[WikiEN-l] Experimental: Live template value search

Magnus Manske magnusmanske at googlemail.com
Mon Apr 20 22:59:17 UTC 2009


I have set up a highly experimental (read: pre-pre-alpha) tool on the
toolserver to search for combinations of key/value pairs in templates.
Like TemplateTiger, but for the live site (one day...)

URL:
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/knights_template.php
(as in "Knights Templar", sorry, couldn't resist)

What does it do (or should do):
Find actors on Wikipedia that have a book by publisher McFarland cited
as source? No problem:
http://tinyurl.com/chadva
(will take a few seconds)

All templates used on [[Roy Scheider]], with key/value pairs:
http://tinyurl.com/dkpbh7


Things that need fixing (like, everything):
* Slooow
* Only en.wikipedia
* Only 16K pages indexed at the moment (some Recent Changes snapshots)
* Only templates used directly in the article are indexed
* Needs continuous update (can run on cron, but disabled because text
retrieval and DB storage too slow to keep up with RC)
* Needs better query interface
* Might cause database size problems

All in all, it would be much better directly integrated into MediaWiki
(no need for text retrieval/parsing, no bulk updates). But I've been
saying that for years, at least this is a first attempt.

Cheers,
Magnus



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