Wikipedia talk:Most-wanted articles

Most viewed redlinks

It seems to 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.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Nroose (talk • contribs) 03:42, January 16, 2004 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

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).

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)

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)

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)

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)

Another reason for confusion is the fact that people create obscene links that spoil ones absolute exquisite taste for knowledge

Suggestions for improvement

(Moved from article page)

1. Count multiple links from the same template due to transclusion. -- Beland 9 July 2005 01:09 (UTC)
2. Some articles with non-ASCII and non-alphanumerical names are improperly included. (Removed manually for now.) -- Beland 08:09, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
3. One suggestion to count by number of linking pages, not counting multiple links on the same page: -- Beland 15:21, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
   1. I think the number of linking pages should be the relevant count, not the number of links. As you can see in the example I gave, that number may be highly variable depending on subject. It seems that sports articles particularly tend to have multiple links in the same document, whereas in science articles, I've very rarely seen it. Hence some kinds of articles would be created at a higher rate than others, resulting in an asymmetric growth of wikipedia. I think this is a bad thing (TM). - Samsara 17:42, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
      1. Or the script that generates the link count could also give the number of linking pages. Something like: (26 links from 4 pages) — RJH 23:14, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
         1. I think this should be done as soon as possible. Some of the articles with the highest number links are only linked to from a handful of articles. Also, sometimes there is a large number of articles linking to the page, but they are not what I would consider the most important, like a minor cast member linked from every episode page and repetitive list articles (often there is an article for each year). While they would probably not show up so frequently if they weren't somewhat notable/important, their apparent importance relative to other topics is skewed. -- Kjkolb 22:05, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
4. Try to automatically sort by topic, based on the categories that the link-from articles are in. -- Beland 20:58, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
   1. I think this is a good idea. It would also be good to make the list longer, as I don't see any articles in the areas that I am interested in, such as science, energy and technology. It looks like the majority are biographies, with most of the rest being sports teams, buildings/stadiums, schools and companies. -- Kjkolb 22:05, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
      1. The list was actually 500 entries long but some 250 were blue. I suppose the script was run on a slightly old version of the database which is why many of the entries from the december run were included. Celcius ^(Talk) Wiki be With us! 01:47, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

NOTE: I have incorporated many of the above requested features into the list created from the most recent database dump, which I am about to post to the article page. --Sapphic 19:14, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

When to remove bluelinks?

I made some recent changes to the page (mostly additions to the "how to help" section) and was stuck on whether to suggest that people remove bluelinks from the list. I can see it going either way. On the one hand, it cleans up the lists and makes them shorter. On the other hand, some people have their stub display preferences set such that the bluelinks are more informative to them. We also might want to encourage people to get articles listed here up to start (or better) class before we take them off the list. What do you think? --Sapphic 01:10, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Since nobody else seems to care about this issue (at least not enough to comment), I'll go ahead and unilaterally decide that it's okay to remove bluelinks. If anybody disagrees, feel free to start the discussion here. --Sapphic 17:03, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

I just deleted a few before I saw this talk, so it's a good thing your unilateral decision was in my favor! Hehe. --Segaba 22:26, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

I was going to suggest strikeout text so that the item is still on the list but others know it's been taken care of, then I saw this item on the Project Page regarding removal of completed items.--CheMechanical 21:10, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Swedish football

The various entries that include AIF, IF, IFK or IK all appear to be Swedish football clubs. Can they be moved to the Football sub-section? — RJH (talk) 16:33, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Done. — RJH (talk) 19:57, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requests for verification

Please see: Wikipedia:Requests for verification

A proposal designed as a process similar to {{prod}} to delete articles without sources if no sources are provided in 30 days.

It reads:

Some editors see this as necessary to improve Wikipedia as a whole and assert that this idea is supported by policy, and others see this as a negative thing for the project with the potential of loss of articles that could be easily sourced.

