Wikipedia talk:Editor's index to Wikipedia/Archive 1

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Excellent work

Excellent work, wow! >Radiant< 08:32, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

It certainly is! This one is going straight into my (somewhat smaller) link directory. Adrian M. H. 18:52, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
Hear, hear! Very useful - thanks John. --217.43.162.202 21:57, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Improving "see" links with section links (anchors)

Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia/Archive 1 contains many "see" links which link to the alphabetic heading of the section containing the link target; for example: 

*Etiquette: see [[#W|Wikiquette]]

When a section is long, and the link target appears late in the section, the user may have to scroll to find the target, and may forget the name of it. A better result for the user, at the cost of more work for the editor, is to link directly to the target term, by placing a name anchor on it. See: Help:Link#Section linking (anchors). To do this, change the link wikitext to: 

*Etiquette: see [[#Wikiquette|Wikiquette]]

and change the target wikitext from this: 

**[[Wikipedia:Etiquette]] - how to work with others on Wikipedia ([[WP:EQ]])

to this: 

**[[Wikipedia:Etiquette]] - how to work with others on Wikipedia ([[WP:EQ]])<span id="Wikiquette"/>

I implented this particular example at:

Obviously, editing the rest would be some work. If MediaWiki had an automatic index-generation feature similar to what DocBook has, the software would create all these name anchor cross-reference links automatically when it generates the index from index tags in the articles. --Teratornis 17:09, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

I've implemented a modified version (basically, three-character anchors, except for subjects that begin with "Wiki", where that is treated as a single character (that is, anchors are six-character). I must say that it makes the "see" and "see also" links much, much nicer; occasionally one (and only one) page-down is needed, but that's not common. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:23, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
Vast improvement. Thanks! And thanks for implementing it so fast. I agree that abbreviated anchor names are sufficient and more robust against future edits. --Teratornis 19:09, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
Belated comment: the three-letter anchor rule can create problems when several lengthy headings stem from the same root word. I've run across one case in particular:
The problem is that several successive headings all stem from "New" and they have dozens of lines of links. This puts the nearest three-letter anchor considerably off target:
I've needed to link to the "News" entry several times from the Help desk (most recently here), and it's nice to give the new users there a precise link, because I would imagine that questioners on the Help desk are probably already feeling overwhelmed, and if we link them to a spot in the index that is two or three screens above where they need to go, they might not realize they need to scroll down. Therefore, I went ahead and added the "News" anchor (no pun intended). If that isn't kosher, let me know how you would prefer to handle this. I suppose we could maintain three-letter anchors with "Nws" instead of "News". --Teratornis 17:52, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Repeat the navigation bar in every section heading?

MediaWiki does not provide options to generate navigation links along with the section headings. On long pages with many sections, I have wished for a short bar of links alongside, or below, each section heading: previous, next, up (to the parent section), top (of page), or in the case of long pages with alphanumeric headings, a navigation bar similar to that produced by {{AlphanumericTOC}}. Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia/Archive 1 is an example of a long page that could benefit from such per-section navigation bars. --Teratornis 19:46, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Awesome! That's what I like about Wikipedia, compared to the rest of the world, which generally ignores obvious suggestions for improvement. --Teratornis 19:07, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Automatic indexing?

The following discussion between User:Teratornis and User:John Broughton appeared originally on their respective user pages. I copied it here to simplify reading and further discussion, and to keep the material with the page it is about. --Teratornis 20:08, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Original question from User:Teratornis

Speaking of the index, which I also like, this makes me realize there is no built-in indexing feature in MediaWiki. Such a feature would be nice to have. For example, I would like to automatically generate index pages for all the (main namespace) articles categorized under some particular category. As I'm sure you know, this sort of thing is taken for granted in technical publishing software such as DocBook (see Making an Index). Has there been any discussion of adding indexing tags to MediaWiki? I looked on John Broughton/Editor's Index to Wikipedia/Credits and further work but there seems to be no summary of background discussion that may have motivated the indexing effort. I did a cursory Google search on Meta without finding much. This might be semi-related: m:Help-style indexing. --Teratornis 20:56, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Reply from User:John Broughton

My index

Interesting post to my talk page. The reason you didn't find any indication of anyone else doing (or thinking) of doing indexing, when you looked at what I've compiled, is that I've found nothing myself. I've left notes at a couple of user pages where the user had done a lot of work on their own personal directory, asking if they knew of an index (so I wouldn't be reinventing the wheel); no success. I admit to not thinking about searching meta for capabilities of the wiki software, however.

As to what generated my interest in an index - I started writing a user manual (for editors), and realized that organizing information about Wikipedia pages into a "logical" sequence was essentially impossible - exactly where does one put pages about edits, or manual of style - beginner, intermediate, advanced user chapters? (I've found several attempts to write what appears to be a "logical" guide to Wikipedia, abandoned.)

I then realized that rather than a table of contents, which I'd tried, or a directory (a page gets listed in just one slot), that an index provided the flexibility I needed - and, to boot, it was useful while I built it.

