User blog comment:Trolypac/Categories/@comment-961279-20140803180113

With the help of a person on Community Central, I have added some code to our wiki's Javascript that will add a page count to the All Pages list. It will show up below the "Search this wiki" search box towards the upper-right of the screen.

The new Select template taps into the All Pages report to list only the letter you want. If you click on M, you will see all pages that just begin with M. It will not display anything beyond that. The Numbers link will display pages beginning with the numbers 0 to 9.

I have added the template to the top of the Episodes category page so we can try it out. Here's the advantages and disadvantages I see at the moment:


 * Advantages
 * Duplicates the filtering provided by those single-letter categories.
 * It's an automatic function. We no longer have to manually add a single-letter category to each page as it's created.
 * The Select template only needs to be placed at the top of the category pages, which are typically going to be major categories like Episodes, Songs, Characters, etc. There are fewer categories than individual pages.


 * Disadvantages
 * Bypasses the category system, so you just get a list of pages. You would not have the option to switch to Category View, with its "Alphabetical", "Most vistied" and "Recently edited" choices.
 * Will display redirects and disambiguation pages. These are not included in the single-letter categories because they are manually excluded when that letter category is added to the individual pages.

I'm in favor of automating things as much as possible. We now have that capability. We just need to know how many people need the functions we would no longer have:
 * using Category View
 * knowing exactly how many pages are in each letter without including redirects or disambiguation pages.

WiKiAN, you're already counted as needing those two functions. The first one is a matter of preference. But the second one is what I need help understanding. Why is it important for you to know exactly how many pages start with a particular letter that do not include redirects or disambiguation pages? Is it for some sort of report, school project or statistical analysis you're doing? If the answer is yes, would you be willing to switch to an automated method even though it means you would have to do a little more work to not count in the parts you don't want?