I'm interested to know what kinds of programming tasks editors feel are most important. So I've grouped feature requests into a few major categories. Please vote on which category you think developers should be working on. Add your votes with ~~~.

If you want to comment on categories rather than vote (or in addition to voting), you can do that underneath the votes.

Vote on one category only.

Quality (25)

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Screening for vandalism, with better watchlists, more configurable contributions pages and RC, etc. Features for organised patrol, marking edits as checked.

  1. ALargeElk | Talk 09:05, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  2. well, if we only get one, this has got to be it. get quality right and it fixes most other issues. Erich 09:06, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  3. Yes, this is by far the most important. →Raul654 09:06, Jul 5, 2004 (UTC)
  4. Yes, sounds good, as long as (a) it doesn't slow down the database, and (b) it doesn't place any obstacles in the path of contributors. -- Heron 10:03, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  5. Agree with everyone. This would be terribly nice to have. blankfaze | •• | •• 10:42, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  6. Yes, keeping track of changes is the most important thing we do -- I find it hard enough to keep up with my watchlist! -- Arwel 12:35, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  7. Yes, edit checking would be useful. It should at least allow a short summary for the reason for accepting or rejecting the edit. Jrincayc 12:53, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC).
  8. Pcb21| Pete. Tim doesn't want details here but I would welcome brainstorming at User:Pcb21/Checked edits so we have good ideas to offer the developers should the time come.
  9. Agree. Edits should be marked as "checked", nothing more complicated. [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 19:57, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  10. Agree. I try to spend about half an hour a day on RC patrol, and I'm clicking like a mad thing during that time trying to keep up. Anything which allows me to see from the RC page that some other logged in user has verified an anonymous edit would be great. --gadfium 20:47, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  11. I'm pretty tempted to vote for performance, but the truth is we could always add a couple of servers, but we can't cope with the increase in vandalisms, etc. Dori | Talk 01:10, Jul 6, 2004 (UTC)
  12. This “feature” should be considered a requirement. —Lady Lysiŋe Ikiŋsile | Talk 01:49, 2004 Jul 6 (UTC)
  13. Agree. A nice feature would be if the Special:Contributions page for a user had "diff" and "hist" links (like Special:Recentchanges) for each edit, rather than just "hist". —Stormie 04:03, Jul 6, 2004 (UTC)
  14. Elf | Talk. Hard choice between this & performance. These tools aren't necessarily as useful if performance sucks. But when performance is good, it's still laborious to detect & fix vandalism. Umm--I guess this isn't really a vote since I'm supposed to vote only once (for performance). But I really want these features, too.
  15. Yes, to all, but especially screening for vandalism. If we want to attract a greater readership as well as more contributors, it is absolutely necessary to make it a safe for all who add valuable and legitimate content. Dieter Simon 23:18, 6 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  16. I think quality is the most important feature, and searching a close second. Performance is good right now, it would be most important otherwise. Anything to help track quality would help a lot right now. --ssd 04:59, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  17. Furthermore, some karma system where people could mark other users as okey or something like that, and those with sufficient votes would have a different color in RC, that would enable people to not waste so much time checking trusted users when they're looking for vandalism. Of course all edits should deserve a check but practically thats not going to happen. Meanwhile a checked box would be great, with some way of stopping people from having two accounts, vandalising on one and marking as checked on the other, could lead to false security. --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 02:55, 2004 Jul 12 (UTC)
  18. A simple checkmark so that others could note that they approved of the article or a change sounds reasonable. Stopping two accounts could be partly faked by checking IP addresses (if the IP address is too similar, say the first 24 bits are identical, then there's a larger likelihood it's the same person). Rules to help detect "likely problems" (using naive Bayesian, pages often vandelized in the past, adding exernal hypertext links, people who haven't committed as many accepted articles, etc.) to mark recent changes that are more likely to be vandalism could help too. Dwheeler 05:13, 2004 Jul 25 (UTC)
  19. Make alternative language version lists transitive automatically: currently, have to edit the page in every language version to manually copy those listed in other language versions. -- anonymous, 19:14, Jul 19 (CEST)
  20. Yes to all. mnemonic 04:12, 2004 Jul 23 (UTC)
  21. Yes to all. Better watchlists especially will help keep vandalism at bay. These features shouldn't take too long, then focus on performance. - Taxman 14:14, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)
  22. Sounds good. Ability to add a user's contribution list to your watchlist would be handy. This would be one way to combat vandalism. DivisionByZero 20:30, Jul 31, 2004 (UTC)
  23. Yes. Watchlist... maybe. Node 21:12, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  24. BrokenSegue 20:10, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  25. penubag 05:49, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Performance (25)

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Full text search, regularly updated special pages, response time, avoiding error messages in peak times, scalability. Working on performance keeps hardware costs down.

