List of users who have access to certain references - Cloud

27 Dec 2018

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

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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.