. Any implementation would depend on the infrastrucutre for bug 11 already being in place. Resolving as LATER in case anyone wants to consider this in some future time if the prerequesites are done.
6 years of inactivity, I assume this is a WONTFIX. Please feel free to undo and to submit your patch :).
