Interesting idea, and could be rather simple to implement. This would also make it much easier to track maintenance categories with a backlog (such as title change requests, etc).
I’d be okay with this, although my main concern is that I’m not totally sure this would work all of the time? I remember back when we had a huge backlog on the Merge category (4,000+ or higher at the time), it seemed like we had some sort of cap on the number of pages that appeared, since the sidebar on the page (the “There are
articles in this category needing attention”) would stop at a number in the high 900s. That might make it difficult to track all pages in categories that are really full, like the Quality Review category or the Stub category (unless I’m missing something and the merge tag isn’t considered an attention tag by the sidebar standards).
Personally, I also don’t think I’d want the number to be formatted quite that way, but that’s just because the formatting of that count is quite similar to the formatting of the counters in Tips Patrol or Picture Patrol, so it’s confusing my brain.
@Galactic-Radiance
: True, but wikiHow’s software engineers could probably sort that out. :) I actually formatted that way so that it would be consistent with the Community Dashboard tool counters. Ping @Anna
Anna
5
I talked with Elizabeth about this and she thinks it sounds like a neat idea! It’s not necessarily on the radar for development in the immediate future, because there are a lot of other priorities that have more impact on readers and editors (for the most part, readers reach articles through search, rather than categories, so this is a bit of a lower priority area, in the grand scheme of wikiHow). It’d also likely have to be a count that was calculated/updated nightly, rather than in real time, since some of these categories are very large and we only crunch those kind of numbers overnight - so just something to keep in mind. Could be a neat feature one day, though, even with those limitations
Batreeq
6
Returning to this, this might be easier to implement than originally thought. {{PAGESINCATEGORY}} displays a number of pages in a category. For example, {{PAGESINCATEGORY:Merge}} displays the number of pages in the merge category.
Example: https://www.wikihow.com/User:Batreeq/CategoryCounter
Anna
7
Thanks, Bat. Neat feature to know about! I can’t speak to whether that would help here, because some of those bits and bobs around MediaWiki are considered “expensive” and wouldn’t be something we could compute for every reader on every page load without stability issues, load concerns, and so on. That may not be a concern here, but it’s ringing a bell in my mind as one of those types of scenarios… hopefully I’m wrong, though
Either way, you’re welcome to use it sparingly in places like your user page, but it might not be something we can calculate in that way on every category page without concerns. In the long run, it would still be neat to build something that achieved the same end, whether it can use this particular feature or not
