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