Last modified: 2012-08-02 23:11:04 UTC
We (on nl-wiki) would like the possiblity to have it possible to select namespaces in what the special page Special:WantedTemplates selects their non-existing templates. We would like to switch off the user-namespace and the user-talk-namespace. I think a drop down menu just as on Special:WhatLinksHere would be sufficient if we can select both the namespace with the connected namespace. Thanks!
To clarify (after IRC conversation). Right now the slow (cached) background query works as following: * Get all templatelinks [1] * Filter only those that tranclude out of NS_TEMPLATE (ie. ignore {{:Article}}, or {{User:Foo/Bar}}) * Group rows that transclude the same template * Order by count The query does not have [1] information on what the title or namespace of the host page is. Even if it would know it (by doing an SQL JOIN), it would have nowhere to store it since the querycache table doesn't have space for that. If it would have space for it, it'd have to have a massive index to allow a live-filter on it. The only solution that isn't unacceptably slow is to have separate querycaches for Wantedtemplates for each namespace and then a cache for all namespaces together, which is quite insane. If there is a usecase for it, we might be able to come up with a better solution, but until then I'm marking this WONTFIX. If the data is needed only once or every once in a while, you may request the Toolserver users to perform the query for you in a long-running job and publish it for you to use. [2] -- Krinkle [1] the templatelinks table contains three columns: * namespace of page being trancluded (usually NS_TEMPLATE) * pagetitle of page being trancluded (ie. "Infobox") * pageid of host page calling the template (ie. the page doing {{Infobox}}). [2] - https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Query_service - #wikimedia-toolserver (or me!) http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Krinkle/Queries/
I understand this is not easy to fix but nevertheless it should be fixed. Maybe it's possible to find a workaround or some alternative approach? Currently, all Special:WantedTemplates pages in all Wikipedia projects are almost completely useless due to two problems: The first is described in bug 12019 (things like an #ifexist count as a link). The second is described above: There are a lot of concepts in the user namespace and archived discussions in all discussion namespaces with non-existing templates. All this is counted in the special page. Currently some people are trying to get rid of these template inclusions in the German Wikipedia but this highly disputed (archives should not be touched, for example). What we really need is something like a Special:WantedTemplatesInArticles. As said the lists (also Special:WantedPages) are useless now. Please help us making it useful again.
