Mediawiki: how do I create a list of wanted articles in the Main namespace?

Question

Mediawiki provides a special page to view all "Wanted Pages" (pages that are linked to but that don't have existing articles yet) by visiting /Special:WantedPages on the wiki. Check out Wikipedia's Wanted pages to see what I'm talking about.

My issue is that the Wanted Pages list will quickly fill up with pages to special namespaces. At the moment my wiki is chock full of wanted pages in the Template, Talk, and Category namespaces, to name a few.

With so many links to special namespace pages, the articles in the Main namespace (the ones my users actually care about) are getting lost. Is there any way (through an extension or what have you) to create a list of wanted pages that are only in the Main namespace?

Answer 1

See the WantedPagesFromNS extension. However, you have to make a minor edit to the extension source files so that it will work with the latest versions of Mediawiki (1.20+).

• Rename the downloaded .zip file to .7z so you can properly expand it.
• Copy the WantedPagesFromNS folder into the extensions folder of the Mediawiki installation.
• Open the WantedPagesFromNS.php file and comment out the line that reads wfLoadExtensionMessages( 'WantedPagesFromNS' );. (That function was deprecated in Mediawiki and is completely unecessary. See here for more details.)
• Finally, add include_once("$IP/extensions/WantedPagesFromNS/WantedPagesFromNS.php"); to LocalSettings.php.

To view the Wanted pages for the Main namespace in your wiki, put this on any page where you want the list to appear:

<wantedpagens>
    namespace = Main
</wantedpagens>