A tool that lists the articles that have been linked to most.
This has been on my todo list since 2015 for my personal tools. I feel this might roll over better into XTools because it is statistics analysis.
At its basic form, it would be implemented as the other tools under the uri "/wanted" and "/wanted/{project}" - I assume we should show an arbitrary (50? 100?) of the top wanted articles.
As a future feature, add the ability to sort it down basted on the article title and/or time.
The query used by Special:WantedPages, modified to only check the mainspace, and only pages with > 10,000 incoming links:
SELECT pl_namespace AS namespace, pl_title AS title, COUNT(*) AS value FROM pagelinks LEFT JOIN page AS pg1 ON (pg1.page_namespace = pl_namespace AND pg1.page_title = pl_title) LEFT JOIN page AS pg2 ON (pg2.page_id = pl_from) WHERE pg1.page_namespace IS NULL AND pl_namespace = 0 GROUP BY pl_namespace, pl_title HAVING COUNT(*) > 10000 AND COUNT(*) > SUM(pg2.page_is_redirect)
this scans 528,072,965 rows (!!!). As such I'm not sure this will work as an on-demand service :( If we are able to improve the query or solution overall, we might consider working on Special:WantedPages itself.
Sounds like a task for a bot, no? Running such a bot once a day should be sufficient since the list probably does not have to be dynamic, does it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_requests seems to be the better venue
Correct, but the existing Special:WantedPages sucks and everyone knows it, so we might focus our efforts there rather than create a bot task. The core feature is also precomputed via cron or something. I would create a task to get input first, but I bet everyone would be OK if it only accounted for the mainspace. At the very least, it should not account for transclusions -- which is why some articles like "HaRav Meir Shehenboim (Etz Hadar)" show up -- because they're in the "To-dos" in the WikiProject banner template.
Do you know of a task for that? If not, I'll file one.
Meanwhile, it seems consensus stands to fix Special:WantedPages rather than implementing in XTools. @MusikAnimal @Samwilson any objections to closing this task?