[Feature Request] Adding option to select items based on a priority metric

[ElanHR]

(I believe) items are currently queued in random order. One way to improve impact/visibility of changes would be to change this to a priority queue based on some importance metric (# of page views, age citation-needed tag, etc.)

[verdy-p]

Useful options: look for articles that are

• in a given category (and up to a specified maximum recursion level, by default 2).
  Users can only give useful references for some topics they better know.
• in a specific namespace (sometimes we need references inside templates, or data namespace, or in the local "Project:" namespace, or a local "Help:" namespace.

[eggpi]

Browsing a category is possible using the text box in the UI ("Search for a topic"). The categories are not recursive though. Different namespaces are indeed not supported at the moment, although we do make a special case for enwiki Wikiprojects and those show up as categories in the UI.

There's also the relatively recent Customize feature, where users craft PetScan queries and import them into Citation Hunt. That is, for advanced querying use cases, we may not need to implement the functionality in Citation Hunt directly, although we could improve the user experience for that.

However, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the initial intent of this issue is to do something more subtle, and separate from the user-visible search options. Basically as we browse snippets (especially when not inside a specific category) we should find a way to prioritize them behind the scenes, instead of just picking the next snippet at random.

I think that's still a good idea and I'll get to it at some point, but I'd also be happy to discuss implementation and review pull requests from contributors :)