[Wikipedia-l] A general note about info pages

[lcrocker at nupedia.com]

Many of the feature requests on this list and in the formal
tracker are for pages showing information about the database.
For example, lists of pages meeting certain criteria, lists
of users by signup date, etc.

While some of these may have recurring use, many are probably
little more than occasional ad-hoc queries for a specific
purpose that may or may not be an ongoing need.

I'd like to point out that every sysop here (and that's over
15% of active users, as someone pointed out) can make SELECT
queries to the database, which is all that's necessary for
getting any kind of information you need.  I'd like to
encourage more users to learn how to do this, and encourage
those who already do know how to help them. 

My time is better spent, I think, working on critical functions
of the software like "recent changes", re-thinking wiki markup,
better features for article creation and user interaction, etc.

Of course, if one of these queries ends up being used regularly,
adding a page for it is not difficult; but I'd like to see a
proven need for such things first before I clutter the code with
100 special pages that rarely get used.