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/* WikiFactor and caching */ There are several forms of caching that can be occur. Server-side caching disproportionately affects wikiFactor.
:One could just as easily argue that if a page was ''not'' cached then the statistics would be skewed. If someone has already seen a page (and thus forms part of their cache) then viewing it again is not a fresh view with a fresh pair of eyes. All said and done, if everybody has the same working conditions (i.e. their wiki does perform caching) then, with regard to the wikiFactor, everybody is working on a level playing field. --[[User:Spud Gun | <b><FONT COLOR="#8B3A3A">Carl McBride</FONT></b>]] ([[User_talk:Spud_Gun |talk]]) 10:18, 14 August 2009 (EDT)
::There are several forms of caching that can be occur. Internally, MediaWiki (and perhaps some other engines) cache various items of data used to reconstruct a page. Busy sites often use a "front-end" cache such as [[Wikipedia:Squid (software)|Squid]] (in reverse-proxy mode) or [[Wikipedia:Varnish (software)|Varnish]] to accelerate the delivery of pages and files, shielding the web server from duplicate requests from different clients where permitted by response headers. Finally, there are the intermediary server and user caches, also advised by caching and age headers. The latter caches are the ones you refer to, but on busy sites it is probably the server-side cache for anonymous users that has the most effect on perceived popularity. Indeed, it will greatly affect the hit-count for most-accessed pages (since they are very likely to be served from cache), and so disproportionately affect wikiFactor. [[User:GreenReaper|GreenReaper]] 14:37, 11 November 2009 (EST)
:There ''is'' something that can be done - use a tool like [[Wikipedia:Google Analytics|Google Analytics]] ([[mw:Extension:Google Analytics Integration|extension]]) to track website usage. This is triggered on each access, regardless of whether a page has been served from a cache. To me, this is the right way to do it - after all, a citation is still counted even if someone copied it from another paper's list of citations. Those wikis using caching are the very ones that you would expect to have a high wikiFactor - some get hundreds or even thousands of HTTP requests a minute. [[User:GreenReaper|GreenReaper]] 14:25, 11 November 2009 (EST)
