Wikipedia Special:Today
19 October 2004 @ lunch time | Comments (0)
Every Sunday, upon arrival of a meaty New York Times, I break out the crossword puzzle and warm up my Firefox search bar (you know you cheat a bit too). Wikipedia (searchbar) is indispensable in the Sunday crossword’s completion; in fact, the NYT crossword puzzle is what initially led to my discovery of Wikipedia.
Some of its coolest features are Special:RandomPage, which can provide hours of tangential web surfing, and Current Events.
I developed a multi-language Textpattern plugin (ajw_wiki_today) simply out of my love for being able to view what happened on any specific day in history and to simplify the creation of the Wikipedia date URL, requiring a certain format. Writing a plugin to accomplish this was necessary for two reasons:
- Differing structure of date URLs per Wikipedia localization subdomain (en fr de)
- There exists no ‘Special’ permalink that takes you automatically to today’s date
It appears there has been some previous discussion regarding this idea prior to my suggestion, currently buried somewhere in Wikipedia’s feature request box. There has been resistance because of Wikipedia developers’ fear of adding too much cruft into the sidebar. It appears that they’ve settled on Current Events as the solution, citing the fact that a link to today’s date appears on that page.
This is poor usability. There is no way to directly link to today’s date in history without first a) dynamically generating the link, b) clicking today’s date from the home page, or c) clicking to Current Events and then clicking on the today’s date link.
An example of the different localizations’ link formats are as follows:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_23
- http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/23._Oktober
- http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_octobre
- http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_de_octubre
There should be no need whatsoever to generate the link in the proper format with the correct month/day delimiters. One link should be created so that — no matter what day it is — it will always take you to today’s date in history.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Today
The current state of affairs with feature requests over at Wikipedia is a complete mystery to me. The Wikipedia feature request page redirects you to the Bug reports page, which in turn points you in so many directions that I’m left unsure as to what is the true hub for development. It lists wikitech-l, MediaWiki feature requests and bug reports page, and MediaZilla — all of which only discuss reporting bugs, none outlining where to make a feature request. It appears that the SourceForge page where I was directed by Wikipedia to place a request a few months ago is now defunct. Anyone know how to get things done in the WikiWorld?