Last modified: 2014-02-25 14:07:46 UTC
It'd be awsome if there was a special page that'd take you to a randomly selected stub. I don't want to crawl through the inordinate amount of interrelated categories to find something to work on. Most users probably have something of value to add to ~20-25% of all stubs, and could just click through the random link generator 4 or 5 times to find one. A related bug: http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2170 Please do not think this identical to 2170, however. A special page that links to a random stub would, ideally, go to any article with {{stub}}, rather than any member of category stub. I think this could be a greatly productive tool. If fixed, please add mention to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Stub Thanks!
Also, SpecialPages should be updated, if this were added.
I'd be more inclined to use the internal definition of stub, which is a page with any length less than the user's stub threshold (set in preferences).
>I'd be more inclined to use the internal definition of stub, which is a page >with any length less than the user's stub threshold (set in preferences). If that were done, would it still be possible to set up a template on the wikipedia using existing features and syntax that'd go to a randomly selected stub? If so, how would I go about doing that? If not, what's it take to make the patch to Media Wiki?
Since I'm not quite sure what comment 3 means, I can't answer.
This one's going to require additional indexes on the page table; a bit of experimentation shows that (using the French Wikipedia page table) a straightforward random pages SELECT with an additional WHERE clause restricting the length causes the operation to take some 13-15 seconds. That's forcing the use of the existing page_random index. Adding an index on ( page_random, page_len ) and forcing its use reduces the time taken to about 3 seconds, but it's still quite expensive. I think we have to look at how useful being able to select a random stub would be. The report as filed gives us scope to adapt, however; most "stubs" on Wikipedias are categorised when the little tags are added to them. If we fulfilled bug 2170, that might be *better* for the cases desired here.
Closing as WONTFIX in favour of fixing bug 2170, which is actually what the original request really needed.
FYI: You can use [[Special:RandomInCategory/Stubs]] now that bug 25931 was fixed.
