There's a few feature requests that have come up multiple times, and I'd like some comments from other developers and power users before I go trashing the code on my own...

• "Most wanted" and "Most popular" special pages list the _total_ number

of links to a page, regardless of how many links there are _per page_. Some types of lists can hyperinflate the numbers; a list of video games might link [[Playstation]] 389 times (once for each Playstation game listed). The behavior that people seem to expect is a count of _pages_ that link, rather than the raw number of links. I would tend to agree. This can be switched by the simple addition of "DISTINCT" to a couple SQL queries; is there any reason to retain the current behavior?

Being one of those who requested this (after noticing a page got #8 on 'Most wanted pages' with 13 links of which 12 were from one page), I am all for it.

• On blocking vandals; there's still no interface for blocking by

username, and you can't get the IP address of a logged-in user except by sifting through the server logs. Should we retain and display IP addresses/hostnames of logged-in editors (as on UseMod), and/or allow usernames to be blocked?

No opinion

• The administrative page rename feature on UseMod could optionally find

and change links to point to the new name in addition to just supplying a redirect. We still haven't implemented this. Desirable?

If so, then only on an optional basis. Sometimes one DOES want to keep the links to the old page. As a precaution for when one might split the two subjects again in the future.

For example, in the Dutch Wikipedia I recently moved 'Trebizonde' (English 'Trebizond') to 'Trabzon'. Trabzon is a city in northeast Turkey, Trebizond(e) its old name. It has an important place in history, and it might well be that in the future one would want to have a separate page about the history, or perhaps about the independent state in the region around the city in the High Middle Ages. And 'Trebizond(e)' would be a good name for such an article. If that ever happens, it would be nice to have the links run right already.

One thing that I _would_ like to have, is to automatically change links _from redirect pages_. Double redirects simply look extremely ugly and non-informative, and are among the things we should most like to avoid.

• While the "Special:" namespace may be localized ("Spezial", "Speciel"

etc), the names of special pages are hardwired in English (hence monstrosities like "Spezial:Recentchanges"). While these are mostly hidden in the interface by descriptive names, the links, URLs, and most annoyingly the tooltips on the links all show the raw internal English name of the function which implements the special page. A table of equivalencies could be set up, allowing more easily recognizable localized names to be used. Good idea? Bad idea?

Good idea.

• For the French wiki, the Wikipedia: namespace is tentatively set up as

"Wikipédia" (with acute accent on the "e"). The parser doesn't accept namespaces with non-ASCII chars so this doesn't work, which is a bug I intend to fix, but additionally one tester asked:

'For the francophone wikipedians without a French keyboard, would it be possible for the "Wikipedia:*" links to automatically transform into "Wikipédia:*"? Or, more simply, could the system interpret e/é as equal in the namespace portion?'

In short, allow aliases for namespaces. Good idea? Bad idea?

No opinion.

Andre Engels

--- Brion VIBBER brion@pobox.com wrote:

• "Most wanted" and "Most popular" special pages

list the _total_ number of links to a page, regardless of how many links there are _per page_. Some types of lists can hyperinflate the numbers; a list of video games might link [[Playstation]] 389 times (once for each Playstation game listed). The behavior that people seem to expect is a count of _pages_ that link, rather than the raw number of links. I would tend to agree. This can be switched by the simple addition of "DISTINCT" to a couple SQL queries; is there any reason to retain the current behavior?

I'm all for a page count rather than an individual link count. I can't think of any reason to retain the current behaviour.

• On blocking vandals; there's still no interface

for blocking by username, and you can't get the IP address of a logged-in user except by sifting through the server logs. Should we retain and display IP addresses/hostnames of logged-in editors (as on UseMod), and/or allow usernames to be blocked?

Blocking a user name without a corresponding IP block is useless. The vandal can just sign up for another ID. I'm in favour of the UseMod-style behaviour.

• The administrative page rename feature on UseMod

could optionally find and change links to point to the new name in addition to just supplying a redirect. We still haven't implemented this. Desirable?

Unsure. My first instinct was to say, "Oh, yeah!", but I thought about it a little more. Imagine a hypothetical article named [[English]] that is entirely about the language. I think it should be moved to [[English language]], so I do so. The software "corrects" all the [[English]] links. The problem is, many of those links were not refering to to the language, but the nationality. we're left with a big mess of incorrect links, with no way to correct them other than examining each one.