Meta and automatic keyword generation

What you found at m:Help-style indexing (and I'd never known about) was a built-in index (of sorts) for meta help pages, using keywords. For example, for m:Help:DPL, if you look at the source, you'll find the following:

<meta name="keywords" content="Help:DPL,Administration,Advanced templates,Array,Calculation,Cascading style sheets,Category,Common words, searching for which is not possible,Contents,Deleting a page,Diff" />

Looking at Help:Edit summary, this is in the source:

<meta name="keywords" content="Help:Edit summary,Contents,A quick guide to templates,Calculation,Category,Diff,Dummy edit,Edit conflict,Edit toolbar,Editing,Editing shortcuts" />

And looking at a very recent policy, Wikipedia:Canvassing, which has no antecedent at meta, this is in the source:

<meta name="keywords" content="Wikipedia:Canvassing,Canvassing,WP:CANVAS,WP:CANVASS,Administrators' noticeboard,Consensus,Ignore all rules,Multiposting,Policies and guidelines,Requests for arbitration/Guanaco, MarkSweep, et al,Requests for arbitration/IZAK" />

Where do these keywords come from? From wikilinks; they are automatically created by stripping off "Wikipedia:". (The software is smart enough to also strip off a the front of a full URL when a URL is used rather than a wikilink, in the text.) In fact, keywords are generated for every page in this wiki, I believe, based on my looking at a regular article and at my user talk page, though the rules appear to be different for different types of pages.

So, what next?

But are keywords used for anything that a normal editor might encounter? I can't find any indication that they are. A search of Wikipedia namespace found only one thing vaguely related to keywords, this very unusual WikiProject, which survived two deletion attempts (in the first, no one voted; in the second, a couple of users said - essentially - "I have no idea what this is, but it could be useful.") (Related page: User:Tractor.) And while the founder and sole member of that WikiProject is aware that source pages include keywords, he apparently isn't aware of their potential power (or has a totally different focus).

So, to summarize, we have (a) automated keyword generation; (b) a existing feature in meta that I'm guessing was designed for programmers looking through "m:Help" files, which uses keywords found on a subset of meta pages, and (c) nothing else, apparently, that takes advantage of these (except, possibly, outside search engines?). Interesting. -- John Broughton (☎☎) 23:21, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

DocBook in MoinMoin on Fedora Core wiki

I noticed that the Fedora Core project has a documentation wiki:

which runs on MoinMoin, and somehow it appears to allow editing with DocBook syntax. Evidently they don't support DocBook indexing tags:

but it's nice to dream. Other pages:

I'm not suggesting this is directly relevant to your project of using direct manual editing to make an index. But it would be nice if MediaWiki had some tags to facilitate indexing. --Teratornis 22:57, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Should the title be: Editor's index to Wikipedia?

Should the word "Index" have a lowercase "I" in the page title? See: WP:TITLE#Lowercase second and subsequent words in titles. --Teratornis 21:53, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes, it should, and when I move it to Wikipedia space, I'll change the title accordingly. Seems unnecessary at the moment. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:40, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm making small edits

I'm making small additions to Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia/Archive 1 whenever I find some page that is useful for Wikipedia editors and does not already have an entry on the index. If this is a problem, tell me and I will stop. --Teratornis 05:24, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

No, go ahead with any additions you want. Deletions or moves, on the other hand, please post suggestions here. Also, if you see typos (inconsistencies) or wikilinks that go to redirects, please feel free to fix. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:40, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
Certainly, will do. As a rule, I like to ask for comments before making any large-scale changes even in the main article space; in someone else's user space, that would be doubly so. I don't like to delete content anyway, as I am something of a packrat, with leanings to the "rehabilitate rather than remove" school. (I was appalled to learn recently, for example, that Werdnabot periodically removes the the Village pump archives. That strikes me as shortsighted, because it removes all that valuable expert advice from the reach of Google search, for example this Google search on the Village pump (technical) pages.) And speaking of moving content around on the index, I feel little inclination to do that, because I'm finding the most convenient way for me to use the Editor's index is to browse to the page and do a ctrl-F search in the browser. That's often easier than using the alphabetic index headings directly, because in some cases a given page could appear under any of several different letters. A ctrl-F search finds index entries containing a given word regardless of where you placed them. Then, having found them, I benefit from the way you group related pages together (for example, related pages whose entries do not contain my search keyword). That makes your index page a more fruitful target for a ctrl-F search than a mere list of page links would be. --Teratornis 19:52, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
(Belated comment) - yes, exactly what I was thinking. I've added a few entries like "Movies - see Films" where I think an editor might search on the wrong name (text string). Otherwise, if the title of the page contains an unusual word, I assume that the editor will find that via Ctl-F, so it's not absolutely necessary to have an index entry for that word. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:52, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Brilliant

Only one problem. Why did it take me so long to find this!! Advertise it more. It's going straight onto User:Carcharoth/Bookmarks. Carcharoth 01:22, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

Possibly because you do not frequent the Help desk? I've cited the Editor's index in dozens of my replies to questions there. Presumably, after the author moves the index to Wikipedia's project namespace, we can start linking to it from the standard entry points to Wikipedia's help (such as Help:Contents, the various FAQs, and so on). --Teratornis 17:31, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Bible

This is like a TOC for a Wikipedia bible! I'm in love with it! --wpktsfs 05:19, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, it looks really good.-h i s s p a c e r e s e a r c h 10:50, 26 August 2007 (UTC)
Not that it's directly relevant here, but there are indices for the actual Bible, for example: Nave's Topical Bible. (Regardless of one's view of the subject matter, that index is an impressive piece of work, especially considering that it appeared long before the age of computers.) The analogy with our editor's index is interesting. Wikipedia editors function something like theologians, by searching their respective scriptures for allegedly divine utterances to settle doctrinal disputes. Of course on Wikipedia our "scriptures" make no claim to divine inspiration, and we continuously revise them. But the basic principle is the same: instead of every editor just "winging it," we try to codify every aspect of our best practices, and then get everyone to follow the codes. This enables Wikipedia to grow ever-larger without succumbing to Brooks' law, because new users can largely train themselves by reading instructions, and when human intervention is necessary, it's more efficient merely to cite an instruction document than to have to rewrite all the instructions from scratch each time. Organizations which rely heavily on an oral tradition (which would include almost every traditional organization in which spoken language dominates) must struggle to train new members, because much of the instruction they need is not in usable written form. --Teratornis 19:25, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Question

