Last modified: 2013-02-13 12:46:58 UTC
There is a namespace selector on [[Special:Recentchanges]]; why nowhere else? It could be used to consolidate: - {All pages, Categories, File list} into "Pages" - {Most linked to categories, Most linked to images, Most linked to pages} into "Most linked to pages" - {Uncategorized categories, Uncategorized pages} into "Uncategorised pages" - {Unused categories, Unused files, Orphaned pages} into "Orphaned pages" - {Wanted categories, Wanted pages} into "Wanted pages" It will also make Pages with most categories, Pages with most revisions, New pages, Short pages, Oldest articles be more generic. And even these could ALL be combined into ONE page with subpages, or a selection. The listings could provide more info for the given namespace, ie links to the image when referring to the Image: namespace. Not only will this allow for less repetitive code, it will stop the ambiguity between the terms "pages"/"articles" and "files"/"images". If nothing else, it will save a lot of time adding the same enhancements to multiple different special pages.
One reason why we don't offer the option of select namespaces on certain pages is that doing so could make them superexpensive as the indexes in place to generate them would no longer be effective, one example of this could be Special:Shortpages (let's presume for the sake of argument that the page table didn't have a namespace index), generating a list of the 100 shortest pages with an index on page_len would be inexpensive but allowing users to select a namespace with no index on page_namespace could in a worst case scenario result in a scan of hundreds of thousands of rows for a namespace that not a lot of pages exist in (like Portal_talk). Another reason for it might be that simply noone has bothered coding it yet, or it's something that's inherantly much harder to do due to a certain structuring in the code. One example of this is Wantedpages/Wantedcategories, the querycache object currently works in a way that makes it impossible to have two different SQL queries for a single special page based on arguments given to it if you want to cache it.
If caching is a problem, the same can be done by subpages instead of arguments, ie Special:Pages/Wanted/Category. I presume here querycache would allow different SQL queries?
*** Bug 6268 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 12689 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 5864 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 18273 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 29083 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
If people are serious about seeing this bug resolved, it should have an accompanying RFC: <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment>. This is going to require some thinking and planning.
Let's call bug 39660 a blocker (an instance of this): I think the dropdown is the best solution for it.
