Wikipedia:Phase II feature requests/Report features and automation

This page is obsolete! It is an archive of old feature requests that were still active on 2002 July 20, when we moved from Phase II to Phase III of the software. Many requests were implemented then, while others became obsolete due to being rejected by the community. See Wikipedia:Feature requests for current requests.

Report features and automation[edit]

Reports and lists[edit]

Report showing all orphaned pages (that is, pages that are not linked to by any other page).
Report showing all old style link pages that aren't redirects (simplify converting them).
Report showing all dangling links (i.e. links which point to pages that don't exist yet.)
Automatically updated page giving the 100 or so most common searches over different periods (today, last 4 hours, last month, last 6 months). This information would help us add what people actually want (provided it fits in with what wikipedia should be).
How about a feature that lists all places where the current page is linked from?
Automatically-generated NewTopics page
- Still considering this, but not for version 0.92. --CliffordAdams
Count and publicly display (somewhere) two or three different numbers of Wikipedia pages that are longer than various particulars lengths (to give a more realistic idea of how many actual pages are on the wiki, as opposed to redirection pages, tiny stubs, etc.).
- A good idea. The only quibble is that it requires opening every page to generate the report, but it shouldn't take any longer than the current search function.
- If wikipedia articles are stored in flat files, you could just approximate the length based on the file size, right?
How's about an automatically generated Wikipedia Contributors page that lists contributors and the number of pages they created or changed? --SoniC
- Unfortunately, not all contributors use a username or have a single login. Also, not all of the requested information is kept permanently. --CliffordAdams
Plagiarism-bot. A bot that goes through Wikipedia pages on a regular basis, does Google searches, and flags pages that it suspects might be plagiarized.
Let's have contributors of a given Wikipedia page listed either in the header or in the footer. IP's are skipped of course and if there are more than, say, 10 contributors make a link to a special subpage "Contributors".Kpjas
- If people wish to be listed, can't they simply include their name at the end of the text?
- I like the basic anonymity of the entries, especially if the diff information is actually stored somewhere. -- TheCunctator
Provide a way to search for all the changes made by one user in Wikipedia. For example, if I contributed to numerous pages over a long period of time, then 2 years later, I would need a way to find out whether someone else added to the subject I once touched.
- Alternately, allow users to "monitor" a page, so that they get email whenever that page is edited. Or adds a link to that page to another page, which could be a subpage of their user page. Greg Lindahl
I would like a page that is a top list of the most frequently linked-to non-existent page. Linus Tolke

Weed-whacking (tools to help in reining in chaos)[edit]

Spell check batch job for newly created articles once a week with a link at the end of the article to the incorrectly spelled words. Even better would be one that worked as the "preview" button, before saving, and that marked somehow the suspicious words.
Is it possible to invent something to sort lists alphabetically? Take a look at pages like Actresses and you know why this would be helpful...
Would someone provide Wikipedia with code for programmatic update of the date on the Homepage? This would certainly make WojPob's life easier ;-)
It would be great to have a feature that would identify all orphaned pages. There's a small but growing problem of our having many useful pages that are not linked-to or underlinked-to. It would be great if we could list all pages to which there are no links, or only one link. --Larry Sanger
Provide a batch job that searches for and lists all links along with the page the link is contained in so that we can look for duplicate/slightly different versions of the same link and fix them. Please make this a weekly batch job so that it does not take too much time.
Automate making old-style links into Free Links
- This will probably happen soon after the 0.92 release. The wiki code to rename pages is already present, although it is available to wiki administrator(s) only
I was trying to find a good way to change the links for the entire UnitedStatesConstitution section so that all the subsections would automatically migrate to United States Constitution. Instead of copying and pasting everything on the web, I figured I could just copy the files on the server from one directory to the other. I tried this and the site broke, so now I think I will just ask if there is a way to do this. So: When we are changing links to the much nicer free link style, is there a good way to get subsections changed as well without having to manually edit each page in the subsection?
- The wiki admin(s) can use the page-rename commands to move pages. Unfortunately, each individual subpage needs to be moved by this method. I'll consider this to be a feature request for renaming all subpages when a page is renamed. --CliffordAdams

Automatic links[edit]

For every topic, go through and grep every other topic (maybe just the root topic) and automatically create a link to the topic we are looking for. So eventually every word could possibly be a link. This could be great for people interested in the origins of words and would save topic creators much time too.
- This is a bad idea. First of all, there are the obvious technical difficulties. More importantly, human beings are much better at deciding when a link is relevant to a given bit of text. Patience--it'll be perfect in the end, trust me. --LMS
At the bottom of every article, I would like to have a list of likely related pages, similar to http://everything2.com. These could be computed once a night or so, maybe at the same time the search indexing is done. Criteria for two pages to be related:
- contain similar words
- link to similar pages
- are linked to by similar pages --AxelBoldt

Automatic Empty Page Deletion[edit]

The whole Page titles to be deleted mechanism is unnecessarily burdensome. The software should be capable of automatically deleting pages that have no content other than whitespace.

It's been discussed - but how do you train the software to distinguish between a blank page which is useless, a blank page which has been vandalised, or a blank page which has been wiped clean pending resolution of a debate on the relevant talk page? Page titles to be deleted is cumbersome, but it preserves the need for page deletions to be conducted with care and judicious consideration. All the history goes as well when a page is deeted - so there is no way back. MMGB

I see. I missed the previous discussion. Sorry for retreading old ground. Causing links to empty pages to display as if it were a new page would do as well without the other problems. Attempts to deal with the issues otherwise: wait a few days or even weeks before deleting (anti-vandalism), don't delete if there are subpages (anti /Talk problem)? --Dmerrill