Wikipedia:Phase II feature requests/Top priorities

This page is obsolete!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. '

Top priorities: really important features we still don't have

Search

A 'power search' page. For example, a search for 'demon' will list all pages that use the word 'demonstrate' (case-insensitive substring match?). That's okay now, but as the wikipedia grows the lists of false matches will get longer and more searches will be affected by it. A power search would provide options for boolean expressions, exact-phrase, case-sensitivity, etc. --Atlas_2091
- I second that motion. Attempts to outsource
  See also : Feature requestsOddlyCapitalized links would be helped greatly by a case-sensitive search, so one does not, for instance, have to search through 149 pages with the word "liberal" looking for the ones that are printed
  
  See also : Feature requestsLiberaL. Of course, the point is moot if 0.92 will include tools to rename pages (and references to them) automatically. --KQ
- A regexp-like search option might be handy...
- I would like the search to return those pages more prominently whose title matches the search string. First give me the title matches, then the article body matches.
- Searches currently turn up only the exact phrase entered, which should probably be one option among many. For an example why, search for
  See also : Feature requests"John A. MacDonald," "John A MacDonald," "John MacDonald," "John D Macdonald," and "John D. MacDonald."
Since I have forgotten what happened in the far past (more than the time that shows up in recent changes) I want other ways to look for articles:
Articles sorted by inverse date (show oldest first) - just so I can do a sanity check on things that might have been overlooked.

Articles sorted by number of revisions (lowest first} - If it never got revised, it probably needs work unless Larry wrote it. :) -- mike dill

Interface

Eventually, a feature to find non-linked mentions of pages could also be useful. --CliffordAdams
Anchors (HTML standard) to jump around in a page! Often the text shouldn´t be split but retain its flow, and yet have some navigation and structure, e.g. "contents"

Report features and automation

Similar to the What Google Likes| page and the request above: a report for pages visited most often (aside from, say, the Recent Changes and HomePage pages and other usual suspects). (So busybodies like me can know frequently-visited areas possibly wanting improvement.)
Generate and place on an automatically-generated R/O page a list of the most popular Wikipedia searches. This would encourage people to write articles specifically on those topics that people search for. --Larry Sanger
- This would probably be easiest to do outside of the wiki script by processing the server's logs.
A script to autogenerate the What Google Likes page once a day or so
There are several pages that have comments like "as of (date) we have NNN pages / MMM comma pages...". This information becomes stale pretty quickly. Would it be practical to provide a Wikipedia Statistics page that could be updated fairly often with things like page counts, web server stats, user stats, etc.? --loh (2001-06-21)

Naming conventions

Use of (at least) Latin1 characters in links and titles of pages. I can see this vexing the Anglo-American crowd, but it's truly annoying to spell your name in a faulty way, and even more so to spell historical persons wrong.
- This is already a feature of UseMod 0.92, which is currently in use by the international Wikipedias. When we get around to updating the software here as well, that will come along. --LDC

Wikipedia distribution etc.

Since the text within Wikipedia is covered by the GNU FDL there is a requirement that it be available in the most "transparent" form. I would suggest that since the publically viewable form of is HTML but the underlying dataset is stored in the wiki source form it is currently not available in a transparent form. I guess that it is possible to gather this data by using the "edit" button of all the documents and culling the information from the text field, but again this is not very transparent. Even if you do this, you still have lost the version information which could be argued to be a fundamental part of the data. Is there a plan to provide a download format from which a new copy of the data in wikipedia can be generated? -Phillip2
- At present, no plan, but we would like to do this, of course.
- I also think this would be a nice service. -- BryceHarrington

Solved

Missed searches - user searches that returned no results (from Wikipedia-L)
Articles sorted by size - so i know where the articles that need work are.
Could we move the search box higher up the screen? It is hard to find right now.
- I second that, and propose that its placement be made a user preference: top, bottom, or both. --Gimbo
Each Wikipedia page could and should have a Talk subpage why not making it default for every new page. Kpjas
- Seconded. I like the idea of making a default /Talk on each (non-sub)page.
Clicking the name of the article at the top of the page searches for occurrences of the page title on other pages, but it would be possibly more useful for that to point to a list of all the pages that link to the page in question. There doesn't seem to be any way to do that at present. --Larry Sanger
- This is likely to be added eventually, and may even become the default behavior of the page-title link. This was not much of a problem with the old WikiName links because those titles were automatically links. Now with "free links" there may be several pages that use a page title but do not link to it. --CliffordAdams
We need a way to let ordinary folks upload files to the Wikipedia server--perhaps the uploads would first have to be hand-processed, to make sure they don't carry viruses and aren't too large. But eventually, it seems to me we're going to need something like this. (Perhaps it wouldn't have to be closely integrated with UseModWiki software, though. We could just link to a Wikipedia upload page, which would run our own unique software.) --LMS
- I'm quite surprised you don't have a file uploader, actually. I can send you the one used in the WorldForge website: http://www.worldforge.org/website/tools/upload_a_file. I'd be willing to collaborate on adapting this for Wikipedia if there is interest (I will need a similar tool for work soon). -- BryceHarrington
- TWiki has the notion of adding attachements to a page that can be referenced within that page. IMHO, something similar would be very useful for Wikipedia.
- Uploading images would be great to build an illustrated encyclopedia :-)
- Uploading files is only half of the problem. We need a way to refer to those files from within articles, that is a easy to use as Free Links. Right now they are fully-qualified URLs, which is a pain to type and also is non-transportable. (Renaming uploaded files would be handy also.) --Alan Millar