User blog comment:Toughpigs/WikiStickies - new feature launching on My Home/@comment-473563-20091219024031

As it stands today, the tool caters very well to a wiki community that is doing nothing to guide the efforts of it's contributors. That is a good thing! The room for improvement lies in catering to those communities which do have a plan or agenda for "what's next" and would welcome this tool as an adjunct for that "To do" list instead of a distraction from that plan.

If you are sincere about handing control of this tool over to local sysops and contributors then each of the feeds (it seems there are now 4 feeds) would monitor pages found in two categories or lists. I think that using categories is better than using MediaWiki messages in this case because the contents of a category can be modified by any contributor whereas MediaWiki messages require sysop/admin privileges to edit. It is not always a sysop that is the most active contributor (or the best facilitator) at a wiki.

One category would be for specifying inclusions while the other would be for specifying exclusions.


 * 1) The "Add a picture" feed should monitor and be affected by 2 categories :
 * 2) Category:Nowantedimages - the exclusion list
 * 3) Category:Wantedimages - the inclusion list
 * 4) The "Expand an article" feed (has this been abandoned permanently or just temporarily?) should monitor and be affected by :
 * 5) Category:Nowantedexpansion - the exclusion list
 * 6) Category:Wantedexpansion - the inclusion list
 * 7) The "Spell check" feed should monitor and be affected by
 * 8) Category:Nowantedspellcheck - the exclusion list
 * 9) Category:Wantedspellcheck - the inclusion list
 * 10) The "Start an article" feed should monitor and be affected by 2 MediaWiki messages :
 * 11) MediaWiki:Nowantedarticles - the exclusion list
 * 12) MediaWiki:Wantedarticles - the inclusion list
 * 13) * Since you cannot add non-existing pages to a category the only practical way to have specific inclusion and exclusion lists for non-existing pages is to use a MediaWiki message.

You have demonstrated an understanding of how a list of specific exclusions should affect a feed because that is how MediaWiki:Nowantedimages functions today. The only difference being that any contributor can add or remove a page to/from the [Category:Nowantedimages] whereas it requires a sysop to edit a MediaWiki message.


 * What remains then, is the specific inclusions list and deciding how each feed should be affected by it.

Since the carousel of yellow stickies has 20 slots populated randomly from the 4 feeds described above it follows that, on average, 5 pages from each feed will appear. However, to keep things simple let's suppose that we allow for the remote possibility that all 20 slots get populated from just the one feed.

A local community ought to be able to ensure that the only pages contributing to a particular feed are those pages specifically named in the include list. To do this they must simply ensure that the population of that include category/list is 20 pages or more. ''A page is removed from the category by a human being removing the category tag. A page is removed from the MediaWiki message by a human being editing that message.'' This is as it should be - a subjective decision made by a human contributor at a wiki community.
 * The code responsible for generating the internal feed should detect that this threshold has been exceeded and dutifully draw only from the specific inclusions list until such time as the number of pages in that list has been reduced to 19 or fewer.

If 19 or fewer pages are specified in an inclusion category or list then the various algorithms that Toughpigs has described for these internally generated feeds may then kick in to supplement the specific inclusions list while always filtering based on the specific exclusions list.
 * At all times the goal should be to help the community to execute it's plan of action by guiding contributors to those pages that have been specifically targeted. Those targeted pages should always be given a higher priority than pages from an automatically generated feed.
 * As each targeted list is reduced to zero member pages then the behavior/function of this tool naturally reverts to the current default. i.e. the communities prescribed "To Do" list has been fulfilled so now let the algorithm generate it's own "To Do" list.

With such a system in place the wiki that has no specific plan for channeling the effort of it's contributors can choose to do nothing with the above mentioned categories and MediaWiki messages and the automatically generated feeds will take over and produce the exact same results or behavior that we see today. However for those wiki communities which are doing the "right thing" and do have a plan of action or a "To do" list then these communities will see the yellow Wiki Stickies as a tool working in harmony with that plan of action and not see it as distracting visitors from the community's current focus.