I've been using this for at least the last month, and I really like it. I recently wrote an essay at Wikipedia:Uphill Battles you might be interested in-- I read your /About section and it didn't really say clearly either way, and I noticed most of the history was yourself, so I figured it would be best to let you decide. Whether you do or not, keep up the good work, this is usually one of the first places I point new editors! --Longing.... 07:00, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Seems worthwhile adding: I've done so. Thanks for checking here; apologies for the delay in responding. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:13, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
No problem. Not like there's a deadline for this stuff. --lucid 11:51, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Length of anchors in the index

Okay, I've decided that three-character anchors were, in hindsight, a mistake. At this point, I'm thinking of going to six letter anchors, which will enable me to remove the "Wiki" exception, among other things.

What I'd like to get from you is some feedback about my removing all the three and four-letter anchors that currently exist. I'd be amenable to leaving the four-letter anchors (as historical anomalies), but the three-letter anchors need to go (I think) because it's just too confusing (I think) to have two anchors for each anchored topic. I realize this will break all of your pointers to specific sections; is this something that could be fixed, or ignored? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:05, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Umm, nevermind. I've decided to treat anchors like redirects - if they aren't broken, they don't need to be fixed (or, in this case, removed). I'm simply going to add a bunch of six-character anchors, and change all the internal links to anchors on the page to be six-characters. All of the external links to specific anchors on the page should continue to function as they did before, because I won't remove anything. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 11:37, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
That sounds fine to me. There is no limit to the number of anchors that can go on a particular line in the index. It would be nice if, eventually, every "major" heading in the index had its own anchor, so we could link to it from the Help desk and so on. It would also be handy for every heading to link to itself, somehow, so a person reading the index to find answers for someone else could easily retrieve the anchor to give to that other person. --Teratornis 15:58, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
I'm done with adding six-character anchors; I think in fact that every major topic has an anchor, and that there isn't any reason to link to a non-major topic (since these are essentially pointers to elsewhere in the index, or a pointer to a single Wikipedia page).

Redirects/Shortcuts

Your last suggestion is interesting; essentially these would be nowikied "shortcuts" to the major topics in the index, such as WP:EITW#Privac. It would, of course, be cleaner if we laid claim to WP:EI, which currently links to an inactive proposal; that would make the links look like this: WP:EI#Privac. And I suppose if we wanted to make this better, we'd use easy-to-remember anchors like WP:EI#Privacy and WP:EI#New editors. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:09, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

Although I wasn't consciously thinking of it when I wrote my above suggestion, I guess I must have subconsciously recalled the WP:NOT page, which has section-specific shortcuts such as:
{{policy shortcut|WP:NOT#PAPER|WP:PAPER|WP:NOTPAPER}}
Maybe we/you could make our own template similar to {{policy shortcut}}, maybe Template:Index shortcut or something. Then each major heading could have a nice right-aligned box showing its shortcut link(s). That would make it very simple to cite index sections on the Help desk and elsewhere. --Teratornis 20:16, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
Oh, I see the {{Shortcut}} template which should do nicely. --Teratornis 20:19, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
I've added a shortcut to the first major topic. What do you think? (Setting aside, for the moment, the EITW versus EI issue.) Did you have something else in mind? (If so, feel free to change.) (And yes, let's continue the conversation in one place - here.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:25, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
That looks good to me. Let's see if it works: WP:EITW-access. Yes, it does. I'm not too concerned about the EITW versus EI issue for now, although in the long run I'm sure a lot more people will link to the Editor's index, and thus in a rational world the index should deserve the shortest shortcut. That's probably worth negotiating with whoever might have an interest in the existing WP:EI shortcut. --Teratornis 21:36, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
I added a {{R from shortcut}} to your shortcut page. --Teratornis 21:49, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. I changed (via a move) the shortcut slightly: WP:EITW-Access ("A" is capitalized). And I'll put on my "to-do" list a request to the creator of WP:EI to relinquish that shortcut. (Just checked; he/she has edited exactly twice, on 8 August, in the past 60 days; but I'll see what I can do.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:24, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

