MediaWiki@Home is a distributed rendering project targeted for Wikimedia Foundation projects. It depends on a javascript implementation of the non-template expansion related aspects of the parser. When a user visits an article they receive a single blob containing all the wikitext with all templates pre-expanded and they render it directly in their own browser. Afterwards they push the parsed blob back to the cache.

Advantages

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  • Speeds up the average total transaction time by 250ms
  • Speeds user-perceived article load time - display can occur as rendering proceeds
  • Provides a full WYSIWYG environment to the user
  • Reduces the amount of money the Foundation must spend on data center costs by reducing CPU loads

Disadvantages

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  • Doesn't exist (yet).
  • Cache injection attacks by malicious clients

Conceived of by prefrontal, werdna and Splarka in #mediawikiconnect on 4-7-09