Wikipedia:Phase II feature requests/Other feature requests

This page is obsolete!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.

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Other feature requests

• Marking pages with a page type: article, /Talk[?], a wikipedians page, pages about wikipedia (policy, requested features, announcements, etc.), redirects, junk, not yet classified. That way we can get a much more accurate count of the number of articles. A link or drop down box at the bottom of a page would allow changes to the page type, which should show up in the revision log. -- Simon J Kissane

• Automate renaming of pages. I'm sick of copying and pasting and putting in #REDIRECTs. There should be a rename command which creates a copy of the page with the new name, and replaces the old page with a #REDIRECT to the new page. And it should be able to move all subpages (e.g. /Talk[?] pages) as well. -- Simon J Kissane

• Can we omit /Talk[?] pages from those returned by Random Page[?] (or at least a user option so to do)" -- GWO
  • Could we exclude #REDIRECT pages from "Random Page" results--make it, uh, why not "Random article"? (Maybe exclude user pages too?) Or perhaps add that as an option under prefs?Koyaanis Qatsi

• I'm not sure if this is a software feature request or a feature request for the sysadmin, but can we make the description metatag for all Wikipedia pages identical to the first 25-40 words of the page contents?

• Disallow self-referencing wiki links. It is counterproductive to the idea of a cross-linked encyclopedia to link the page the user is currently on to the page the user is currently on. One can easily kill these links when one comes across them, but perhaps it would be easier to simply disallow it in the wiki code?
  • I think the idea here is not to parse a link on the XYZ to the XYZ page as a link.

• There should be a diff between two adjacent changes. The current diff only shows the change from a given version to the latest version. It would be useful to diff version 1 with version 2, version 2 with version 3, ..., version 14 with version 15 etc. Not version 1 to version 15.

• I'd like a more precise "diff" feature. Currently if there's a change in a paragraph you have to scan the entire paragraph to find it. Could we mark the changes themselves in some way?
  • I second for this feature. I recently suggested a convention used in entering text on the FAQ page. If each sentence is entered on its own line, the diff will show only the sentence that is changed instead of the whole paragraph. However, if Wikipedia's diff can use color to highlight the changes within the paragraph, then it would work better than what I suggested.

• Let users "subscribe" to a page: every change to that page will then be emailed to them. AxelBoldt
  • I like this idea very much, but how about sending a daily/weekly/monthly digest instead of one message per change? This would be very nice. sandos

• the Wikie (erlang wiki) allows for passworded pages, and append-only pages, as well as marked sections as well. These are rather useful as well. The primary use, in my mind, for this wiki would be quoting material from somewhere else, like the US constitution, the text of a speech, the exact program code to do something...

• Images should automatically be aligned to the left (align="left") so that text wraps around it. Or something. Check out Galileo. There is a huge white space even on 800x600.

• A standardized method to include grants of permission from sources of copyrighted material, plus a detail on fair_use implied consent on copyrighted material. A statement that this wikipedia.com is either for commercial or educational purposes might help !

• Tag that would allow Tex Math mode. Like in < formula >F = frac{GMm}{r^2}< / formula >. It would be converted to cached imag/png and img tag with 'alt' set to Tex source, like in < img src="texcache/tex01234567.png" alt="F = frac{GMm}{r^2}" > -- Taw

This would be really cool. In fact, I'd like to do this on my own site for my own nefarious purposes, so I'm looking into how to pull it off. -- EdwardOConnor

• Keywords for every page, with syntax like: '#KEYWORDS foo,bar,baz'.
  • It will help getting high locations in web searchers.
  • Some display-all-pages-with-selected-keyword should be provided. It would enhance quality of articles, as an expert on some field could easily see all articles on his field. It would also be good way of checking completeness of article set.
  • Most important would be Recent Changes restricted to some set of keywords. That would be very good peer-review mechanism. --Taw

• There should be a way to specify alt= and title= of an inline image for the benefit of the visually impaired, the slowly connected, or anybody else using Links or another textual web browser. --Damian Yerrick

See also : Wikipedia:Phase II feature requests