Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-15278555-20131204031214/@comment-188432-20131209204704

A lot of the issue with S:WP is that it just grabs from all namespaces, and there are no settings Wikia (or any other MediaWiki host) can do to narrow that search. Thus, as wikis grow and start putting redlinks in templates and forum spaces and talk pages and article comment areas, the list of WantedPages gets increasingly bloated. What's genuinely required is for someone to write an extension that only looks at redlinks in a single namespace: main. That would increase responsiveness of the feature tremendously, and give you the list you really want anymore.

After all, I don't care about false redlinks that are created in project pages to explain how to use wikitext, or theoretical page names that are redlinked on discussion pages. What I care about are the pages of actual, main content that are missing.

A related issue complicating the utility of S:WP is the "#ifexist bug". There are many occasions on which it's useful to build a template that performs an action based upon whether a page exists. Unfortunately, if the page doesn't exist, then S:WP counts this non-existence as a page that needs to be created and is thus "wanted". This problem has existed for the better part of a decade and the people at mediawiki.org, who actually make the underlying software that Wikia, Inc. use, don't seem to care about providing a solution. One of the earliest-known reports of this issue of which I'm aware at Wikia can be found at memoryalpha:Memory Alpha:Announcements. Yah, that's right, 2007. But it was a probelem noticed long before that at Wikipedia.

I think it's almost disgraceful that the #ifexist part of this prolbem is unfixed. It basically makes you choose, as an admin, between the really useful functionality of #ifexist and S:WP. So I definitely think that the #ifexist bug should be fixed.

But I don't particularly think it's a tragedy that S:WP doesn't quite have the latest results. I mean, I think we're lucky to have S:WP enabled at all. And I find the list of redlinks useful to fomulating at least some kind of page creation strategy. At Tardis, the fact that the report is limited to only 1000 reponses means that we will never, ever be able to see the whole list, anyway, so up-to-date accuracy is truly not a problem.