[Vim-l] Fix random page

[John Beckett]

Santhalus has recently described a major problem and how it might be fixed.
Here is a summary with some additional details that I've researched.

Fixing the problem requires help from the wikia staff, so please comment on
the following as we need consensus before approaching them.

---Problem---
Many users click 'Random page' to find a Vim tip.
However, for historical reasons, we have many overhead pages, and 'Random
page' will often go to a page stating that a tip is missing for some reason.

---Solution 1---
Ask the wikia staff to change file LocalSettings.php for the Vim Tips wiki
so there is a line reading:

$wgExtraRandompageSQL = "page_title NOT LIKE 'VimTip%'";

We have 1504 pages like 'VimTip%' (in MySQL, '%' matches zero or more
characters). Of these, 279 are pages with messages like "this tip was not
imported because it was missing from vim.org". The remaining 1225 VimTip%
pages are redirects to valid tips.

These numbers mean there is an 18% chance of 'Random page' retrieving a page
the user does not want (and the chance will increase as we clean up and
merge more old tips).

If it were possible to make the above change, the Vim Tips wiki would not
require any changes.

---Solution 2---
If the above is undesirable or not possible, we could recreate all our
VimTip% pages in a different namespace, and delete the VimTip% pages from
the main namespace. This might be a better long term solution because it
would remove overhead pages from our main namespace - I suspect that would
help with things like using Special:Allpages.

We would need to get Bram to update the original vim.org tips web site
because he has links to the existing VimTip% pages.

To create a namespace, we need to ask the wikia staff. We are entitled to
have three extra namespaces (but if we want any others, we should ask for
all of them at the same time).

We could ask for namespace 'VimTip'. Then I would script something to do the
changes.

We have 228 tips with links like [[VimTip123]]. We would change those to
[[VimTip:123]] (a page with title '123' in the 'VimTip' namespace).

Clicking 'Random page' finds pages only in the main namespace, so putting
all the VimTip% pages in a different namespace would fix the problem.

I like 'VimTip' rather than the simpler 'Tip' because it is easier to search
for 'VimTip' when maintenance is needed.

John