(undent)Given the number of shortcuts you will be making specifically for the index, we (you) might want to make another category and template for them, such as "R from index shortcut", rather than use {{R from shortcut}} which would mingle your shortcuts with many others. That way if you move the editor's index, you can update all your shortcuts with a bot more easily. Also, I would like to move this discussion from here to User talk:John Broughton/Editor's Index to Wikipedia, perhaps into more than one section, so we document the development history of this new feature in the appropriate place. --Teratornis 18:58, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Possibly relevant to the WP:EITW - WP:EI shortcut appropriation, there is a Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion page where we might discuss it. You probably already knew this, but I thought I'd mention it for the record. Speaking of the existing WP:EI shortcut, it doesn't have too many backlinks at the moment: Special:Whatlinkshere/WP:EI, so if we moved WP:EI to something like WP:INTEGRITY there wouldn't be a lot to fix. --Teratornis 23:47, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
I've posted a request at the talk page of the creator of WP:EI, asking if he/she has any objections to our using that redirect for other purposes. However, I'm not optimistic that the editor will actually reply - he/she seems to have (more or less) left the project about two months ago.
Looking at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion, the August 29th discussion for Wp:table seems somewhat similar to what we're discussing, although I'm still inclined to be bold and simply change the four old links to WP:EI to point to something else (I was thinking of WP:EdIn). Let's wait two weeks and see if anything happens, then decide.
Which brings up the matter of mixed case in shortcuts. Perhaps both that and the idea of having a separate R template (I'm not sure how many major topics are in the index - 100? certainly no more than 200) should be raised (separately?), at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:34, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
It's amazing how complicated this stuff gets.
  • I see nothing about letter case in shortcuts in Wikipedia:Shortcuts, which strikes me as a rather glaring omission. Personally, I like all-uppercase shortcuts because that distinguishes them from ordinary page titles in a real namespace. (I'm a little uncomfortable with something that looks like a namespace prefix, but isn't really, and making the whole thing uppercase gives a visual cue that something fishy is going on. But I could see in the case of shortcuts to the index, these will have three or more parts, and the last bit could be in mixed case.)
  • Wikipedia talk:Shortcut#Reason for ALL CAPS? at least brings up the issue, but the discussion isn't what I would call enlightening.
  • A separate template and category would be useful if you ever end up needing to run a bot on all the index shortcuts (and I think there may be some chance you would). As far as the number of shortcuts, I think even 100 would be enough to justify a separate category and template, but that's just my opinion. Wikipedia's category pages only display 200 links at a time, and that seems to be like an implicit suggestion about the granularity we should aim for. Also, as time goes on, we would expect the number of major headings and shortcuts to grow, as more people add more stuff to the index. Wikipedia keeps getting larger and more complicated, there are more tools, and so on. I can only see the numbers going up, so it would be better to plan for growth instead of having to struggle later to split up crowded categories and re-tag a bunch of shortcut pages.
--Teratornis 18:50, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for doing the research you did; interesting.
I'm happy to propose a separate template, but I don't think it's critical - a bot could simply sweep through all the WP:EI redirects and change whatever. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:29, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Make our own shortcut prefix?

I thought about this some more, and I'm wondering if making our own shortcut prefix would be useful. Then instead of (or, possibly, in addition to) shortcut names such as: WP:EITW-Access we could have: WPEI:Access, or even: EI:Access.

  • A compact shortcut such as EI:Access would be easier to type on the fly than WP:EITW-Access. This would be handy when one is typing a reference to a topic heading in the index without actually looking it up first.
  • If an editor is actually looking at the {{shortcut}} box in the index, and will copy and paste a shortcut, the length of the shortcut is less important.
  • Using our own prefix would help to distinguish our shortcuts, without requiring a separate redirect template and category.

See: WP:SHORT#List of prefixes. --Teratornis 01:42, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

I just noticed that using our own shortcut prefix would allow us to list them automatically from a link like this:
[[Special:Prefixindex/EI:|EI:]]
--Teratornis 01:59, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Of course that also works for: WP:EITW. --Teratornis 02:01, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Again, a stellar analysis. I think it's clear that EI:Topic would be ideal. What's less clear (to me) is what's involved in creating a new pseudo-namespace. Do we need to ask permission? Get an admin or developer to take some specific action? Can we just do it?
In any case, it's pretty trivial to do an en masse change from WP:EI-Topic to EI:Topic, or vice-versa, so I'm going to go ahead and set up the shortcuts (in the index, not as actual shortcuts) with EI:Topic, the preferred approach. I'd like to wait until the shortcuts are in the index before we address the issue of actually making them operational. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:08, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
Creating a pseudo-namespace appears to be a "virtual" operation, in the sense that there is nothing to "create." Anyone who can make a new page can give it a title that contains a colon character, and then we call everything to the left of the colon a pseudo-namespace. Therefore, anyone who can create a new page can also create a new pseudo-namespace ("can" insofar as having the necessary privilege from the software; I don't know if any convention or guideline would restrict what a person should do). Of course, the pseudo-namespace name must not be an existing namespace name, nor an existing interwiki link name. I just realized there is an unfortunate visual similarity between EI: (E capital eye) and the existing interlanguage link to the Greek Wikipedia, El: (E lowercase ell) - I don't know whether this would impact us. Using EIW: as our pseudo-namespace should eliminate possible confusion with an interlanguage link, given that most of the interlanguage link prefixes have two letters, and those with three or or more end in a lowercase letter.
Can we "just do it"? The conservative approach would be to track down the creators of existing pseudo-namespaces such as MOS:, and ask them if they had to do anything special to create theirs. For example, the history of the MOS: shortcut goes back only a little more than one year. In any case, here we have what seems like another glaring omission, in that sections like Wikipedia:Namespace#Pseudo-namespaces and Wikipedia:Shortcut#List of prefixes say nothing about any procedure for proposing and creating new pseudo-namespaces. However, the reason for these omissions may be that the sections in question appeared just last year. Once we clarify the procedure we should update those sections. --Teratornis 18:03, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
I will edit a question on Wikipedia talk:Namespace about the procedure for creating a new pseudo-namespace, if any. My reading of that talk page suggests that either nobody has articulated such a procedure, or the people who commented on that page are not aware of one. --Teratornis 01:37, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. I'm going to change the proposal to show EIW rather than EI; this has the advantages of not conflicting with the existing WP:EI shortcut, and the pseudonamespace of EIW is similar to MOS (three characters). -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:19, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

