A few days ago I wrote:
There's a few feature requests that have come up
multiple times, and I'd
like some comments from other developers and power users before I go
trashing the code on my own...
* "Most wanted" and "Most popular" special pages list the _total_
number
of links to a page, regardless of how many links there are _per page_.
Some types of lists can hyperinflate the numbers; a list of video games
might link [[Playstation]] 389 times (once for each Playstation game
listed). The behavior that people seem to expect is a count of _pages_
that link, rather than the raw number of links. I would tend to agree.
This can be switched by the simple addition of "DISTINCT" to a couple
SQL queries; is there any reason to retain the current behavior?
Everybody seems to like the idea of couting each page that links only once.
* On blocking vandals; there's still no interface
for blocking by
username, and you can't get the IP address of a logged-in user except by
sifting through the server logs. Should we retain and display IP
addresses/hostnames of logged-in editors (as on UseMod), and/or allow
usernames to be blocked?
There is some support for internally recording IP addresses of logged-in
users and allowing admins to block based on them, without necessarily
showing the IPs in general.
* The administrative page rename feature on UseMod
could optionally find
and change links to point to the new name in addition to just supplying
a redirect. We still haven't implemented this. Desirable?
Opinions are mixed on changing the links in the text; everyone who's
mentioned it seems in favor of automatically fixing double-redirects
created by a move. I'll plan on implementing the latter.
* While the "Special:" namespace may be
localized ("Spezial", "Speciel"
etc), the names of special pages are hardwired in English (hence
monstrosities like "Spezial:Recentchanges"). While these are mostly
hidden in the interface by descriptive names, the links, URLs, and most
annoyingly the tooltips on the links all show the raw internal English
name of the function which implements the special page. A table of
equivalencies could be set up, allowing more easily recognizable
localized names to be used. Good idea? Bad idea?
There's desire for this from non-Anglophone wikipedians, but mav brought
up a good point -- when visiting another language to do something (like
updating interlanguage links or checking for images), you need to be
able to find your way around. The special page names being in English in
the popups gives some consistency...
The ideal thing to do, I think, is to make it possible to select the
user interface language separately from the content language. ie, I
should be able to surf the Korean entries with Esperanto menus or the
English with Arabic if I'm comfortable that way.
That'll need some work to extract content-affecting code (names of log
files etc) from the interface and be able to handle them separately, and
to make sure charset encoding is handled sanely. But, it's something
that's been occasionally suggested and I think it's the way to go
ultimately.
The special page links can then use local names, and perhaps the
internal English names can also be available as aliases (see below).
* For the French wiki, the Wikipedia: namespace is
tentatively set up as
"Wikipédia" (with acute accent on the "e"). The parser doesn't
accept
namespaces with non-ASCII chars so this doesn't work, which is a bug I
intend to fix,
(now fixed)
but additionally one tester asked:
'For the francophone wikipedians without a French keyboard, would it
be possible for the "Wikipedia:*" links to automatically transform
into "Wikipédia:*"? Or, more simply, could the system interpret e/é as
equal in the namespace portion?'
In short, allow aliases for namespaces. Good idea? Bad idea?
There seems to be general nodding about this. I plan to implement it.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)