Is there a tool already (or "how hard would it be?") which would show the user what is said about article X in other articles. It seems to me that there are a lot of easy content additions that might be found that way and used to flesh out stubs and other shorter articles. What is motivating this is because I often find that "what links here" often points to some surprising articles which can reveal new insights into a topic. I often write about places. Often I think "oh, this one's nothing special" and suddenly "what links here" reveals some interesting events that occurred there. Discovery of a famous fossil or a big role in World War II or the birthplace of someone quite famous. So I am wondering if there is a way to automate this process a bit by quickly drilling down to the relevant chunk of the article content rather than having to read/search the whole thing.
That is, if I was writing the article [[Bang Bang Jump Up]], I would want a list along the lines of:
* From article [[Winston Churchill]] within section "After the Second World War" : On 23 July 1944 at [[Bang Bang Jump Up]], he met [[Harry Truman]] to discuss the establishment of the [[United Nations]].
(False news alert: These world leaders did not meet at Bang Bang Jump Up, but let's pretend they did.)
That is, a list of the articles with the sentence/para containing the link or +/- N chars before or after the link, whatever's feasible to create an intelligible snippet without having to read the whole article.
I am assuming here that article X is linked from Y (I'm not considering text mentions). Of course, the success of the tool is its ability to pick what might be most relevant. Nobody wants to wade through a list of irrelevant mentions. So I would want to stick to links occurring in the prose of the article body rather than navbox transclusions, links in citations, templates and so forth. I also think that ordering the list by some "likely to be most useful" metric would be beneficial (or ideally the ability of the user to fiddle with those choices at run-time). Now until one has such a tool to get experience with, it's hard to know what might constitute more "relevant". But some metrics might be:
* The relative importance of the topics. I suspect if a more important topic is mentioning a less important topic, it might be more relevant. Winston Churchill is more important than Bang Bang Jump Up.
* The relative quality of the articles. I suspect if a high quality article is mentioning a low quality article, it might be more relevant. Winston Church is a higher quality article than Bang Bang Jump Up.
* Being tagged by the same WikiProject (or not within the same WikiProject). Not sure which would likely be more relevant but it might be interesting to explore. It's unlikely Winston Churchill and Bang Bang Jump Up are in the same WikiProject.
* The other article is not already linked in this article. That is, if Bang Bang Jump Up already links to Winston Churchill, then probably this is less likely to be "new information" for the Bang Bang Jump Up article.
Anyhow, do we have a tool that does something along these lines? If not, is there a student project here? :)
Kerry