Wikipedia:Most wanted articles

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Categories Categories-Alpha (~700k!)
See also: Maintenance Reports, Collaboration

These are the 'most wanted articles' from the database dump of January 25, 2006. Operational (blue) links show articles that have been created since then. (These can be deleted from the list, if you wish.) You may want to use the "Threshold for stub display" on Special:Preferences to check which ones are still stubs.

Articles at the top of the list have the highest number of links to them from other Wikipedia pages. (Including only links from the main article namespace, category description pages, templates, portals, and redirects in these four namespaces.) These articles are more likely to be on important topics, and because there are so many ways to get to them, readers are more likely to notice that they are missing, it gets their attention

Note that "What links here" counts the number of pages that link to a given target, but this listing counts the number of links. Because there may be more than one link per page, these numbers may be different.

Contents

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How to help

When there are many links pointing to a missing article, this is often an indication that an "important" topic is missing from the encyclopedia. The idea of this list is that the more links there are to a missing article, the more value there is for readers in creating it.

It could be that the article that should be linked to already exists. If you click on the red link, on the next page, you will have the option of searching Wikipedia. If you find an article on the same subject, go back to the missing page and make it into a redirect to the existing article. You only need to fix the inbound links to point directly to the already-existing article instead of the redirect, if there is a typo or the title of the new redirect is otherwise improper.

If you don't find an existing article, start writing it! Even a stub would be useful. It would be very helpful to other editors if you cite your sources, even if you don't have time to format them properly. This makes it easier for others to verify and expand on your work.

If you don't know what the title is referring to, click on the "(XX links)" link. This will show you which pages link to the non-existent article. Reading these should give you a good idea of what the topic of the missing page should be.

If you find an article on this list that you think will or should never be created, you will need to remove all the links that point to the missing page. If you simply remove the listing from this page, it will reappear the next time the list is updated. Removing all the red links will also repair the fabric of the Wiki, and send a signal to the editors working on those other pages about the proper scope of content on the topic.

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See also

Template:Active Wiki Fixup Projects

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How to update

There are three methods.

1.) Run the following SQL commands on a Link Analysis Database: 

select concat( '#[[', link, ']] (', count, ' articles)' )
from bad_link_summary
order by count desc
limit 200;

This may cause problems with non-ASCII characters, but due to recent changes to the database and the ability of your operating system and SQL software to handle these characters, it might not. (Let us know what happens.)

2.) Download and run the scripts described at Meta:Toolserver/Reports.

3.) Ask the developers to update Special:Wantedpages and copy the result here.

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Suggestions for improvement

  • Count multiple links from the same template due to transclusion. -- Beland 9 July 2005 01:09 (UTC)
  • Some articles with non-ASCII and non-alphanumerical names are improperly included. (Removed manually for now.) -- Beland 08:09, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
  • One suggestion to count by number of linking pages, not counting multiple links on the same page: -- Beland 15:21, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
    • I think the number of linking pages should be the relevant count, not the number of links. As you can see in the example I gave, that number may be highly variable depending on subject. It seems that sports articles particularly tend to have multiple links in the same document, whereas in science articles, I've very rarely seen it. Hence some kinds of articles would be created at a higher rate than others, resulting in an asymmetric growth of wikipedia. I think this is a bad thing (TM). - Samsara 17:42, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
      • Or the script that generates the link count could also give the number of linking pages. Something like: (26 links from 4 pages) — RJH 23:14, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
        • I think this should be done as soon as possible. Some of the articles with the highest number links are only linked to from a handful of articles. Also, sometimes there is a large number of articles linking to the page, but they are not what I would consider the most important, like a minor cast member linked from every episode page and repetitive list articles (often there is an article for each year). While they would probably not show up so frequently if they weren't somewhat notable/important, their apparent importance relative to other topics is skewed. -- Kjkolb 22:05, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Try to automatically sort by topic, based on the categories that the link-from articles are in. -- Beland 20:58, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
    • I think this is a good idea. It would also be good to make the list longer, as I don't see any articles in the areas that I am interested in, such as science, energy and technology. It looks like the majority are biographies, with most of the rest being sports teams, buildings/stadiums, schools and companies. -- Kjkolb 22:05, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
      • The list was actually 500 entries long but some 250 were blue. I suppose the script was run on a slightly old version of the database which is why many of the entries from the december run were included. Celcius (Talk) Image:Flag of Denmark.svg Wiki be With us! 01:47, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
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General

This ranking includes only links from the main article namespace, category description pages, templates, portals, and redirects in these four namespaces. Multiple links from the same page are counted more than once, but a link in a template is only counted once.

The following is from the January 25, 2006, database dump. Please strikethrough any articles that are no longer "most wanted", to prevent them from being featured on Template:Opentask. (This section will be automatically scanned by a bot.) Removing blue links would also be helpful. -- Beland 01:07, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

We are currently having technical problems updating this list. I would encourage you to check out Wikipedia:Articles requested for more than a year in the meantime. -- Beland 22:47, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

  • Done!


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Sub groups

(Link counts not necessarily updated on the current run.)

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Seasons in Sport

  1. 2004 English cricket season (26 links) (Cricket)
  2. 1980-81 West Indian cricket season (24 links) (Cricket)


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Low link or page count

These articles either contain many links from 1 or a few pages or the overall number of links have decreased due to deletion of linking articles or the links therein. These articles are not a priority although they should eventually be created.

  1. Premiere Production (0 links) Previously deleted per nn, most links listed for deletion per nn.
  2. Dr. H.C. Carlson (1 link) the 30 links were all in one article, I removed 29 of them
  3. John Palumbo (5 links)Deleted redundant links within pages
  4. Dawn Valazquez (0 links) Only the "most wanted articles" page comes up on this article's links site
  5. Ken Squier (20 links) 18 links from one table - Daytona 500 speaker
  6. List of Royksopp songs (0 links) 0 Links - all pages deleted
  7. The Electric Joy Toy Company (0 links) —Ronnie Martin's recording studio.
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