That would effectively make the output quasirandom, make paging confusing, and look up of specific pages and following pages impossible. In all I think this makes the page useless for anybody except those projects that has managed to clean up the remaining unconnected pages, and those that has less than 5000 (I think that is the limit) pages in the list.
I would rather suggest that an optional category should be added, and that it should be mandatory if the namespace page count indicates that the number of pages goes above some limit.
I think the start was implemented as a prefix search originally, but I wonder if that is still the case. It could be wise to check it out. It could be an idea to use a default prefix search if none is added.
If neither a prefix pattern or a prefix search are used, then a page-id sorted first N hits can be returned. It should also be possible to switch between oldest first and newest first.
The seemingly caching behavior is probably the update which arrives late, but it could be an indication of other issues. The same bug was fixed several years ago, and disappeared, so it can be a new bug.
It is interesting that there are now real needs for caching and an API, the page itself wasn't much appreciated and deemed unnecessary when it was created. This it has in common with a lot of the maintenance pages, the editors use them even if they are really crappy. Other special pages are using old, often several days old, reports as their source. When it comes to maintenance reports they should be up to date and actionable, not outdated and questionable.
</rant>
John
On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 2:07 PM, Lydia Pintscher lydia.pintscher@wikimedia.de wrote:
Thanks so much for the feedback. That was useful. We'll rework the page to make it not time-out as it currently does on larger wikis. The way we'll go for to achieve this is by sorting the pages by page-id rather than page-title. That should also make it relatively easy to find the newest or oldest pages depending on which you're working on. We'll also provide a filter for the namespace but that might come a bit later.
Cheers Lydia
-- Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher Product Manager for Wikidata
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