MediaWiki feature requests and bug report discussion

Annoyance:

Almost every time I use the Random page feature, I get some small city in the USA. I would like to end up with interesting topics. It seems that cities are overrepresented in the Wiki database.

As a remedy, I suggest that

• classes tags be added which specify what kind of thing the page is talking about. These tags could be a simple text like "belongs to [group:place]".
• some classes be ignored when getting a random page.

Flash-Support

• Support for the addition of shockwave media would be great
• I double the vote for shockwave support.

Relationship Navigation

• Relationship-friendly categories. This might be something that can be developed with simply a relationship protocol in the categories, although, ideally, it would be a bit more programmatic.

The notion would be that in wikipedia, for instance, you should be able to track kinds of relationships. A concrete example of kinds of relationships is family/genealogy. For instance, Dante Gabriel Rossetti is brother to Christina Rossetti (the poet); and uncle to Helena and Olivia Rossetti, who were activist anarchists around the turn of the 20th century. Implementation might look like: [[relationship:sibling to Christina Rossetti]]

Ideally, then, someone could click on "relationship" and see a tree structure branching out from that person.

There could be pre-defined sets of relationships, as in, genealogy (parent, child, sibling, or romantic/sexual/marital partner). Other examples of kinds of relationships could include artistic/intellectual influences; language trees; etc. Really any "thing" or field of inquiry has a series of relationships. These are currently included now in the text of the entries, and in categories, but the ability to see the relationship itself (in tree or graphic form) would really extend the capability of the software.