• While the "Special:" namespace may be localized

("Spezial", "Speciel" etc), the names of special pages are hardwired in English (hence monstrosities like "Spezial:Recentchanges"). While these are mostly hidden in the interface by descriptive names, the links, URLs, and most annoyingly the tooltips on the links all show the raw internal English name of the function which implements the special page. A table of equivalencies could be set up, allowing more easily recognizable localized names to be used. Good idea? Bad idea?

It doesn't seem like a pressing matter to me. All of the PHP source code is in a form of English too. As long as the interface is localized, I can't see this being a problem. Note: I am an English speaker. :)

• For the French wiki, the Wikipedia: namespace is

tentatively set up as "Wikip�dia" (with acute accent on the "e"). The parser doesn't accept namespaces with non-ASCII chars so this doesn't work, which is a bug I intend to fix, but additionally one tester asked:

'For the francophone wikipedians without a French keyboard, would it be possible for the "Wikipedia:*" links to automatically transform into "Wikip�dia:*"? Or, more simply, could the system interpret e/� as equal in the namespace portion?'

In short, allow aliases for namespaces. Good idea? Bad idea?

Sounds good to me. Any downsides?

Stephen G.

__________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Faith Hill - Exclusive Performances, Videos & More http://faith.yahoo.com

A few days ago I wrote:

There's a few feature requests that have come up multiple times, and I'd like some comments from other developers and power users before I go trashing the code on my own...

• "Most wanted" and "Most popular" special pages list the _total_ number

of links to a page, regardless of how many links there are _per page_. Some types of lists can hyperinflate the numbers; a list of video games might link [[Playstation]] 389 times (once for each Playstation game listed). The behavior that people seem to expect is a count of _pages_ that link, rather than the raw number of links. I would tend to agree. This can be switched by the simple addition of "DISTINCT" to a couple SQL queries; is there any reason to retain the current behavior?

Everybody seems to like the idea of couting each page that links only once.

• On blocking vandals; there's still no interface for blocking by

username, and you can't get the IP address of a logged-in user except by sifting through the server logs. Should we retain and display IP addresses/hostnames of logged-in editors (as on UseMod), and/or allow usernames to be blocked?

There is some support for internally recording IP addresses of logged-in users and allowing admins to block based on them, without necessarily showing the IPs in general.

• The administrative page rename feature on UseMod could optionally find

and change links to point to the new name in addition to just supplying a redirect. We still haven't implemented this. Desirable?

Opinions are mixed on changing the links in the text; everyone who's mentioned it seems in favor of automatically fixing double-redirects created by a move. I'll plan on implementing the latter.

• While the "Special:" namespace may be localized ("Spezial", "Speciel"

etc), the names of special pages are hardwired in English (hence monstrosities like "Spezial:Recentchanges"). While these are mostly hidden in the interface by descriptive names, the links, URLs, and most annoyingly the tooltips on the links all show the raw internal English name of the function which implements the special page. A table of equivalencies could be set up, allowing more easily recognizable localized names to be used. Good idea? Bad idea?

There's desire for this from non-Anglophone wikipedians, but mav brought up a good point -- when visiting another language to do something (like updating interlanguage links or checking for images), you need to be able to find your way around. The special page names being in English in the popups gives some consistency...

The ideal thing to do, I think, is to make it possible to select the user interface language separately from the content language. ie, I should be able to surf the Korean entries with Esperanto menus or the English with Arabic if I'm comfortable that way.

That'll need some work to extract content-affecting code (names of log files etc) from the interface and be able to handle them separately, and to make sure charset encoding is handled sanely. But, it's something that's been occasionally suggested and I think it's the way to go ultimately.

The special page links can then use local names, and perhaps the internal English names can also be available as aliases (see below).

• For the French wiki, the Wikipedia: namespace is tentatively set up as

"Wikipédia" (with acute accent on the "e"). The parser doesn't accept namespaces with non-ASCII chars so this doesn't work, which is a bug I intend to fix,

(now fixed)

but additionally one tester asked:

'For the francophone wikipedians without a French keyboard, would it be possible for the "Wikipedia:*" links to automatically transform into "Wikipédia:*"? Or, more simply, could the system interpret e/é as equal in the namespace portion?'

In short, allow aliases for namespaces. Good idea? Bad idea?

There seems to be general nodding about this. I plan to implement it.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)