[Wikimedia-l] Info action

[MZMcBride]

Hi.

This is just a heads-up that you'll start seeing a "Page information" link
in the sidebar (under "Toolbox") in the coming days on Wikimedia wikis. It
is deployed now to a few wikis already. This "Page information" link leads
to a newly reimplemented info action:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=info

Many, many years ago, the info action was added to MediaWiki, but due to
performance issues, it was quickly disabled by default and was mostly
forgotten about. This year, with the wonderful help of Madman, Krenair, and
others, we have reimplemented the info action to provide an information
dashboard of sorts about a particular page title to users.

This dashboard includes a variety of metadata about the page, including the
page's protection status, length, default categorization sort key, internal
page ID, templates used on the page, and more. The content is somewhat
dynamic: for some pages it will omit certain irrelevant fields and for some
users (such as administrators), certain additional fields (such as the
number of page watchers) will be displayed. This will slowly allow for the
deprecation of outside tools that currently provide information of this
nature.

The hope is that this action will evolve over time to become a valuable
resource for users. If you can think of data points that are missing from
the current action's output or have other ideas to improve the info action
(it desperately needs a little design love), please feel free to e-mail this
list or file a bug at <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/>.

MZMcBride