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