16,787 downloads - 28 January 2012
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User talk:GreenReaper

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Hello! Sorry to see wikiFur stop using the Universal Edit Button. Can you let me know what your thoughts are around it? What do you mean "it takes up a bunch of header space per page"? Have you seen this video Best, MarkDilley

Hi Mark! My original thought was "that's cool", so I eagerly added it, but on reconsideration:
  • We already have a big bold edit button on every page that can be edited
  • Most people know it can be edited because it is quite clearly a wiki (it even looks like Wikipedia)
    • Those that don't know this are incredibly unlikely to be using a custom Firefox plugin to tell them it can
  • The extension requires MediaWiki to emit a header into every page, delaying the presentation of useful content to the reader and causing pages to occupy additional cache space (it was about 1% gzipped; our pages are shorter than Wikipedia's)
While patching MediaWiki to emit just one header for the feature, I decided it made more sense just to remove it entirely.
To make it clear, I'm not just picking on UniversalEditButton - I also removed MediaWiki:Print.css (merged to commonPrint.css), the Content-Type, Content-Style-Type, generator, apple-touch-icon and copyright headers, the RSS/Atom feeds (again, two headers - and they're not even page-specific!), parser cache/debug comments, licensing/MediaWiki logos, the printfooter, and the http: from our interwiki links (which, while perfectly valid, broke several crawlers as well as MediaWiki itself). Individually none of these were significant, but together they total about 1.5Kb/page, or closer to 700 bytes gzipped. Our average gzipped page size is about 7kb, so this is a 10% reduction that affects our squid cache, parser cache, and - importantly for usability - the time taken to deliver and display each page to the user. (We also made plenty of other changes). GreenReaper 06:07, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
I think I understand the technical reasons. One of the things that I appreciate about the UniversalEditButton is the way it is a Community Mark for wiki culture. The intentionality of adding the one line of code is more of a community building act. Thank you for letting me know what was up. Best, MarkDilley
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