Last modified: 2012-06-13 22:07:09 UTC
Hi! This is a feature request about a pagination behaviour within MediaWiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagination There is a recurring debate about whether one should break long articles into pieces (that is, several *articles*) or not. Sometimes, one want to maintain a single article because the subject is already highly specialised (#1), or because it is about a very large subject with many specialized articles and serves as the unified starting point (#2). some other cases may exist as well (#?). Whatever are the reasons, it may be cool to have a way to split an article into pieces rather than into several articles (#1, #?). I'm thinking about something like this : <article text.... soooo long... but, look!> '''1''' | 2 | 3 | next > The pages behind 1, 2 and 3 wouldn't be *real* articles, i.e. independently reachable within the article namespace. They would be virtual part of the whole and only article, created by MediaWiki to ease reading. For a live example, see how http://www.iht.com software handles articles, or any equivalent. I guess MediaWiki would break articles on the basis of the h* tags (== h2 == titles I guess), or between two paragraphs if no title is provided within the zone where the text begins to drag on. I have no opinion about the ways this could be achieved, and no opinion wether this should be enabled by default or provided as a command/magic_word/the_like. I guess it would be cool, if this is a feature you think is interesting, to have a way to fix the critical length defining what a "long aricle" is and a way to force the pagebreak. What do you think of this?
I bet people who use ads would love this. They always seem to want to expose you to more ads by forcing you to click through page after page . . . this might be an okay extension, and it's probably quite doable with existing hooks, but not in core.
I have succeeded in doing this using Semantic MediaWiki and the Special:RunQuery ephemeral page provided by Semantic Forms. Here's an example: http://www.coincompendium.com/w/index.php/Special:RunQuery/Sighting_list?&wpRunQuery=true Yaron was dismissive of the benefits of ephemeral pages provided by Semantic Forms, but you can read numerous examples of how they can be used, in bug 34150. None of those involve advertising. I think this enhancement request by jd@typhon.org has merit. It is now partly handled by subpages, but more flexible ways of paginating would be substantial forward progress in the capability of MediaWiki, even without SMW and SF.
