[bawolff]

In order for wikipedia's anyone can edit to work, its really important that when someone makes a bad edit to a popular article that it can be removed immediately. This is important both to get things fixed quickly and to make it less of a juicy target so less people vandalize (no fun to vandalize if it doesnt stay up).

I suspect latency in the minutes for cache updates would be unaceptable to wikipedia users

[majewsky]

Power users use very different workflows than read-only users. You can serve pages from a 30-minute-old cache to the 99.9% of passive readers and it doesn't hurt that much. Editors use "Recent Changes" to monitor edits, and that's much easier to render in real time because the audience is comparatively minuscule.

[bawolff]

Yes but if someone replaces the picture on the trump article with goatse, and non power users get this version for 30 minutes until the cache clears - they are going to be pretty pissed and start yelling to power users & just generally cause a PR disaster.

Additionally if vandals know their vandalism will stay for 30 min, they are much more likely to do it, which is a vicious cycle

[user5994461]

Aren't articles like Trump write protected? If you want to edit, you shouldn't be able to, unless you have an account that's not brand new. You will be banned very quickly as soon as you start putting goatse on most visited pages.

Also, the white house PR team is actively watching and editing political figures articles. They will sort it out too.