User talk:Peter17/Reasonably efficient interwiki transclusion

Hi Peter, I'm not so deep into wiki software, so ignore my comments if fool.
 * 1) When you mention templates, I presume, you'll address to any wiki page, since any wiki page can be seen as a template, and works as a template.
 * 2) Please consider deeply and carefully the software and the philosopy of Extension:Labeled Section Transclusion. It's an extension mainly used into wikisource projects, but it would be extremely useful to any wiki project for very sound reasons, I only wait that it is discovered.... it is simply unknown. Just an example: I usually write multi-axial arrays into a single wiki page with a very simple code... sometimes with hundreds, or thousands of elements. I'd like to post here an example of its features, but I can't since the extension isn't installed here.... ;-) --Alex brollo 09:27, 25 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Hi Alex,
 * # Yes, I noticed that my text was somehow unclear... The aim is to be able to transclude any page. I will correct that.
 * # I have read that page, but I didn't know this extension before. Transcluding sections by heading (like #lsth) would be great for my project. I don't know if I can use the API for that but I will check. I don't know if #lst or #lstx are in the field of my project, but I will keep it in mind! I don't really understand what you want to to with multi-axial arrays... Do you have an example on another wiki?
 * Best wishes. Peter17 09:49, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

What about a more comprehensive approach, allowing a unified page table, and certain pages therein, to be shared across two or more wikis
Hi Peter, I am working on an extension to fix a number of bugs that are within the purview of Project:WikiProject Interwiki Integration. I have proposed that we add a field to the page table that could be set to one of three values: (1) The wildcard "*" for all wikis; (2) The name/index of the one wiki/database to which the page pertains; or (3) A foreign key leading to a table with wikis/databases as its fields and boolean values as its contents. There would be a function, e.g. Title::getDatabases, that would access that table and return an array of all the wikis/databases that a page pertains to. (This need not be set up as just one field in the page table; in fact, it might be better to set up as 2 or 3 fields.)

The idea is that wikis on a wiki farm could use $wgSharedTables to share the page table, and then the wikis could have "global" or multi-wiki pages that the software would recognize as being present and identical on all the wikis in that array. Thus, an edit to the page on one wiki would change it for all the wikis that page is shared on. I suppose pages could also be set up as having a "home wiki" that would be the only wiki the page could be edited from (creating something functionally equivalent to mere interwiki transclusion), or restrictions could be set up on a per-wiki basis. Maybe users blocked from editing on the page's "home wiki" would be unable to edit the article, but otherwise users could edit it from any wiki that the page is shared on. There are a lot of possibilities.

Probably setting up a page to be shared could be done in a similar manner as moving an article; that is, the page would have to be non-existent on the local wiki, or the only item in the page history would have to be a redirect; otherwise, admin assistance would be required. Tisane 14:16, 1 June 2010 (UTC)


 * You can't share the page table; it would break database integrity everywhere unless you also share revision (and hence text), templatelinks, pagelinks, recentchanges, page_props, basically the entire database. Then you have your entire wiki farm running off one database, which doesn't scale: WMF's wikis are split into six clusters for precisely the reason that one database can't handle the load.  Happy ‑ melon 18:37, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Also, this project is specifically about interwiki transclusion, which is difficult in and of itself. That alone is a reason not to do this; Happy-melon's arguments for why this is a bad idea are also right on the money. --Catrope 19:50, 1 June 2010 (UTC)