Cormac, puzzling why your Aug 11 post is missing.
As for the task of finding what links here, you could do the low tech hack of just sending a hand crafted URL that sends back the first 5000 links, like this query that finds out how many folks link to WP:POINT:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=W...
I use 5000 since the last time I checked, the most any query will return is 5000 for db performance reasons. If there are more than 5000, alter the "offest" number to 1, then rinse, lather and repeat.
At least that way, you're not having to hack XML, SQL, Python.
If you know some shell scripting, then you can automate this somewhat with curl/wget to automate the fetching of these pages, then use some combo of grep/wc to actually find out how many user page, project pages, talk pages, etc link to policy pages.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
On 8/21/05, Cormac Lawler cormaggio@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, Just something that occurs to me as I write up my dissertation - I keep on thinking it would be nice to be able to cite some basic figures to back up a point I am making, eg. how many times Wikipedia is edited on a given day or how many pages link to this policy page - as I asked in an email to the wikipedia-l list, which has mysteriously vanished from the archives (August 11, entitled "What links here?"). I realise these could be done by going to the recent changes or special pages and counting them all, but I'm basically too lazy to do that - we're talking about thousands of pages here, right? I'm also thinking this is something that many people would be interested in finding out and writing about. So what I'm asking is that to help researchers generally, wouldn't it be an idea to identify some quick database hacks that we could provide - almost like a kate's tools function? Or are these available on the MediaWiki pages? If they are, and I've looked at some database related pages, they're certainly not so understandable from the perspective of someone who just wants to use basic functions. You might be thinking of sending me to a page like http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Links_table - but *what does it mean?* Can someone either help me out, or suggest what we could do about this in the future?
Cheers, Cormac _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l