On 11/9/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Motivation: there are lots of links to disambiguous pages, and they're not at all visible. This is bad for navigating, bad for reusing content, and bad for any kind of analysis that involves links.
- Define a magic word like __AMBIGUOUSPAGE__, which would be included in
{{disambig}} on Wikipedia.
Unnecessary. {{disambig}} already has special status, because it's listed on MediaWiki:Disambiguationspage. Otherwise Special:Disambiguations wouldn't work. A magic word might be more sensible from an interface perspective, which of course would allow anyone to declare a template to be a disambig template.
- When a link is rendered that goes towards a flagged ambiguous page, it is
rendered differently, such as using a new css style, or perhaps a predefined but editable template, which would allow an image to be displayed next to such a link.
You know you can set it so that links to short pages display differently? It picks up many disambig pages, in my experience. Although far from all, and it picks up short articles too.
On 11/9/07, Andrew Garrett andrew@epstone.net wrote:
Sounds problematic. There isn't a binary AND function in mysql
Um, what?
mysql> SELECT 9 & 15; +--------+ | 9 & 15 | +--------+ | 9 | +--------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec)
, so looking for new/redirected pages (as is done in, for instance, special pages) would have performance issues if you condensed it into a bitfield.
That's true, but only because ordinary INT-type columns aren't indexable for that kind of search. Apparently SET columns aren't either: FIND_IN_SET requires an index scan. Of course the cardinality is very low, for a small bit field, so the index scan might be "fast enough".
As for disambiguation pages, it's done best as an extension. Most wikis running MediaWiki will not want or need this functionality, and it's certainly an editorial tool more than a display tool. It's probably better implemented as some user-side javascript.
If it purely affects display, it should use CSS, not JavaScript, if possible.
On 11/9/07, Mark Clements gmane@kennel17.co.uk wrote:
MW already knows which pages are disambiguation pages. These are any pages that include the page given at [[MediaWiki:Disambiguationspage]].
I'm not sure if this is remembered anywhere on a per-page basis, but if not you probably need to add something to the schema to remember it.
We just use the templatelinks table. Contrary to previous remarks by me, it's perfectly efficient for individual articles, just an extra join.