[Wikipedia-l] Feature request

[Mark Christensen]

I think the thing to do is to test out the current capabilities as best
we can.  To that effect, I'm setting up the "List of Philosophical
Topics" as a test case.  The list is by no means complete, and some of
the links aren't disambiguated properly, but it is 1) a long list
(useful for testing performance issues) and 2) it already exists, and
helps Larry out directly with his current request.

Even if this shows that the current software solution doesn't provide
exactly what we need, it should at least help us to be more clear about
what features a better solution would possess.  

Mark Christensen

-----Original Message-----
From: Axel Boldt [mailto:axelboldt at yahoo.com] 
Sent: Monday, September 23, 2002 10:40 AM
To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Feature request



--- lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> > Sorry if this is already in the hopper or (!) has
> already been
> > done, but it seems long overdue:
> > We need a way to compile, based on lists of links
> (I guess),
> > "Recent Changes" lists for all articles about a
> general topic.
> 
> This has been doable since Magnus's software, and
> still is; the
> hard work is just compiling the list of links.

Right. Here's the problem. I could easily spend the
next weekend compiling an [[Alphabetical list of
mathematics articles]]. This will allow me to cut down
on my time by simply doing a "Watch links" on that
page every morning. Cool. I update the list by
monitoring special:Newpages occasionally. Nice. Except
we need the same for all other major fields. Unless
you have somebody really active, these lists will
become obsolete and thus useless really soon. See [[Biographical
Listing]] for example. Once the list is out of date, somebody needs to
spend another weekend. And you never know whether the list is out of
date or not, unless you have just spent a weekend on it.

I still believe that all of this can and should be
done automatically, by tracing link paths from the
main page.

Axel

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