Mailing List Archive

Hi Lars!

Lars Aronsson wrote:
> What if the main menu was entirely based on statistics, with the most
> frequently requested URL at the top.

Would you allow for any popular URL to be in the main menu? Let's say
the article "Current events" became the second most popular. Would it be
in the menu? What if "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" became most popular.
Would it go into them menu? And what would have to move out?

> I bet Recent Changes would be at the
> top, and the "diff for this page" in 2nd place and "edit this page" 3rd.
> Maybe it would be very useful.

The diff for a specific page is most likely less requested than the page
itself and a lot less than the most popular articles. What you would
need is a priorization in the context of a certain article in order to
balance this out.

> Before you collect the statistics, you would have to substitute all the
> page names with something like "%s" that can later be substituted back
> with the actual page name.

I think it's not at all that simple.

Menus ordered by use are a widely discussed topic in the HCI (human
computer interaction) community. But when it comes to implementation,
all sorts of problems arrise.

For example: How does a user know when and why a menu topic appears or
disappears or repositions? Which criteria are relevant? Is the absolute
number of pageviews for a certain page enough? Or should it be the mean
average number of page views during a certain period? Which period would
be appropriate?

What if Wikipedia had only two users, and they both had very different
interests? Both had to live with each other's "bookmarks" in the menu.

Even if all users had the same interest, which is not a good assumption
to make, wouldn't a menu ordered by frequence of use mean that the most
popular functions or pages would become even more popular?

So far,

Marian


--
Marian Steinbach
http://www.ds.fh-koeln.de/~marian/
ICQ# 9790691