I would encourage your comments in that page's talk or Mailing list thread on this proposal WikiEN-l: Proposed "prod" for articles with no sources

Signed Jeepday (talk) 14:10, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Astronomy links

Many, if not most, of the desired astronomy links are references to amateur astronomy observatories. It might make more sense to consolidate and/or link these references to the Minor Planet Center page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_Planet_Center), since that is the organization where all such discoveries are officially recognized and cataloged. The official web site for the Minor Planet Center can be found here: http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/iau/mpc.html (or just go to the wiki and follow the link from there.)

Deadend411 01:10, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Readability

Is there a way to get rid of the underscores? Doing so would make this list much easier to read. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 12:50, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

 Done Tra (Talk) 20:18, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Invert the stats

It would be much more useful if the numerical stats were inverted, e.g. "22 articles (37 links)"; it is the article count that matters, not the link count. Also, having the list sorted by the article count would be much more helpful. (No criticism intended; the fact that this list exists at all is a great boon). — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 12:52, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

I am (finally!) almost done testing the latest version of my processing script, and will be updating the lists within the next few days. I'll invert the stats as you requested, unless somebody else presents opposing argument here before then. Also, no criticism inferred. :) --Sapphic 20:16, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Update from 2007-09-08 data

I am preparing to update the page using the output of my processing script run on the 2007-09-08 database (XML) dump. The format of the data has changed, so that it inverts the order of the article count and link count (as requested above), and also so it provides an indication of how the two counts have changed (or not) since the last update. A timestamp is also provided on a per-entry basis, to indicate whether this is a previously existing entry that has been updated, or if it is a completely new listing. Only requested articles with 20 or more articles linking to them are listed, since this seemed to provide a reasonable number of listed items. This cutoff can be adjusted as needed for future updates. I'll be updating each sub-list individually, and then doing some cleanup work. Once I'm through, I'll report back here. --Sapphic 16:33, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

I am done updating now. I've pruned the 'Uncategorized' section so that it's only about 1000 entries now. It could probably stand to be broken down into more sub-lists. --Sapphic 17:20, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Page Missing Update

The page is gone and no text is showing. Someone messed with it. Please help. Thanks ---Washington Public School System 02:01, 17 October 2007 (UTC).

Jockeys

Can we sort all the horse jockeys out from the bio list, the way the tennis players are? I stubbed out a few of there, but I'm starting to feel like I'm cleaning out a stall here. -- Kendrick7^talk 22:28, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

You should feel free to break the lists into more specific sub-lists, however you see fit. The creation of sub-lists is an entirely manual process, so any help is appreciated. --Sapphic (talk) 20:53, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Bangladesh

Is it possible to have an automated "most wanted articles" listing for Wikipedia:WikiProject Bangladesh? Bangladesh related articles are still pretty few in number, and so is the number of active editors interested in them. This will be enormously useful in channeling there efforts to the most wanted area. It will also act as a beginning of a new step in project collaboration, especially the biggest and smallest projects with wide scopes. Cheers. Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 13:52, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, there isn't any practical way to do that at the moment. The lists on this page are divided into categories after the list of most wanted articles has been generated. The scripts used to update the lists can only determine which articles are most wanted, and the categorization is done by humans. The "see also" section of the project page lists other pages where you can request articles on specific topic. --Sapphic (talk) 20:51, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Merge Possibly unwanted articles

I am suggesting a merge and redirect from Wikipedia:WikiProject Red Link Recovery/Possibly unwanted to Wikipedia:Most wanted articles#Possibly unwanted articles. Both list contain the same articles and have the same needs and requirements. It seems that recently [[Wikipedia:Most wanted articles#Possibly unwanted articles]] has received more attention and more periodic updates, based on that I am suggesting it as the primary area for coordinating work on these articles. Jeepday (talk) 17:23, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Melina Yuros

Cantante(1978 - )cantante de música popular argentina.Comenzó cantando tango y folclore luego de abandonar la carrera de Psicología. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Melinatempe (talk • contribs) 15:19, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

8 September 2007

Since the entire list is from the 8th of septembers database dump is there a need to have it written down after every link? I think how it says at the top that "this list is from the 8th of september database dump" is sufficient rather than saying it after every line? Maybe the bot that handles this list should be modified to not include the date after every link?

Cheers!Calaka (talk) 09:33, 12 May 2008 (UTC).