"Magnus Manske" magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote in message news:fab0ecb70701220032p2a20b5fcw86d18c916da7c5eb@mail.gmail.com...
I once posted the idea (which, of course, was ignored;-) to store the names and values of variables passed to templates from articles in a SQL table. If you write {{xyz|a=1|b=2}} in article BLA and save, it would store BLA | xyz | a | 1 BLA | xyz | b | 2 in said table. Applied to {{Persondata}} [1], you could search for a specific birth date, or for "%January%1980%" to find people born in January 1980, which you can not do with the current category system, even with intersections, AFAIK.
Given the amount of data we put in navboxes via templates, this is a vast repository of unharvested metadata, IMHO.
I have been working on a WikiDB extension that would work as a direct substitution for infoboxes (i.e. it would require the page to be edited, but it is the kind of edit that could be done by a bot).
The result would be visually identical, but it additionally adds the data to a named table that can then be queried.
See http://www.kennel17.co.uk/testwiki/WikiDB for details. I would appreciate some feedback!
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)