I run a site with thousands of pages (constantly growing) and as time goes by, I have become ever more enamoured with the listpages function. For those of you not taking advantage of it, you should really rethink what you are doing.
I get a decent amount of traffic from google, based just on content quality, and for many search terms a sheer lack of competition. (Be obscure, play in the long tail). What listpages has done for me is to increase the number of page views per person, by offering links to related pages, in a manner that is constantly fresh and requires no sweat from me.
I generously use tags for all the pages, so that a page for Saudi Aramco's latest refinery project will have the tags "refinery" "saudi-arabia" "saudi-aramco" "m-east" etc. On another related page, I have a list pages function which lists by tag, such that a link will be automatically created to this page. When I started to do this a couple of years ago, there was a sharp increase in page views per visitor.
The default for the function is to list the most recent page first. This wasn't exactly what I wanted, as older pages do not get listed, even if they have been regularly updated. In fact older pages are generally better quality in terms of content. So imagine my delight when I realised that adding "order="updated_at desc" will give you a list based on updates. So my links thus generated become more relevant. I have started to make the change, and again I seem to be getting an improvement in page views.
Having discovered the ability to list by update, I also added a page called old pages, that lists those pages that were updated a long time ago. This gave me the ability to look at them and see if they needed changing, which many of them did. When a site has a vast number of pages, general maintenance can be time consuming and poor quality pages can go unnoticed. This is now less of a problem than it was.
So if you want Wikidot to do some of your work for you, try using this technique. For those of you that are more advanced than I, I would love to know how you use listpages.
My site is at http://abarrelfull.wikidot.com/
