Last modified: 2012-01-15 08:59:49 UTC

Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

Wikimedia migrated from Bugzilla to Phabricator. Bug reports are handled in Wikimedia Phabricator.
This static website is read-only and for historical purposes. It is not possible to log in and except for displaying bug reports and their history, links might be broken. See T26754, the corresponding Phabricator task for complete and up-to-date bug report information.
Bug 24754 - Change Article::isCountable() check method to more flexible and reliable
Change Article::isCountable() check method to more flexible and reliable
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Product: MediaWiki
Classification: Unclassified
General/Unknown (Other open bugs)
unspecified
All All
: Low normal (vote)
: ---
Assigned To: Nobody - You can work on this!
:
Depends on:
Blocks:
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2010-08-11 12:08 UTC by Danny B.
Modified: 2012-01-15 08:59 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

See Also:
Web browser: ---
Mobile Platform: ---
Assignee Huggle Beta Tester: ---


Attachments

Description Danny B. 2010-08-11 12:08:03 UTC
Good article is now defined (discounting the optional weird comma rule) by:

good article = page in ns 0 AND not redirect AND not dead end

However, Article::isCountable() does check for presence of literal '[[' in source text, thus it also counts pages without links, but containing:
1) [[File:Foo]]
2) [[Category:Foo]]
3) <nowiki>[[</nowiki>
4) even <!-- [[ -->
and on the other hand it does not count any page which transcludes templates which generate links (therefore the page is no longer dead end).

Because of that, lots of projects, namely Wikisources, Wiktionaries and Wikibookses are "hacking" their wikitext sources by methods 2-4 described above to have involved pages counted.

This method is completely useless because of two reasons: first is mentioned above and second is, that there is no efficient way how to update counter by running maintenance scripts which - if they want to follow the same method used in Article::isCountable(), which they apparently should to keep the consistence - would have to load texts.

So the method should purely rely on registered links. Thus it would be comfortably re-checked (counters re-counted) anytime.

The second issue is the optional weird "comma rule". Like the previous method, it relies on texts, however, unlike the previous method it's not replaceable by any other possibility using other tables (such as pagelinks in previous case) but always have to work with texts.

It has been discussed on random places several times that this method is even more useless and less reliable then check for presence of links (because it's possible to write quite long article without any comma at all as well as e.g. article "Pi" saying only "3,14", not even speaking about languages which do not use comma) and thus it should be removed completely (yay! another worthless and useless config variable away!).
Comment 1 Nemo 2011-04-25 19:14:14 UTC
Perhaps this should be discussed before: you're actually proposing a new method to count articles which is more restrictive (or anyway different) than the current one. Articles which include a file or a category should arguably counted as "good"; perhaps articles which just include some template shouldn't.
And bug 26033 proposes yet another method.

(In reply to comment #0)
> It has been discussed on random places several times that this method is even
> more useless and less reliable then check for presence of links (because it's
> possible to write quite long article without any comma at all as well as e.g.
> article "Pi" saying only "3,14", not even speaking about languages which do not
> use comma) and thus it should be removed completely (yay! another worthless and
> useless config variable away!).

It's still there just for backward compatibility, what's the problem?
Comment 2 Alexandre Emsenhuber [IAlex] 2011-05-14 17:12:48 UTC
Fixed in r88113.

Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.


Navigation
Links