Talk:Community Wishlist/W467

Current / readily-implementable solution

A solution that seems like the easiest most straightforward to implement is adding a link to the corresponding massviews scan to categories. This could be done by a gadget but it would be best if it was enabled by default, including for logged-out users.

The link for your example would be this.

Maybe info on this could be added to the wish itself such as info that this is how one can get the intended result if one knows about the tool or why you'd like to have something other than a link to the corresponding scan on the category page if that is the case. Prototyperspective (talk) 10:10, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, bookmarked. Something like en:Soviet Union receives over 10k views a day., but most articles on the list get far less traffic. 0.1% get over 5k views a day, but 82% of pages get fewer than 200 views/day. Polygnotus (talk) 19:35, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

I suggest that the wish is edited to factor in the existence of the tool and specify what the remaining missing things are here (such as a button for this missing in the Tools menu or a gadget) and/or that there is a new tag like 'Partially implemented' if this isn't marked as 'delivered'/done (also @MusikAnimal (WMF): regarding the tag). Maybe setting the wish status to delivered would actually make quite some sense as relevant Wikipedia pages could inform about and link to this tool. One could also create a new WikiProject or task force or meta page for that (not a technical thing that is missing). Prototyperspective (talk) 00:24, 8 November 2025 (UTC)

Massviews has a cap of only being able to process 20,000 pages, and is an external tool wholly maintained by volunteers (in this case, yours truly!), so I wouldn't consider it a definitive solution to this wish.

I can't say for sure as the pageview metric is unique to the WMF cluster, but ideally we would get this data in MediaWiki somehow.

The larger problem I think is that you can't sort category members by anything other than the sort key (i.e. the page title) or the timestamp of when the page was added to the category. Categories weren't designed to have associated metadata like pageviews. I do not know how hard it would be to change this. — MusikAnimal ^talk 21:31, 12 November 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the info – this is the kind of info I was asking about at specify what the remaining missing things are here but it remains unclear if such functionality is needed/wished by the user or users in general. Didn't think it was a definitive solution to this wish either.

Maybe it would be better to create an entirely new wish for explaining any missing things as this may not be just or mainly about displaying the link somewhere more visibly/conveniently but about improving that tool in certain ways (needed features users can probably only describe if they used it a while for multiple applications). One could also heavily edit the wish (I just mean something needs to be done here that considers the existence of the tool at the link).

Another large disadvantage is that one can only select "Include all subcategories" instead of specifying a depth level as with petscan and also excluding some subcategories (some introduce lots of offtopic articles and subcats so scanning as if it wasn't a subcategory is needed). I'm sure the tool could be used for lots of interesting applications and insights / statistics but I haven't used it very much. One thing I used it for is c:File:English Wikipedia articles on WHO essential medicines sorted by pageviews.jpg (file description) which apparently lead me to create phab:T367291 Request to add Popular Pages bot to a new category. Prototyperspective (talk) 23:34, 12 November 2025 (UTC)

Response to the wish

@Polygnotus Thank you for submitting your wish! We are working with internal stakeholders to figure out next steps, such as feasibility and prioritization. We’ll keep you posted about it. Sannita (WMF) (talk) 13:55, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

@Polygnotus thanks again for your wish! The team recommended this as a community opportunity by building a toolforge tool and using pageviews - one similar example can be found at https://mvc.toolforge.org/ (source code). MikeZ-WMF (talk) 11:03, 21 April 2026 (UTC)