Wikipedia talk:Most wanted articles

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Archive: /1

Contents 1 Most viewed redlinks 2 ISBN 3 Filipino Actor 4 Minor Change 5 Technical difficulties 6 Most Wanted Stubs? 7 Filter out template links? 8 Confusing

[edit] Most viewed redlinks

It seems the me that this page should have a list of the most viewed broken links as well. This, to me, would be more closely aligned with the description "Most Wanted Articles". Perhaps this is just a harder thing to determine... Perhaps just a list of broken links that occur on popular pages.

I'm with the guy above me.Dan 18:51, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree that it would be useful to know how often each broken link has been viewed recently. However, that would probably require some analysis of the webserver and squid logs, which makes it a more complicated issue than just pulling information out of the database. I hope to work on this sometime soon (but not right now).--Wclark 17:39, 2004 Jul 11 (UTC)

Why would anyone view redlinks? Maybe for stubs this is a useful suggestion.--MarSch 15:27, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

I'm sure many readers don't realize the the color red means the target of the link does not exist. On some web sites, this simply means that you've visited the page before, and on many sites it has no particular meaning at all. Implementing this would require developer assistance; Wikipedia's server are distributed and currently do not permanently record requests. -- Beland 20:13, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

If it doesn't exist, why would anyone visit it if they didn't want to create it? Seems rather useless to me. (But then again, what Beland said about people not knowing what red means is true.) --SheeEttin 20:20, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] ISBN

The entry for ISBN 1-903111-14-15 isn't an error in the script- the person who added it to a bunch of pages put double-brackets around it by mistake. I'm fixing them now. -- Jake 07:26, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Oh, yay. -- Beland 20:51, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Filipino Actor

Seems like this request comes from one, or many users, who have a limited concept of the English Language. I am not going to wikify or stub any or all of these, but I am going through and replacing "Filipino Actor" with Filipino Actor. Any help would be appreciated. Dragoonmac - If there was a problem yo I'll solve it 01:37, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Minor Change

Let you know that i correct the the general headline like this 'j== general == '.. athough i forgot to check the 'minor edit' box. heh. oh well. my first edit ever! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Maxhrk (talk • contribs) 08:23, 2 March 2006 (UTC).

[edit] Technical difficulties

I discovered today that my laptop no longer has enough hard drive space to run the report-generation scripts for this page, and my desktop machine does not have enough RAM. We are currently trying to get these scripts moved to the Toolserver, anyway - see Meta:Toolserver/Reports. Someone will either need to adapt these scripts to run on the Toolserver (it runs Solaris and my laptop runs Fedora 4 Linux, but the scripts are in Perl and so should be reasonably platform-independent), download them and run them locally, or re-write them to use less hard drive space and/or less RAM (which is certainly possible and might be good to do anyway). Unfortuantely, I have a lot of other projects on my plate right now, and I probably won't have enough free time in the foreseeable future to take care of this.

In the meantime, I have posted a link to Wikipedia:Articles requested for more than a year, which was scheduled to be a major Maintenance Collaboration, anyway. Maybe we can eliminate the backlog there while we are waiting for technical fixes. -- Beland 22:57, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Most Wanted Stubs?

I thought I'd mention this proposal at the village pump for a "Most Wanted Stubs" listing, to see if there was any overlapping interest here. I'd assume there would also be a lot of overlap between the means of generating either such list... Alai 16:02, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Filter out template links?

Would it be possible to not count links that appear in a template, or to at least only count them once? I don't think it makes sense to inflate the "wantedness" of a missing article simply because it's linked to from a bajillion other articles that have a link-farm template at the bottom. Those articles aren't linking to the missing article in any meaningful way (or, at best, are doing so in a much less meaningful way than one that links in the article text itself) and so should be discounted. I'm not sure how the script that generates these counts is written, so this may not be feasible. --Wclark 06:06, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

I think this should be done unless if it is not impossible or an extreme amount of work. The counting of templates makes this list of very little value in my opinion. Almost all of them get all or almost all of their links from being included on a template. If they were truly wanted, they would have a lot of links from articles, too. -- Kjkolb 04:15, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

I agree with you, that this list is useless if the link resulting from templates are included. An especially nasty template along these lines has been nominated for deletion at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion#Template:Municipalities in Salamanca. Gene Nygaard 22:01, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, it's not impossible... now define an 'extreme' amount of work. :/ Trouble is that the most ready source of this information, the "pagelinks" table in the database dumps, just doesn't distinguish between "real" links from the top-level page text, or those transcluded from templates. So an accurate count of the former would need to go a completely different route. I think it might be somewhat easier to add a "caveat" by flagging those that have links from the template space, and perhaps even the number of actual transclusions of those templates, though I think that's in yet another separate table... Just to play devil's advocate, isn't an advantage of the current basis that it flags up such 'problem' templates? If these are progressively cleaned up, lists from later dumps would be more meaningful (assuming reasonably regular updates). Alai 00:07, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Of course, as I've just discovered from trying this out, people's obscurantist template coding can frustrate even that. For example, {{Africa in topic}} as used on Roman Catholicism in Nigeria generates a 'crypto-link' from {{Roman Catholicism in São Tomé and Príncipe}}, which doesn't show up as a template link in the the table. So in short, the chances of getting a "clean" list are pretty vanishing at present. So for the time being, here's some moderately dirty ones: the top 100 on raw numbers of article-space red links, User:Alai/MWA, annotated with the numbers of redlinks for templates; and a similar list filtered to exclude articles with any redlinks from templates, User:Alai/MWA-0. I won't put these on the project page at this iteration, given the different format and method of counting, but anyone that wants to work with these, please feel free to mark up the lists. Alai 04:23, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Confusing

If these are more wanted articles by virtue of "most linked to", and therefore most desired, why are some of the red links crossed off when they don't yet exist, for example under the general section? Unless I am misunderstanding these all must be created yet or redirected if something similar exists. · XP · 19:58, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

Because, for one reason or another, the number of links to that page have significantly dropped. I checked the "What links here" for two of the pages that are crossed off, and they now have four and three total links, respectively (one each from this page, so really three and two). My guess is that these used to me linked to from a template that was included in many pages, but the template was modified, perhaps because the item was actually non-notable, perhaps due to a typo, or perhaps for some other reason. --Psiphiorg 05:07, 27 September 2006 (UTC)