[Wikipedia-l] Recent changes and personal caches

Sun Jul 21 23:39:58 UTC 2002

Last night I shut down for the night at about 1 am, and was back into 
Wikipedia about 12 hours later at 1 pm.  Naturally, the first place 
visited on line was "Recent changes",  where I had to crank it up to 
1000 items before I could pick up my shut-down time.  That's ok, and it 
doesn't bother me to see that someone else had saved their article 
several times before being satisfied with his or her own work.  (In fact 
it made me feel good to see that I was not the only one who had to do this.)

Once I've picked up my prior shut-down time I begin to go through the 
articles more or less chronologically reading changes that I might find 
interesting.  When I've finished reading a change, and sometimes made 
related corrections or contributions,   I back button to the recent 
changes list to look for the next interesting article.

Before the current update back button would bring me back to my cached 
list at the place on the list where I left off.  When I reached the top 
of the list I could use reload to get the most recent of the most recent.

With the updated system I find that the back button now forces a reload 
of the most recent changes, and puts me at the top of the revised list. 
 I then have to scroll through the list to find where I left off.  I 
really would like to at least have the option of back-buttoning to my 
cached page.

Since the circulated test results show that Recent Changes with a large 
parameter of articles continue to be one of the slow response request, 
the last thing the system needs is a number of forced reloads of Recent 
Changes.  My 1000 articles was based on only 12 hours.  At that rate 3 
days would require a 5000 article request for recent changes.

Eclecticology