Axel Boldt wrote:
I think that a subject classification of articles would vastly improve "soft security" and would save regulars a lot of time, since not everyone would have to check every edit as currently seems to be the case.
I'd still like to see if we couldn't build those subjects automatically in some way based on links in the database.
How about this: the possible topics coincide with the major pages listed on [[Main Page]] (from "Astronomy" to "Visual Arts"). The shortest link path from such a topic page to an article defines that article's topic. If there is no such path, then the article is classified as a topic orphan.
To compute these topics quickly, the cur table gets two new columns: topic and distance, where distance stands for the link distance from the Main Page topic page. If a new article is created, looking at the distance entries of all articles that link to the new one, and taking the minimum, immediately classifies the new one. If an existing article is saved, the topic and distance entries of all articles it links to (and their children) may need to be updated; these changes can be propagated in a recursive manner.
Would that work?
Axel
Interesting! I had a very similar thought a couple months ago, and never bothered to mention it. I guess that qualifies Axel for the4 moral copyrights.on the idea.
The orphan (like the main page) would simply have a distance value of 0.
The path for a page could appear at the top of the article. This already happens in some places, and we manually do something similar in our Tree of Life project. I hope nobody complains about polyphyletic Wikipedia pages.
As for saving time for regulars, that may be a very limited benefit. We all have certain subject areas where we tend to track things and tend to ignore topics outside of that. The real time loss often doesn't appear until we have looked at an article to see if a minor change really is minor.
Eclecticology