(Moved from wikien-l to wikipedia-l; discussion of revamped alphabetical page index affects all languages.)
On dim, 2003-02-16 at 17:17, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
How about something like the alphabetical index for the online AHD: http://www.bartleby.com/61/s0.html ?
That would be a definite improvement over what we don't have now!
Okay, very preliminary version (code is in CVS): http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Allpages
Note that the test wiki contains nearly all pages starting with 'A', so the index seems a little oddly weighted. ;)
There's probably some wiggle room in the ideal number of links per page and whatnot. It needs to be made prettier, with backlinks to the top level index and forward/back browsing, but the basic functionality is there.
Also we need to get a proper sorting system in (see my recent post on wikitech-l); for instance if I put this on the Esperanto wiki all the accented letters pile up at the end instead of in their proper places: http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciala:Allpages
Other things: currently the list includes redirects. Some redirects should definitely stay -- alternate names that would not appear near each other, for instance. Others (spelling, caps variations) could maybe be dropped, but that's harder to do consistently. Or more simply, we could just italicize redirects or something.
The generation of the top level index is currently pretty inefficient; it makes a separate database query for each chunk of 480 articles, and takes a while to generate on a wiki with 100,000+ articles. Before putting it on the English wiki live, it'll need to have some sort of caching mechanism if it can't be made a lot faster.
Here's a saved copy of the toplevel index for the big English Wikipedia just to give an idea of scale (the links don't work): http://test.wikipedia.org/upload/c/cd/Allpages-demo.html
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)