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This really was a question on Meta:Babel, but got deleted there in an cleanup task without being answered. I hope that wasn't because this is uninteresting or because I'm a non-member.
I propose a tag or other means to mark wiki pages maually as more "important" than other pages.
Maybe something like this exists already, but I don't know of it.
- Benefit: One could easily extract the most "important" sub-part of a wiki and thereby publish e.g. a book (e.g. with http://pediapress.com/), CD, DVD edition without laboriously selecting the candidate pages each time a release is needed. The selection of pages would become an implicit part of the authoring of pages.
- Proposed method
- By using the already existing tag mechanism and an offline application reading the wiki database.
The tag could look as follows (assuming the current page is considered more important than OtherPage:
or simply
[[>OtherPage]]
If enough of these ranking hints are present a script could accumulate them and derive a total order from the graph implied by this relation.
But even if only a few pages are marked, these pages could be extracted and dated among themselves.
The algorithm doing the ranking has to be somewhat more robust than a simple total order extractor Of course, because users will likely provide some inconsistent marks. But these could be resolved by e.g. considering inconsistent marks as indications or more or less equal importance.
- Why?/My motivation
- I'd like to have a durable printed edition of wikipedia which could weather some adversities and provide valuable advice and information in an emergency (e.g. no power, no internet, disconnected from the outside world).