jeluf wrote:

The "other languages" section is already much too small.
Cluttering it with this information seems not too useful.

Additionally, this would require dozens of DB lookups, one for each language
=> severe performance impact

wuttke1 wrote:

I request that this proposal be taken a little bit more serious. I suggest to
first discuss whether the proposed enhancement would be useful. If the
usefulness is agreed upon, I accept that performance issues may retard
realisation; in the long run, however, I am confident that such issues can be
resolved.

I maintain that the enhancement would be useful. I would like to hear the opion
of people who regularly consult WP in different languages (if this is not the
right place for such a discussion, please redirect me).

The reason why I maintain the usefulness of the proposed enhancement is quite
simple: Unless you are an active contributor, you mainly look into the "other
languages" section if you want additional information. Precisely in this case,
you might want to see on the first glance which of the WP's you are able to read
is likely to provide substantial contents.

@cluttering: could be resolved by customisation.

jeluf wrote:

The change that you propose requires to query each of the interwiki linked
articles from the database. Seeing that we will likely split databases to
several servers soon to handle the load, this is a VERY expensive operation.
Connect to foreign language DB server, load article from disk, parse the article
to get the images. Seeing that it now takes about half a second to parse a page,
do you have any idea how long it would take to parse the about 50 interwiki
links on en:Main page?

Furthermore, please provide a screen shot of how this will look like (ugly, I
assume). For some languages, we already have problems showing the language
names. For most of the languages, the (52kb, 5imgs) would go to a seperate line,
doubling the length of the "other languages" section, reducing its use.

wuttke1 wrote:

If the length of some language names is a problem even now, then replace

*Alemannisch
*Bahasa Indonesia

by

*als (46B, 0i)
*id (3k, 5i)

and let the full name of the language appear as you move the mouse onto an entry.

Should many users prefer the current style, one could easily introduce an
additional switch in preferences>misc.

I do not understand why parsing would be necessary on every READ access. Why not
parse and save the current length and number of images after each WRITE access.
(By the way, this might provide very useful information for the change log. For
instance, If you see that an article went from some k down to 30B, you know at
once that it has been replaced by a redirect.)

This is very unlikely to be done, for the reasons stated.
Any implementation would depend on the infrastrucutre
for bug 11 already being in place. Resolving as LATER in
case anyone wants to consider this in some future time if
the prerequesites are done.

6 years of inactivity, I assume this is a WONTFIX. Please feel free to undo and to submit your patch :).