(undent) I posted a question at: Wikipedia talk:Namespace#Procedure for creating a new pseudo-namespace? The initial responses only seem to indicate that my first phrasing of the question was hard to understand. There is no reply yet to my follow-up attempt to clarify my question. --Teratornis 00:09, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Note: the final comment there was as follows: (-- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:15, 13 September 2007 (UTC))
(I am not a developer/code-guru, but) That should be fine. Tagging them with {{R from shortcut}} will place them in category:Unprintworthy redirects, so there aren't any mainspace-overlap issues. As nobody has objected, I'd say you can just do it. :) --Quiddity 18:46, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Proposed approach

  • Each major topic in the index will have both an anchor and a shortcut.
  • Anchors are intended for internal links (see or see also), shortcuts for external (incoming) links. (Of course, anchors can be used for incoming links, but they're not as convenient, and more problematical to change).
  • The format for shortcuts will be EIW:Topic
  • The format for anchors will be <span="Topic">. (Implication: I'm abandoning the six-character approach, intending instead to have anchors and shortcuts use exactly the same character string.)
  • When the "natural" name of a major topic is not reasonably short (I'm thinking of six to seven characters maximum), I'm going to use a camel-case combination; for example, perhaps EIW:AfDetc for the major topic on deleting of articles. Suggestions for such ad hoc names are welcome (feel free just to make the edit, rather than post a suggestion).

* A separate template will be requested at Wikipedia:Requested templates, which will give the community a chance to comment on this new approach. (If the EIW prefix is used for redirects, they'll be separate enough from WP: redirects to not need a new template, I think. Opinion?)

  • Shortcuts will be added en masse at the same time as the anchors are revised; the shortcuts will be redlinks for a while (they'll still be useful because one can see the anchor for a major topic without having to go into edit mode). I'll request a bot to assist in creating these pages (I'll set up a separate page with a list of redirects to be created; having the anchors and shortcuts contain the same text string will make it possible to have a bot set up the redirects.) My goal is to do the en masse changes by the end of September.
  • If at all possible, the shortcuts will be EIW-Topic rather than WP:EIW-Topic or (worst) WP:EITW-Topic. The goal is to implement WP:EIW as the main shortcut to the index by mid-October, and have (bot-assisted) shortcuts that point to the major topics implemented by the end of October.
  • After the shortcuts have been implemented, I'd like to go back and change all the external (incoming) links on other pages that use anchors, changing the wikilinks to use shortcuts instead. Then I'll clean up the page by removing all the three-character anchors.
  • I expect to be doing a fairly thorough "conceptual review" of the index over the next two months, which will almost certainly result in tweaking a lot of subtopics, and may result in changes to a few major topics as well. Once that is done (that is, sometime in November), I'd like to move this index into Wikipedia namespace. (Note: the new title should be "Editor's index to Wikipedia" - the "i" in "index" is lowercase.)

-- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:29, 1 September 2007 (UTC) updated: -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:25, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

To answer the request for an opinion about the sufficiency of the EIW: pseudo-namespace prefix for distinguishing the index shortcuts, when I first suggested the possibility of making another template for index shortcuts, I imagined them being in the WP: pseudo-namespace, crowded in with all the other shortcut redirects there. Then when I realized making our own shortcut prefix would make more sense, the need for a separate template declined considerably (in my opinion). You might still want to make a separate template someday, but at the moment I can't think of a screaming need for one, since we appear poised to use our own EIW: pseudo-namespace prefix. --Teratornis 20:46, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
I also suggest using underscores rather than spaces in anchor names. Evidently MediaWiki converts a tag such as: <span id="Talk p"/> in the wikitext to: <span id="Talk_p"/> in the rendered HTML of a page. For example, WP:EIW#Talk_p works. (Thus we don't end up with ugly %20 percent-encoded triplets in the resulting URL.) However, I would prefer to have underscores in the span id values in the wikitext, just to avoid possibly confusing people about what the eventual URL is going to be, since not everyone may know that MediaWiki converts spaces to underscores in span tag id values just as it does in wikilinks. (I did not know that, until just now.) --Teratornis 17:31, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
The current six-character anchors, some of which contain blank spaces, are going to have a very short life, I hope; in fact, fixing those may be a good off-line project while I'm traveling next week. I'm going use replace them with longer (or shorter) anchors, keeping the three and four-character anchors for a while, until I can completely transition to the new anchors that will match the shortcuts. Or so I plan. I'll make sure that none of the new anchors have blank spaces (thanks). -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:10, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

(undent) I just had one of those "Oh, duh!" moments. I was looking at Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not again to see how that page implements its shortcuts. While the page does have lots of separate redirect pages that link to sections on the page (such as: WP:IINFO and WP:INDISCRIMINATE), it also has lots of shortcuts that append name anchors to the same redirect page (such as: WP:NOT#FAQ and WP:NOT#LYRICS). The WP:NOT redirect itself has no knowledge of those name anchors; they are all completely within the What Wikipedia is not page itself, in the form of <span id="name" /> tags, and calls to the {{policy shortcut}} template. Thus there is no real need for us to create a huge number of redirect pages to link to individual name anchors in the Editor's index. We can just append the name anchors already in the index to the WP:EIW shortcut, in our calls to the {{shortcut}} template. I don't know why I did not realize this earlier when we were discussing the problem. You suggested using name-anchor shortcuts in #Redirects/Shortcuts:

