Issue: Possibility to "manually" create wanted pages

@pegasus, what do you think about this, is it feasible?

It would greatly help us prioritize which pages to create first, if we could get the Special:WantedPages to count/show how many times a topic is mentioned on other pages (including those that we haven't WIKI-tagged, but still created a "wanted page" for

Okay about creating a "Wanted Page" entry manually, but I'm a little unclear how it would count the links -- if you had to add it manually, then no links were found.

In 4.1.7, we count autolinks now. As before, all links have to be in a wiki page in order to be counted (it takes a lot of processing that can be hard to shoehorn into other content-types).

About 4.1.7 counting auto links to wanted pages, I just checked one of the wanted pages and it says 3 links to it... When I search the wiki for the same term I find many more pages that contain that text (i.e. would autolink to it once created), so it doesn't seem to work there, but I guess that shouldn't work yet (it's part of this request)

Also, on the Special:MostLinkedPages I also checked one of the pages where it says only 1 link, and when I search the wiki for the text I can find 10+ pages that actually autolink to the page in question (not in the sidebar btw). So I guess there is some bug there then? Or have I missed enabling some feature for this?

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Anyway, back to this feature request:
If/when I create a "wanted page" (either by marking it with [wiki]-tags on a "dummy page", or through some future UI, I would want the following:

1. The Special:Wantedpages shows it with the correct link count (i.e. finding all places where it would be linked from once the page is created
2. All pages that contain the text, would also auto link with "red text" i.e. meaning that it doesn't exist yet.

With those 2 features, it would be really easy to prioritize what to write next, and someone reading any Wiki page would also see that there is a missing page for some subject that they might know about, hopefully prompting them to go write a page about the subject

Does that make sense?

Okay, I think I get what you are saying now. The problem with this is that we can't look for the text for a link count until the page is somehow marked wanted. In order to count links, we have to process every single page and look for that text to get a count. This can get overwhelming, especially if a lot of wanted entries are added, and can quickly become a vector for abuse.

I think if this gets added, it would have to both:

• Be an option, disabled by default.
• Count the links via cron job, probably at most daily (as it involves processing every single page). This means a delay in the wanted count. I suppose there could also be an admin option on Special:WantedPages to count links on demand.

As for autolinks not seeming to count yet in 4.1.7, it appears to be a bug in the upgrader. It looks like if there were already cached autolinks for a page, it skipped processing the autolinks during the upgrader's link count and likely any subsequent counts we did. The autolink cache only invalidates if the text changed or a certain amount of time has passed. So it seems the upgrader overlooked that it needed to invalidate the autolink cache before attempting to count the links. However, newly posted autolinks should be counted normally, assuming the containing page's text has changed.

Along the same lines, I believe we should keep in mind that when performing a wanted count in this requested feature, we would need to invalidate/skip the autolink cache before attempting to count.

Optional features is fine :+1:

Also, cronjob is fine, it doesn't have to be exact, just a "somewhat correct"


1. Is there some way to reset the autolink cache or rebuild it? :thinking:
2. What about the feature to insert "autolinks for wanted pages", is that feasible?

It doesn't seem work for newly created pages either.. I just checked a newly created page that is autolinked to in 2 places, but doesn't show up in Special:MostLinkedPages

Also it seems the Special:MostLinkedPages has too few pages comparing to how many pages exist in the wiki (almost all should have autolinks to them...)

But was the page that shows the autolink newly created after the page it autolinks to, OR was it last edited after the page it autolinks to was created? Because without a cron job, there is no other way for those links to get recorded.

Okay I misunderstood... However, I now tried to edit one of the pages that was auto-linking to the new page, and afterwards the new page still doesn't show up in Special:MostLinkedPages at all...

Anywho, without the cronjob that actually counts correct auto-linking counts I don't consider any of those counts correct, so hopefully we cna get that cron soon

When you edited the page, did you actually change anything?

To get it without changing anything, edit src/addons/vw/vw/_core/instance/parser/renderer/xf2.php. Find:
BEFORE it, add:
Find:
Replace with:

Yes, I edited something so that it shows up in the edit history of the page..

I just want to clarify some things, so that for the next release this is actually fully implemented and working (not just partly working in some scenarios).

First: we don't actually need any extra/new UI to create a wanted page, we can use the existing functionality to wrap the "wanted page title" inside a [wiki]-tag so that it gets picked up by the system. i.e. this feature already exists

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From there on the following should work (It is okay that these 2 features are behind wiki settings, as long as we can enable them):

1. Any page that contains text matching a "wanted page" should auto-link to it with red text, showing our users that there is a missing page to be written.
- It should also respect the "Allow duplicate links"-setting

2. The Special:WantedPages shows (and sorts) the correct link counts, which include the above-mentioned auto-links (this can be collected with a nightly cronjob)


Are those features possible to get into the next release? It would improve the UX of managing the wiki greatly

That would give ordinary wiki editors the ability to modify cache states of any existing page in the wiki, and trigger expensive mass rebuilds using arbitrary strings. This functionality needs to be locked in an admin or moderator screen, where only certain wanted strings are granted those abilities (elevated).

The feature will require:
- new toggles for including certain wanted pages in autolinks
- admin/moderator screen for elevating wanted pages, and changes to the existing Special:WantedPages with admin/moderator controls.
- at least one new database table, and likely changes to others, for containing that list of wanted pages
- proper auto-management/pruning as pages are created/renamed
- changes to how the list of autolink candidates is constructed, to include elevated wanted pages.
- new cron jobs to search existing pages after the list of elevated wanted pages changes

No matter what, this exceeds our policy of what features may be included in a minor point release (new toggles for existing functionality, small changes to styling, low-hanging performance enhancements, small adjustments to platform integrations due to changes in platform releases, etc). The earliest a feature like this may appear is branch 4.2, but this may or may not be off-theme for that branch.

How is that any different from a normal user being able to create a new page that will be auto-linked to, wouldn't that also trigger rebuilds?
Why would/should/does the wanted page functionality have to work differently from how a "real" page works?

And I thought you already said this would be happening inside a cronjob, so it would happen maximum X times per Y period...

Even if it was just the a fix so that the "Special:WantedPages" link counts are done correctly (this is a bug!) in a cronjob?

I feel like you are trying to make this task way bigger than what it needs to be so that you can put it off for some "future release", which honestly will take a really long time to become reality (speaking from experience with the very slow release schedule policy that VW has)...

What if we just start small by getting the Special:WantedPages to show a correct link count? i.e. including the auto-links once the page is created... Would that fit into the next release?