On 8/21/05, Cormac Lawler cormaggio@gmail.com wrote:
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.
This is all Klingon to me - is there an encyclopedia of that somewhere? :-)
Looking back, it would have been useful to have a "research tools" section at Wikimania, during the days before the formal conference. Jakob V. and Erik Z. touched on some of this, by discussing some of the visualization tools and software tools they used, but it might be useful to have a step-by-step hands-on session for folks who don't know much about UNIX command line and text processing tools. We should definitely make it a part of WM2006.
Unfortunately, my suggestion of a roundtable for research didn't materialize. But we should keep the conversation going. Perhaps a tutorial on Meta on where to start when using Wikipedia data for research.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)