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.