I think the thing to do is to test out the current capabilities as best we can. To that effect, I'm setting up the "List of Philosophical Topics" as a test case. The list is by no means complete, and some of the links aren't disambiguated properly, but it is 1) a long list (useful for testing performance issues) and 2) it already exists, and helps Larry out directly with his current request.
Even if this shows that the current software solution doesn't provide exactly what we need, it should at least help us to be more clear about what features a better solution would possess.
Mark Christensen
-----Original Message----- From: Axel Boldt [mailto:axelboldt@yahoo.com] Sent: Monday, September 23, 2002 10:40 AM To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Feature request
--- lcrocker@nupedia.com wrote:
Sorry if this is already in the hopper or (!) has
already been
done, but it seems long overdue: We need a way to compile, based on lists of links
(I guess),
"Recent Changes" lists for all articles about a
general topic.
This has been doable since Magnus's software, and still is; the hard work is just compiling the list of links.
Right. Here's the problem. I could easily spend the next weekend compiling an [[Alphabetical list of mathematics articles]]. This will allow me to cut down on my time by simply doing a "Watch links" on that page every morning. Cool. I update the list by monitoring special:Newpages occasionally. Nice. Except we need the same for all other major fields. Unless you have somebody really active, these lists will become obsolete and thus useless really soon. See [[Biographical Listing]] for example. Once the list is out of date, somebody needs to spend another weekend. And you never know whether the list is out of date or not, unless you have just spent a weekend on it.
I still believe that all of this can and should be done automatically, by tracing link paths from the main page.
Axel
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