Wishlist: Sorting related wicks by date

I have no idea if this is a pipe dream, but it would be awesome if there was a way to sort the related wicks by date added—it would make it so much easier to keep pages clean, rather than having to memorize which tropes are clean and which aren't. Ooooh the glory.

It would also make it easier to guess whether changes to tropes from TRS is working, since newer wicks shouldn't have as much misuse.

I have no idea how the wiki keeps track of the wicks, so I'm sorry if this actually is a pipedream.

Conceptually, the wiki has a separate database table that stores one row for every article X linking (at least once) to each article Y. It's quite a compact thing, really, but since the size of the table is potentially on the order of (num. wiki articles) ^ 2 it's also a damn huge thing. Adding a third column to the table to store a timestamp of when the row (i.e. the wick) was added is technically possible but would be a significant increase to the overall table size and most likely require downtime to process it.

I agree though that it would be totally awesome to have.

The table Stratadrake refers to is about 7 million rows. And we want it be able to fit in ram so we can do fast listing for the "related to" button. So the idea of making each row bigger is maybe not so good.

The functionality you want is to be able spot to usage of a name after the name has been changed. Might be to do something like that at save time. Make a note to a table, then build a little report that shows that activity.

edited 11th Apr '13 11:23:01 AM by FastEddie

Bumping...this doesn't seem like something that's practical from a tech standpoint but with the new servers, it might be. Thoughts?

I think this is an issue with MySQL and not with servers. Eddie's proposed implementation may be feasible enough to port to Query Wishlist.