[Wikipedia-l] Changes and suggestions (was Re: slight change to the announce-l list)

Mon Mar 31 09:52:20 UTC 2003

On 30 Mar 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Sat, 2003-03-29 at 23:52, Anthere wrote:
> > 1. Was the count system for pages changed ? If it was,
> > when was it ? When it is changed, could it be
> > announced on the "announced list" please ? It will
> > also need to be made obvious on the stats pages
>
> The official vote results were to count pages in article space that are:
> * not completely empty (size greater than 0 bytes)
> * contain at least one link (search for "[[" should do)
>
> Unless someone else snuck it in and forgot to tell me, the change has
> not yet been put in effect, as I'm a lazy, grumpy bastard and way way
> too busy of late. :)

Well, I did notice that the article count for Japanese has skyrocketed
(from 251 to 3337 in two weeks); I thought this was because of the new
counting method. If not, the Japanese are to be congratulated on their
productivity.

> > 4. Could we slightly improve the search box, maybe by
> > having a drop down menu aside from it : search in
> > encyclopedia by default as right now, search in
> > personnal pages, search in meta pages...but have it at
> > first level, not on a second page, after a first
> > unfruitful search.
>
> Yes, that would be lovely.

I agree.

> > So, since others protest and undelete the
> > redirections, some asked if it would be possible to
> > somehow catch mispellings, redirect the mispelled
> > title to the right-spelled page, *and* dynamically
> > display a message at the top of the article saying
> > "you asked for "fachisme", this word does not exist,
> > and is probably a mispelling of "fascisme".
>
> It has in the past been suggested to have a special type of redirect for
> misspellings. These could have a "you're an illiterate idiot, from now
> on please type 'X'" message display when visited or searched, but be
> hidden from lists like the Allpages list or general search results.
>
> Would that be a help?

Please do not use this kind of message - in most cases the person ending up
on a misspelled page is NOT the one who MADE the misspelling, just the one
who READ it.

Andre Engels