[Wikipedia-l] Re: RFC on a few feature requests

[Brion VIBBER]

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)