Brion Vibber wrote:
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
It looks beautiful!
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.
And I thought I could expect perfection on the first draft. :-)
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
Would a table of equivalent values be workable so that for sorting and searching purposes "à" and "ã" would be considered equivalent to "a", etc. A second level of mini-sort would only be required when accents are the only thing distinguishing two entries. Entries in non-Latin scripts would still need to be handled separately.
There would still be the problem of those languages which really do consider some of those accented characters as special letters which sometimes belong at the end of the alphabet. But that should not be a worry for the English wikipedia, and modifications could be made for the others as required for their special rules.
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.
I agree, but for now it's a step ahead of where we are. Another interesting challenge will come from how we deal and reconcile with the established policy of putting names as [[John Smith]] instead of [[Smith, John]]
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.
As much as I find beauty in the proposal, there may be other ways to do this that are less demanding on the system, but just as easy for the user.. A tree that requires succesively choosing the first, second and third letters of the first word might do this. So would a simple browse function that asks the user to supply the first few letters to begin his browse. This would still contain the opportunity to step back and forth to adjacent blocks.
Eclecticology