  1. Deepak IMO, all other aspects are pretty good/acceptable. A slow website is a killer and will prevent widespread adoption by the public. OTOH, this is probably a hardware issue. Can programming help beyond a point?
  2. Jongo 12:52, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  3. --Grouse 13:26, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  4. Jay
  5. Angela. The other options are fairly pointless if people can't even use the site. This one has to be the priority.
  6. Elf | Talk. Poor performance is the biggest thing that has discouraged me from patrolling new pages & recent changes. Hence = more vandals getting away with it.
  7. Not sure this is really called "performance", but yes, we should make the software stop breaking as a top priority. anthony (see warning)
  8. I'd like a title only search...especially when searching in categories. I keep unchecking everything but category, and I do a search and it brings up all these non-category articles that don't even have my word in the title. I'm sure that hurts performance while not doing what I want. --ssd 04:54, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  9. I waited to vote and consider this a bit. My immediate inclination was to go with the herd and vote for Quality, but IMO quality is more a matter of human effort. It would be nice to have better tools to help maintain quality, but it is all for nothing if the WP is so slow as to deter people from using it. I may be mistaken on this, but I do not think improving performance is simply a matter of throwing more hardware into the mix. I think that optimizing performance is very challenging work and possibly not as gratifying to developers as creating new user-interface features (which often have a sort of "gee-whiz" factor). And speaking personally, I know that I avoid doing things like check RC or new pages when things are running slowly. olderwiser 15:15, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  10. AaronSw
  11. Acegikmo1 18:54, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC) I don't know what full text search means, but any kind of search is useful, especially the one we have currently is very good. Google never helped me when searching for words within Wikipedia, maybe Google's indexing of W'pedia is poor. W'pedia doesn't have to rely on Google. Jay 15:10, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  12. Etaoin 02:36, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  13. Yes. The site is down too often for my liking, and it's often slow during busy times, to the point where editing anything is impossible. Decrypt3 00:44, Jul 12, 2004 (UTC)
  14. DocUK 21:29, Jul 14, 2004 (GMT) Wikipedia is awesome, but the only thing keeping it from surpassing any software alternative is the speed. Lower response times and increased search performance would be a definite improvement, and the highest priority.
  15. I agree with Angela; performance, scalability and stability must be the number one priority. What is the point of adding features etc. if no one can use the site (or using it is a pain in th...)? As a programmer myself, I see that PHP probably ain't the best choice. Have other languages been considered? Ie. rewriting MediaWiki (for Wikipedia) in Perl? Perl/mod_perl and Apache is quite a bit faster than PHP. I know, 'cause I've developed load-extensive applications in both these languages. Toreau 11:32, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
    • PHP being slower than Perl is news to me — equal, arguable, but slower? Odd. Anyhow, the others' comments here have convinced me. I can still remember waiting forever for my edits on VfD to happen, only to find out that there was an edit conflict. Johnleemk | Talk 13:14, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
      • I've only benchmarked applications in Perl and PHP running under mod_perl/mod_php (Apache). I'm not sure how "standalone" Perl and PHP are compared to each other. But that's not an issue, as a site like Wikipedia have to run under a "boosted environment". Most of the benchmarks floating around on the web seems to be done by person not familiar with either programming language (or how to properly configure mod_perl and Apache to get the most out of it). My own personal conclusion is that it's easy to create fast and small application with both languages, but it's a lot easier to scale with Perl. Toreau 17:06, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  16. gracefool 03:55, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  17. Paddu 18:19, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  18. Patik 16:31, Aug 5, 2004 (UTC)
  19. KneeLess 06:38, 07 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  20. Johnleemk | Talk 14:17, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  21. rhyax 05:15, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  22. AHM 01:46, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  23. [[User:Eequor|ηυωρ]] 20:28, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  24. Quadell (talk) (help)[[]] 16:08, Sep 19, 2004 (UTC)
  25. Ellmist Configurable contribution pages don't do much good when articles take forever to load.

Syntax and rendering (5)

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Templates with parameters that actually work, new kinds of data e.g. chemical structural formulas, chess, music, etc., browser compatibility, WAP access.

  1. [[User:OldakQuill|Oldak Quill]] 11:48, 6 Jul 2004 (UTC) Very useful feature. No more ASCII chemical formulae. Very useful for musicologists such as myself
  2. Neutrality 05:09, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  3. FiP 16:31, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC) a tool to create chemical formulas could be nice ^^
  4. WAP access would be nice. But then there's the issue of compatability - for example, in Japan they use iMode rather than WAP (though I think Japanese devices might be able to read WAP as well), not all devices support Unicode or images... New kinds of data... hmm... what about "tree" charts? ie, to show a family tree, or a language family (which would differ significantly from a family tree), or the taxonomic relationship between genera? Node 21:29, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  5. [[User:Eequor|ηυωρ]] 20:29, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Distribution (4)

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Formal review, CDs, DVDs, print, static HTML dumps.

  1. [[User:Sverdrup|Sverdrup❞]]
  2. arj 15:59, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  3. Utcursch July 6, 2004
  4. Vrabcak 15:11, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC) WAP acces will be great

User rights (1)

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Partial bans on users, e.g. from namespaces or given sets of articles, or number of edits per day. Alternative methods for sysopping and desysopping. Dangerous actions by quorum or consensus. Partial page protection, using file replacement or similar. Automated sock puppet checks. Trust metrics.

  1. theresa knott 17:51, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC) this would give the AC much more flexibility

Feature suggestions

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This is a vote, not a feature suggestions page! But you can add your suggestions below anyway.

I think it is within reason that Javascript and Ajax could provide this utility, as it is possible to associate an id with a stretch of text hilited with mouse selection.. Wikipedia is due for an update anyhow, and this one does not compromise the integrity of the information. BTW, youtube now offers this feature for its videos.. You may consider how youtube could exceed the utility of literary resource.

Then if this was tied into watchlists, it could be made easier to see if anyone has examined the edit and if I have examined the edit (make self checking specially marked, maybe bold or something). Also, if it was tied into recent changes, it would make finding unexamined edits easier. Jrincayc 12:53, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I replied at User:Pcb21/Checked edits where I saw your points first. Pcb21| Pete 16:50, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
[[User:Sverdrup|Sverdrup❞]] 13:52, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Note that we already have live RC using IRC. Pcb21| Pete 15:56, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)


<div class="template" id="name">Content of Template:Name</div>

so that it could be added to the CSS files to render specific templates in a certain way, this was initially suggested at the template:stub talk page, and was implemented so users could hide the stub template in their css, i think it would be great to make this global however. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15:07, 2004 Jul 22 (UTC)