User blog:Dudegi WC/My Rant about Special:Insights

Special:Insights is supposed to be a well organized, auto-updating special page that helps with wiki maintenance. This includes showing pages without links, redlink pages, pages without infoboxes, and more. Unfortunately, this feature is not only crippled by the lack of autoupdating in most areas, lack of manual control (allowing admins to make insights ignore certain pages), and just an overall lack of info.

Wanted pages is a great example of a page that doesn't update. I am currently looking at 7 redlinks on a single page, and none of them show up in wanted pages. Instead, it tells me that there are no redlinks. I understand some will say that Special:Insights is a "work in progress" special page, but if that is the case, then why was Special:Community made, when it relies on Insights to produce its lists? If anything, this page should be fully customizable by the admins. I don't care if we can create our own "things to do list," because right below it is the useless insights lists. That's a rant for another blog, though.

And again, the lack of manual control is annoying. I don't care about all these "non-portable infoboxes" because they aren't used on any pages. There are some pages which are purposely left with issues (whether it be because it's not a regular page even though it says it is, or because of other reasons), so why can't I just choose to ignore them?

Then there's the popular pages. I can never tell what time it's based on, and there's no way to look for a certain page to see how many views it got. It's nothing but a list with a view count for I don't know what time frame. It's not based on what it says it's based on (one week, 4 weeks, etc) because the page views are way too high.

I'm just glad the wiki I mostly contribute to doesn't try to use these insights pages or the community page; otherwise we'd all get caught up in the confusion and stupidity.