We will never know who "owns" which book. We only know that they have used it as a source a number of times. It could very well be that they just can easily borrow that book from a library (as is my case, with a lot of books and journals I have used as sources on Wikipedia).

The profiling issue is beyond this discussion, and I will make sure to mention that on fawiki, but one can already "profile" users using their edits (it is quite easy for people to look at my edits on fawiki and realize that I read and write about Persian music based on my fawiki edits; knowing that I also use some of the books on this topic as my source wouldn't add much to the picture; of note, my real world life and identity is unrelated to Persian music or music in general, so profiles are not always as revealing anyway).

@John: I had not heard of mwparserfromhell and it is really cool! But how exactly does it come into play? The issue is less of being able to parse wikicode (what we really need is pretty much a regex search for the Persian equivalent of {{cite book}} template, and a second regex pattern that looks for the "name" parameter inside matches for the first one). Frankly, I am less worried about the steps *after* we found a "ciite book" instance, and more about the steps leading to it (running many many diffs).

Perhaps I am not fully understanding your thoughts, so please elaborate.

Thank you both!

On Thu, Dec 27, 2018 at 1:24 PM T Paris <tparis.wiki@gmail.com> wrote:

Could I ask that you guys make this an “opt in” feature. Both because it’ll speed up the bot and also because once you start identifying which books people own, you start to develop a profile on people.

v/r,
TP

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: Huji Lee
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2018 11:42 AM
To: Labs
Subject: [Cloud] List of users who have access to certain references

This is an idea that came up on fawiki, and there is some merit to it. I just want to figure out the best approach to implement it and would love your input.

TL;DR: We want to sweep through the recent edits in articles, look at each diff, see if it contains the addition of a "{{cite book}}" template, and if so, set it aside for future processing by another code.

I wonder if there are already scripts in pywikibot that would help initiate this. If not, I wonder what is the best strategy to implement this using MW API.

Thanks,
Huji

------------

Long version:

The idea is to identify users who probably have access to certain offline sources, so that if another user needs something to be checked in that source and they don't have access to it, they know who to ask. For instance, if I have access to a physical copy of Encyclopedia Britannica (let's say it is a book and is not available digitally), and you want me to check if it has an entry for Sir Isaac Newton, it would be great if instead of or in addition to asking on the village pump (which I might not follow), you would ask me directly.

The assumption is that if the same user keeps adding the same "{{cite book}}" template in many articles (e.g. if I add the {{cite book | title = Encyclopedia Britannica | ... }} in several edits across several articles), then that user most likely has access to that source. And if these edits are relatively recent and the user is still active, then chances are the user can still access that source if another user asks them to.

So if we find all such edits, we probably can aggregate them into a table that shows "Huji" added a {{cite book}} for a book titled "Encyclopedia Britannica" 17 times, and so on and so forth. Sorting it by the frequency column, we might have a good list of user-source pairs.

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