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Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Miscellaneous/Only show mainspace pages in Special:WantedPages

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Only show mainspace pages in Special:WantedPages

  • Problem: As part of the Special Pages in every wiki, there is a section called Special:WantedPages. There, it lists non-existing pages by number of incoming links, in order to know which of these are the most desired. One problem is that non-articles are shown. The list includes files, Talk pages, project pages, etc., that are not useful to most people.

    On some wikis, when these pages are actually created, they are still shown at Special:WantedPages. This has caused the wanted pages list to become more and more useless over the years.

    Additionally, the places that the incoming links originate are also not necessarily legitimate links. Pages that are mentioned in a template are counted as a link with every template transclusion. It would be more useful to count actual direct links. To make matters worse, pages that are checked with {{#ifexist: are also counted as a link (that is the subject of this proposal). This causes false positives to show up. For instance, at w:en:Special:WantedPages, the top result (at the time of writing) is w:en:Talk:Jay Obernolte/GA1. In reality this is not really a wanted page at all, rather a popular template is checking whether or not it exists.

  • Who would benefit: Users who are looking for articles to write, or are interested to know what popular topics are not covered on the wiki.
  • Proposed solution: Only include mainspace pages, or at least offer options to pick a namespace. Secondly, only direct incoming links from the matching namespace should be counted. Finally, assuming the queries of this Special page can be made more efficient, it should refresh the list more often so that pages that now exist are removed.

Discussion

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@Pencho15: Could you update the summary of this proposal by summarizing the current issues that you see? "Solve Wanted Pages issues" is a bit vague as it could be any issues... Thanks in advance! --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 20:50, 8 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  • @AKlapper (WMF): Done, I hope its better. --Pencho15 (talk) 00:53, 9 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • In the case of the pages you mention, en:Special:WantedFiles, en:Special:WantedTemplates and en:Special:WantedCategories all work perfectly fine, and I don't think they need any improvement, they are useful and updated adequately. I understand it is the same on every other wiki, and I know it is the case in the Spanish one.

    My only request is with en:Special:WantedPages, if you look at the english page, all the top entries and most of the page is full of Talk Pages and Assessments. Those are not encyclopedical pages and are not actually needed in the Wikipedia. If they are sometime, then they will be done, but should not appear on this list which is meant to indicate us the pieces of information missing from Wikipedia.

    Besides Talk pages and assessments, you also find some wanted files that should not be there, as, since you have indicated, they have their own section. A further problem is that those listed files that have already been created do not dissapear from this list after it is updated, and they remain there forever. Spam reports and user pages also appear in some wikis, making all this section pretty useless, when it could be very useful as the Wated Categories, Wanted Templates and Wanted Files pages are.

    If you look at the current list in the english wiki, the first entry that should actually be there is the number 14 of the list, Rehavia Rosenbaum, and only that one and articles number 15, 16, 21 and 24 are actual encyclopedical entries that should be listed.

    So my proposition is to update that single en:Special:WantedPages section in all wikis to make it useful changing its configuration so that Files, Talk Pages, Assessments, Spam reports, Categories, Templates, User Pages and all other kind of special entries that are not actual articles dissapear from it. Perhaps you could help me on how to phrase this in a simpler way in english so my proposition is clear? --Pencho15 (talk) 06:09, 12 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    So, problem: In Special:WantedPages, wanted article are entangled together with other type of wanted pages, including talk pages, templates, non-content pages and Wikipedia pages.

    Thus, proposed solution: Make a new special page that would only display wanted pages from the main namespace. C933103 (talk) 21:21, 12 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  • @Pencho15: I am familiar with the issues with Special:WantedPages, so I have copyedited your proposal to make it more clear what the issue is, and how it could be fixed. Hope this is okay!

    To elaborate on what I know: A while back I actually looked at the code for Special:WantedPages. It suffers from many problems, but the main one is that the query is very inefficient. If we narrowed it down to the mainspace, that should help. The other major issue is elaborated at the proposal Stop ifexist checks from appearing in Special:WhatLinksHere. This causes false positives to show up in the list.

    Also note that if we fix WantedPages as proposed, we should probably also add the necessary options to WhatLinksHere, too (exclude ifexist checks). Otherwise the number of links that are shown in WantedPages will not match the number of links shown at WhatLinksHere. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 01:45, 21 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

imo, We should allow filtering by namespace for all query special pages (That is do the query once for each namespace, and store the results for each namespace, and then add an index on qcc_namespace so we could efficiently show them). Bawolff (talk) 22:51, 28 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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