On 1/11/06, AndrĂ¡s Kardos k.andris@gmail.com wrote:
Using this you could look up things/people that happened, borned, died or whatever on a given day. Or things that happened in Tokyo, or in 1923, and put that on a Google Map. Look at Wikipedia as an intelligent "who's who" (searching not only by name). Or list books or movies that have wiki pages about them. Possibilities are quite broad. Look up pages that are in multiple indexes, "events" and "presidents of the world" for example.
There are a couple of hacks and extensions for mediawiki which can automate some of this.
One allows you to create a list from the information for different categories. So you can create a list of all pages in [category x} and {category y} but not {category z}.
Another lets you do similar things, but with backlinks.
I don't think either would ever make it into mediawiki code or into the Wikipedia if they are very cpu-intensive to operate.
I don't like the idea of editors needing to do things like this manually. I like the idea of having mediawiki do it Martin mentioned Google.. they index wikipedia very well, and it's a "free" * way to have good indexing done.
* Not totally free because of advertising on search result pages.