I must not have realized at the time that both of those shortcuts use the same WP:EI redirect page (we could use that, or the WP:EIW redirect, which I prefer, to avoid possible confusion with other two-letter codes). Obviously the name-anchor method eliminates the hassle of creating a huge number of separate redirects via a bot or by hand. --Teratornis (talk) 20:36, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I added shortcuts from letters A through T. I will finish the remaining letters later. I noticed a problem with the {{Shortcut}} template on second-level list items. (Not many second-level items have name anchors, but some do, and some are very useful for answering questions on the Help desk.) The template appears to cause a second-level name anchor to appear with two bullets to its left, rather than only one indented bullet. I left a question on Template talk:Shortcut#Double-bullet problem in lists. A brute-force solution might be to use HTML lists, but that would require massive reformatting of the index, so that does not seem practical. I will try to find a solution that fits in one line. --Teratornis (talk) 23:25, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
I found what I think is a solution to the double-bullet problem; see my addition to the template discussion. I'll wait for some feedback from the other template experts who are following that discussion before I make a new shortcut template that should work on list sub-items. --Teratornis (talk) 17:23, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
It looks like the underlying cause was a software change (bug), which has been fixed; I've put the shortcuts for subtopics back on the subtopic heading lines. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:59, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Possible changes

  • Wikipedia:List of base pages in the Wikipedia namespace might be worth adding to the to do list. (it was made in March 2007). --Quiddity 17:23, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
    • Thanks. I think that was once on my to-do list, but I took it off because it contains a lot of pages that are rather obscure (for example, there were, as of about a month ago, over 500 pages in Wikipedia namespace that were categorized as essays, and presumably a lot more that no one put the "Essay" tag onto). In general, I think I've done a pretty good job of finding the pages in Wikipedia namespace that other editors already cite (and therefore, presumably, are useful), and don't have the time to look through haystacks looking for needles. (If you know of any that are missing from the index, please feel free to add them directly.)
    • Plus, unfortunately, while the page was made in March 2007, it says that it is from a database dump of February 2006. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:31, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Citation templates?

Should probably be included under the "formatting" part of sources (mostly category:Citation templates and Wikipedia:Citation templates). Circeus 20:04, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Not sure I understand. I've added the first link (thanks!) to the same part of the index where the second link already was. That seems to me to be the right place, but perhaps I don't understand your suggestion. If you still think the two links could be in a better place, the best thing to do would be to move them yourself; then I'll clearly understand what you're getting at, and can better make a decision about the matter. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:32, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
My idiocy: I couldn't find the link the first time around. Circeus 01:19, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
Be sure to try Ctrl-F keyword search in your browser if you don't find something where you expect it to be in the index. Some items may have several possible headings, but because the index is not paper, and is therefore searchable, an item does not need to appear under every possible heading. A number of items might not be where I would have thought to place them, but it doesn't matter as long as I can find them with a keyword search. --Teratornis 04:46, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Amazing

This editor's index is absolutely brilliant! But I think this should be made more official. Moving this to a "Wikipedia:" page and having a link in the main page might be a good idea. --ざくら木 11:59, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

See #Proposed approach above. We still need to load the index up with shortcuts. Then eventually it will move to the Project: (Wikipedia:) namespace. --Teratornis 04:49, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
John, Teratornis, EIW is a wonderful resource but it's been three months already and this is still in John's userspace. May I please move the page out of userspace? You could still later do as much improvement as you want but IMO it'd be great to release this index to a wider audience.  :) --unforgettableid | talk 13:42, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Kudos

Nice work Mr. Broughton! Mike R (talk) 17:09, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

All I can say is--Wow. Just wow. Elf | Talk 03:23, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks

First, John, thanks again for making this wonderful resource. Also, thanks for moving it out of userspace. Now far more people will notice it.  :)

P.S. I moved all the old talk content to here so people will be able to see it and continue the threads. Cheers, --unforgettableid | talk 17:44, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Some new suggestions

IRC section

I was looking over the IRC section, and I realised that Geogre's essay is there. His is probably the best of the lot at Category:User essays on IRC, but I was wondering what the threshold is regarding the other ones there. How are pages like Wikipedia:IRC channels/Personal views regarding IRC handled here?

What gets included in the Index is always a judgment call - too many entries makes it difficult to find the most valuable content, too few means that valuable content is accessible only via listed entry. I'm going to add both the links you provided; the category page in particular lets editors know that there are other essays to look at if that's of particular interest.
There is some guidance as to what should and shouldn't be in the Index at Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia/About, as you probably know, but for borderline cases, it does come down to judgment. (One somewhat objective criteria is to check What links here; few links indicates a relatively unknown/unused page; still, that's often not critical for newer pages or pages covering a less-discussed topic.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:56, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
Late reply: my personal threshold of what belongs here is whatever I need to answer questions on the Help desk. However, the converse is not a threshold for what to exclude from the index, since the index is easy to search with Ctrl+F. Currently the size of the index is (probably) not a problem for users, although editing can become harder since we edit at the granularity of a single letter. If individual letters begin accumulating so many entries that they become difficult to edit, it might be time to consider subdividing some of the popular letters into subsections. --Teratornis (talk) 23:24, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Featured article writing essays

Not yet finished, but where would something like User:Giano/A fool's guide to writing a featured article go? Similarly, I noticed that User:Tony1/How to satisfy Criterion 1a is missing, although the redundancy exercises are linked. User:Yomangan/A bastard's guide to writing a featured article is a bit less serious.

