Wikipedia talk:Overlink crisis

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[edit] Technical implications

There are none, as I corrected the page to say. Database storage alone is not a major cost for Wikimedia and probably will not be for the foreseeable future, compared to its overall technical budget (which is increasing exponentially over time). There are data warehouses that easily deal with orders of magnitude more data than Wikipedia contains. If storage should ever become a problem in the future, the ones paid by the Wikimedia Foundation to pay attention to such things will recognize and deal with the issue in whatever way is best. Until then, you can assume that you don't need to do anything special to avert such problems.

In particular, I would like to comment on this paragraph that I removed:

The guideline WP:PERF focuses on the wiki server-performance issues, not on article-display issues, basically stating that the wiki developers have purposely limited or delayed the server operation to prevent groups of users from creating denial-of-service events. The guideline really focuses on minute-to-minute response time, not on long-term plans about storing Wikipedia data. Exceptions to the guideline admit there are exceptions as unallowable pages, such as when the servers will limit and truncate very large pages that might hog server operation. However, if an editor creates a page with a 1-megabyte moving graphic image, that is not a server-side concern, and readers will simply have to wait until the 1-megabyte graphic is transfered into their browsers. The guideline WP:PERF basically states that no single user can stop server response for all other users, but it doesn't mean users can't systematically make a set of pages way too big or way too slow for comfortable viewing. The wiki servers will simply delay the viewing/editing of big pages, allowing other readers to view/save their smaller pages comfortably.

The guideline is every bit as relevant to long-term as to short-term issues. It is relevant to any issue involving server resources alone. While it's correct (as I have previously clarified) that it does not apply to the very narrow segment of performance concerns that deal with client-side limitations, such as limitations in viewers' bandwidth or processing power, the question of database space is very much a server issue, and as such is the responsibility of the server administration team, not Wikipedians. Of course, adding more links also makes pages' HTML source larger, and so slightly increases the time that people need to take to load pages, but for articles large enough to be problematic, it's the article text that's the problem, not the infoboxes.

I have no particular comment on the merits of the idea outside of technical implications. You could certainly argue that a few concise links are more useful than a forest of them. I've never really found myself using the link-boxes at all, personally. Could be they're just useless clutter. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 01:10, 14 February 2008 (UTC)