Currently the filtering options only add new groups of articles, and don't find articles that meet certain criteria. It would be valuable to have the ability to filter to only Transportation articles in Asia for example.
Topic on Talk:Growth/Personalized first day/Newcomer homepage
Hi @JackFromWisconsin -- thanks for bringing this up. We've heard from many newcomers that they would be interested in more specific topics (especially country-level, as opposed to continent-level). Your comment has spurred an internal conversation on the Growth team about how we might accomplish this idea. One interesting thing is that it's already possible to do this through Search. For instance, check out this link using topic keywords: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=articletopic%3Atransportation+articletopic%3Aasia&title=Special:Search&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns0=1
By entering both topics, I get articles that have high scores for both transportation and Asia (Indian Railways, Toyota, etc.). We're thinking about whether it might be easiest to add a free-form search bar so people could use Boolean logic to make specific lists, or if there are user interface elements that could make this simple.
Is there a specific topic combination that you yourself would want to select?
I did not know that was already available through search! A search bar could definitely be an easy way to implement this, but I think having a selector to change between adding the topics together, and only taking articles that are in both topics would be great. Asking a question such as "How would you like your articles selected?" "From any topics" or "Only in all topics". I'm not a UX designer so my wording choices suck, but this is asking between whether all topics, or just the intersection of topics.
Messing around with the topic search, it works exactly as I would want (by bringing up articles that are rated high in both categories). If I was interested in video games based on war, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=articletopic%3Avideo-games+articletopic%3Amilitary-and-warfare&title=Special:Search&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns0=1 would be more useful to me.
Okay, I'm glad to see that the underlying technology is already there. Thanks for your input, and we'll continue to consider when/how to make this improvement.