Last modified: 2008-06-11 21:23:04 UTC
[[Special:Allpages]] allows to search pages by first letters or first digits. It's very fine and useful. But it doesn't show "non-existing" categories... Should it be possible, in [[Special:Categories]], to add a form which would also allow to search by first letters or first digits? Explanation: on big projects, with thousands of categories, it takes a lot of time to find some "red" categories (used in articles or other pages, but without creation of category's page). This new form should help contributors to create missing pages for some categories... or to choose to remove, in articles using those "red" categories, [[Category:foo]] ou to choose another (already existing) category. On big projects, you have sometimes, to click a lot of times on link (500 next) before you find the "red" categories you are looking for... I apologize if there is already any bug report about this problem.
[[Special:Wantedcategories]] should cover your needs.
[[Special:Wantedcategories]] only shows the first ***most*** wanted categories, and not the followings. My proposal should allow to access quickly to all "red" categories in [[Special!:Categories]].
I forgot: the first 1000 ***most*** wanted categories from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Wantedcategories , I click one time on (500 next) and, after a second click on this link, I get this message: <The following information is cached, and was last updated 09:14, 25 February 2008.> <Discuss this special page at [[Wikipedia talk:Special:Wantedcategories]].> <See also: Specialpageslist with editable versions.> <There are no results for this report.> Maybe there are hundreds of other wanted categories, unreachable from [[Special:Wantedcategories]] (only the the 1000 most wanted). On EN Wikipedia and [[Special:Categories]], URL seems to be useful: "&offset=Grammar", for example, allows to find "red category" Grammar Schools, cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Categories&offset=Grammar On other Wikipédias, or those where there are categories with accents or diacritics on some letters, we can also search though "&offset", but who knows that? Example, on FR Wikipedia: http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Categories&offset=R%E9 (but having only typed "&offet=Ré" in the address bar) Then you can find "red" categories with that URI: Réalité virtuelle, Réchauffement climatique, République Fédérale de Yougoslavie, République romaine. But other "Special" pages use both "&offset=" in the address bar and a box on the page to reach the same result. For example: [[Special:Listusers]], where I can 1°) "manually" transform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Listusers (default URL) in http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Listusers&offset=Jimmy or 2°) directly type "Jimmy" in the box after "Display users starting at:". If it's possible for [[Special:Listusers]], I think it should be also possible for [[Special:Categories]]. Do the Help pages, on any project, show that we can search any category ("red" or existing) by the first letters or digits of its name? I'm not sure, and think that a box should help people.
This is fixed in r35065
This still doesn't work properly. It doesn't process spaces correcly. For instance, to make the listing start at Cape Verde, one has to manually tweak the url into http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ACategories&offset=Cape_Verde because http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ACategories&offset=Cape+Verde and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ACategories&offset=Cape%20Verde make the listing start at "Cape". Besides, perhaps it would be cool to have the listing start in the category referred in the url, not the one immediately next to it.
Where did you get the "offset" parameter in the URL? These are the ones generated when you type in the box, and they all work fine. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ACategories&from=Cape_Verde http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ACategories&from=Cape+Verde http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ACategories&from=Cape%20Verde At any rate, if there are any bugs in the implementation, or changes you want, please file new bugs (and possibly link to them here). Don't reopen this bug, since the original request is in fact fulfilled.
Your first problem was probably fixed in r36111, incidentally. For the other request you can open a new bug.
Looks like my FIXED note didn't make it in here: Fixed in r36111. Clean up r35065 -- normalize initial caps and _ input on Special:Categories form and accept /suffix on page name. The earlier quick hack I did just popped the input value into the 'offset' parameter used by the AlphabeticPager system. This was sub-ideal since it didn't normalize input values as nicely, and could get a little funky when paging backwards. Now the input form uses a 'from' parameter (as with Special:Allpages and others) which is nicely normalized. Also the ability to put the starting point on the subpage suffix (as with Special:Allpages, Special:Prefixindex, etc) is helpful for making in-wiki links, and was added, allowing either input method to work.