I've added the first two links to the "Featured content" topic. As for the third, I've generally not added humorous pages to the Index (and I'm updating the /About page to discuss why not). -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:13, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Subpages

What is the approach to subpages here? Ones like Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Completed requests are very useful, but theoretically people can access them from the main one linked here. There are probably many other examples of subpages that are not well known.

I'm also trying to organise some of the Wikipedia namespace history pages better. I note Wikipedia:History_of_Wikipedian_processes_and_people and Category:Wikipedia history, but would that be all that would be added here? Carcharoth (talk) 17:13, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Subpages are again a judgment call. Partly it's whether there is a logical place to look for certain information, and partly it's whether a reader, when browsing a topic, might say (if a subpage were listed) "that's interesting - I'll just click on that link". Another factor is whether there are a lot of similar subpages that go under the same topic; if so, I'd lean in the direction of including none at all.
In the case of Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Completed requests, I think experienced editors who already know about the Arbitration Committee in general might want to go directly to that page, so I've added it. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:29, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
Another factor to consider with subpages is "searchability." Someone who does not know a subpage exists might serendipitously find it with a Ctrl-F search, but only if the subpage title appears in the Index. Thus I personally favor a large index, since having more entries provides more search targets. However, if a subpage title does not add useful search keywords not in the parent page title (e.g. distinct jargon terms that a searcher might have seen somewhere), then it does not usefully expand the search target size. Of course this is hard to judge because we can never predict all the search keywords people will try. But the basic rule I suggest is, include the subpage name if its title contains keywords that a person might use to find that subpage even if that person does not use any keywords in the parent page title. That's a roundabout way of saying a subpage belongs here if some users are likely to miss the parent page altogether. I.e., not everybody comes here knowing what they are looking for, and able to browse alphabetically directly to it. --Teratornis (talk) 19:58, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Suggested entry

I wonder if you people would like to have the new how-to guide Wikipedia:Line break handling in this index?

I noticed you have a topic named after a word I created here at Wikipedia: "ambox". I feel honoured. :))

--David Göthberg (talk) 01:22, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

In response to the question, (a) definitely yes (nice guide), and (b) "you people" is actually "all the editors here" - while I monitor the index (and this page, less so), I'm not the owner, because, of course, there is none. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 13:36, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
(a) Ah, thanks. (b) Well, I just discovered this index so I had no "feel" for it yet, but it seems very nice! And it is already huge. And I know I am not objective since I wrote that Wikipedia:Line break handling how-to guide myself. And I had already "advertised" it in lots of places. So I wanted someone else to have a look and take the decision.
--David Göthberg (talk) 14:04, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

ONUS vs. NoONUS

These two essays are kind of a set. Of course, I didn't submit JzG's article to MfD, as I am, after all, an anti-deletionist, but it was rejected as a policy/guideline (violates WP:PRESERVE, imo). I strongly feel either they should both be here, or both should go and would be happy either way. -- Kendrick7talk 05:02, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Kendrick - One of the two is marked as a failed proposal, and is in projectspace; there are lots and lots of such failed proposals listed in the index. The other is an essay in userspace; there are very, very few of these in the index; the ones that are listed have lots of links to them (that is, are often mentioned), as, for example User:Uncle G/On notability (more than 500 incoming links). So I don't see this as a matter of symmetry at all. Nor is this approach new - Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia/About mentions both failed proposals and userspace essays, and was written well before this issue arose. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 13:20, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
Your link says most failed proposals aren't listed here. Seems like a case of el caballo del malo to me if it's simply a matter of counting incoming links. Not to mention a Catch-22: pro-deletionists get anti-deletionist essays deleted or userfied, while anti-deletions, by their nature, do not, no matter how wrong-headed a pro-deletionist essay might be. But whatever -- from what I've seen, people "citing" the WP:ONUS essay aren't really using it the way it was intended, which is as an argument to exclude "unpopular" content which otherwise meets our policy requirements (WP:RS, WP:V, etc.), but instead as part of an argument to exclude content which doesn't meet our requirements anyway (patent nonsense, and other invalid content already covered by WP:PRESERVE). -- Kendrick7talk 19:31, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Editor's index to Commons

Lately I've been playing around on Commons, and I noted with some pain that Commons has no Editor's index like the one here. I've gotten so I can hardly function on a wiki without an index, so I've been trying to port our index technology over there. This is like revisiting all the problems we had with shortcut templates and so on. See:

Hopefully in a few weeks I will have something decent enough to move to the Commons: namespace on Commons and turn loose for everyone to edit. I'm thinking the other Wikimedia Foundation wikis may have a similar structure in (some of) their internal document pages, and thus we can (somewhat efficiently) duplicate the relevant parts of the highly-developed index structure from here. That's far easier than re-thinking everything from scratch. --Teratornis (talk) 23:53, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

commons:Commons:Editor's index to Commons has been live for a while. It still needs work, but already it is useful for answering questions on the Commons Help desk. --Teratornis (talk) 23:16, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

New random link tool

I added an improved version of Protein's user script for following a random link on the page. (Long diversion after needing this tool to better test some hyphens-to-dashes code that I'm tuning.) I spent a lot of time tuning it so it works well on all list pages (e.g., categories, contribs, recent, history, allpages, specials, watchlist), in addition to regular pages. I didn't boldly remove his tool, though I'm not aware of any advantages of it. His pops up a confirm and opens in a new window; mine silently uses the same window, though you can configure it to open in a new window. —GregU (talk) 16:52, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

