On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 2:34 PM, Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@gmail.com wrote:
Consider that a solution from our point of view is to create two bots:
- Bot 1 makes repeated calls to api?action=query?list=allpages to
download the complete wikibooks page list. 2) Bot 2 applies a simple regex to that page list, counts the number of unique prefixes. Posts an edit to the page [[Template:NUMBEROFBOOKS]] with that number, and posts an edit to [[Wikibooks:List of all books]] with the complete list.
I doubt this would be an ideal solution, but it would give us exactly what we want.
In all honesty, there *is* a place for bots on wikis, and features that aren't so easy to implement cleanly in software are a good place for them. In many ways bots are more flexible and easier to handle. In this case, I suggest getting someone with a toolserver account to run the regex on the page table instead of using the API to retrieve the list in bits and pieces. (The current number not matching Ramac's regex is 6,085.)
I would venture to guess that this feature is of particularly narrow interest. I can only imagine that, based on the way I know other projects to handle naming, only Wikibooks and possibly Wikiversity would use it. Hence, the extension.
I had a discussion with some people (Mike, wknight8111, darkcode, Ramac) about this on #wikibooks. I still think these couple of features, and a few others, fit most naturally in with the concept of namespaces, and that it would make the most sense to reorganize the site (but I doubt that will happen, due to inertia). Some other features would be better suited to implementation as better subpage handling. For instance, the ability to move all subpages together with the base page is a perfectly logical thing to have in the core software, and in fact I just added it in r33565.
I think few of the features Wikibooks wants are really narrow enough, intrinsically, to belong in extensions. Allowing automatic TOCs, navigation, etc. for particular namespaces was the only one I saw that really doesn't fit with any more generic feature that is or should be present, and that would make a good extension.
At any rate, the decision as to whether these features would make a good extension (and if so, what about it needs to be improved) is up to Brion, who I've pointed to this discussion.