Re: [Wikitech-l] Linking from Wikipedia articles to local library resources

See http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/glam/2013-March/000361.html & http://everybodyslibraries.com/2013/03/04/from-wikipedia-to-our-libraries/ : "how do we get people from Wikipedia articles to the related offerings of our local libraries?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Library_resources_box "create a sidebar box with links to resources about (or by) the topic of a Wikipedia article in a reader’s library, or in another library a reader might want to consult." And more! "As with most things related to Wikipedia, this service is experimental, and subject to change (and, hopefully, improvement) over time. I’d love to hear thoughts and suggestions from users and maintainers of Wikipedia and libraries." John, since you said you're new to template-building, you might enjoy learning about what the new Lua templating system gives you: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Scribunto/Lua_reference_manual

Thanks! The Lua capabilities look interesting. I could see them potentially making it possible to eventually implement some or all of the "smarts" of the service in Wikipedia itself. (Right now, my templates simply package up some arguments to a CGI-script forwarder I run on my end, which does the figuring out of what library to query, how to formulate a query, and what library headings or other query terms to use, for a given Wikipedia source.) I hope to publish data and source for my service once things quiet down a little bit here (right now, I'm keeping pretty busy with library requests and queries). Though the source isn't something that can simply be installed and run as-is (it's got some hooks into Online Books code, and is implemented in Perl), it might be useful for people looking to port it or do similar applications.