I've now enhanced my tool so that it can also go to a random page in a specified category, list, special page, or WikiProject, among other things. I removed the now-redundant original tool. —GregU (talk) 00:38, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Redlinks

I've noticed a couple of redlinks in the index. Is it aceptable to just remove those from the list?Colincbn (talk) 09:34, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it's okay to remove any redlinks; in fact, this is highly advisable. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:31, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Idea: renaming this to "Wikipedia:Editors' index" to remove redundancy and improve apostrophe placement

Hi John and Teratornis,

Thanks again for your work on your excellent resources. I think we should rename the Wikipedia index for editors to "Wikipedia:Editors' index", and the Commons index for editors to "Commons:Editors' index".

  • These names are less redundant. Now that the Wikipedia index for editors is in Wikipedia: space instead of userspace, there's no need to repeat the word "Wikipedia" later in the article title.
  • These names seem to me to be more grammatically correct. But I don't have much formal grammar training, except what I learned in Grade 10 English class long ago. Really, you should talk with someone who knows more about grammar, like an English teacher, to hear a more informed viewpoint.

What do you think? Also, to those who are quite knowledgeable in grammar: what do you think? When you make your points about grammar, please either tell us where you've studied grammar, or cite a source. :)

Let's centralize the discussion here, instead of letting some of the debate be on the talk page of the Commons index for editors. That way we can make one shared decision about grammar and one shared decision about repeating the project name. It'd be confusing to have different naming conventions for the Wikipedia index and the Commons index. Only at the end, once we've made a decision, should we summarize our decision on the talk page there.

Cheers, --unforgettableid | talk 16:12, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

  • The grammar would only be incorrect if you decide the word "editor" should be plural in the title. But why? Many similar expressions in English use a singular possessive noun. Fireman's ladder, Bishop's Mitre, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, etc. When Douglas Adams wrote the word "Hitchhiker's", by no means did he imply that only one hitchhiker exists. Rather, the reader may understand this to refer to a book about which one might say, "If you are hitchhiking through the galaxy, this is your guide." Hundreds if not thousands of Wikipedia editors have used the Editor's index without being troubled by the title, so I see no point in changing it. It is not wrong, it is consistent with common English usage, and it does not degrade the usefulness of the index (the index is a tool, after all).
  • There is still a need for the word "Wikipedia" in the title, because there are many editable things besides Wikipedia which a Wikipedia editor might edit, such as for example maps, SVG files, diagrams, etc. It is conceivable that some of them could have their own indices someday, since there is (or could be) much documentation about how to draw maps for example. The Wikipedia: namespace name does not eliminate the need for the word "Wikipedia" in a page title, in part because the Project: prefix is synonymous (e.g. Project:Editor's index to Wikipedia). Many pages in the Wikipedia: namespace have the word "Wikipedia" in their titles. Some examples:
  • If you don't like the current title, you can create redirects to it.
There are many far more pressing problems on Wikipedia. See WP:BACKLOG. --Teratornis (talk) 00:25, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Shortcut link point

Why does the WP:EIW#Layout, which is coded above the "Layout and sections: (see also Table of contents) (for layout of the standard Wikipedia page, see Customization)" line, bring the clicking editor to just below that that line? Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 14:13, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

I don't know. I've posted a note at User talk:Teratornis, since that editor is the expert on this template. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:41, 19 November 2012 (UTC)
I think I noticed odd behavior from shortcut links back when I was originally fiddling with {{Shortcut compact}}, but I'm not seeing a problem with the WP:EIW#Layout link now. My Firefox browser displays the line and its shortcut box at the top of the screen, as it should. --Teratornis (talk) 00:39, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Best kept secret in Wikipedia project namespace. Time to get the word out.

I've been (officially) editing Wikipedia for what, 2 years, 4 months, and 25 days – and just now I first notice this most excellent index? Heck, I even ran into Wikipedia:Utilities, its grandparent nost:Wikipedia utilities and its successor Wikipedia:Topical index before I found this. I'll help make edits to give this resource the exposure it deserves. – Wbm1058 (talk) 21:18, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

  • Wikipedia:Topical index redirect: Portal:Contents/Categories → Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia  Done (Wikipedia talk:Topical index has an interesting history of the indexing of the Wikipedia project "utilities", from before there even was a Wikipedia namespace) – Wbm1058 (talk) 22:08, 7 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Added a link from Wikipedia:Project namespace  Done – Wbm1058 (talk) 20:37, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
    • @Wbm1058: - Thanks for helping get the word out. The index has fallen a bit out of date (it's rather amazing, to me, how much goes on "behind the scenes", all the time, that I want to capture in the Index), and I am planning - if I at least mostly work my way through my backlog - of suggesting a short Signpost item, precisely for editors who weren't around when this was initially publicized in 2008. Also thanks for the pointer to Wikipedia talk:Topical index. It failed, I'm guessing, for the same reason that my initial attempt at sorting links into a sort of user guide failed - because it's impossible to organize an index based on a tree approach (one person's category scheme is not obvious to another person), and doubly impossible if you can't put the same entry into multiple places. The secret to scalability of an index, it turns out, is making the top level be alphabetical entries. That, and the trusty web page search function, takes care of grouping issues (what to clump/put as subsections) and avoids the problem of excessive rigidity of categories. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 05:06, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
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