[Commons-l] Category intersection: New extension available

[Ilya Haykinson]

For what it's worth, the extension
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/DynamicPageList has been in use on
various Wikimedia sites for a while now with great success to allow
for category intersections, and I think the latest versions support
image galleries etc.

-ilya

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 1:16 PM, Magnus Manske
<magnusmanske at googlemail.com> wrote:
> (cross-posting wikitech-l and commons-l)
>
>  I created a new extension ("CategoryIntersection") that allows for
>  quick lookup of pages (and image) in intersecting categories. That
>  would enable wiki(m|p)edia sites to use categories as tags,
>  eliminating the need for oh-so-specialized categories.
>
>  Intersection of two categories works very fast, but intersecting more
>  categories is possible, and already implemented; the maximum number
>  can be limited.
>
>  I tried it on my (mostly empty) MediaWiki test setup, and it works
>  peachy. However, *I NEED HELP* with
>  * testing it on a large-scale installation
>  * integrating it with MediaWiki more tightly (database wrappers, caching, etc.)
>  * Brionizing the code, so it actually has a chance to be used on
>  Wikipedia and/or Commons
>
>
>  Techinical notes:
>  * This was recently discussed on wikitech-l
>  * More than two intersections are implemented by nesting subqueries
>  * Hash values are implemented as VARCHAR(32). Could easily switch to
>  INTEGER if desirable (less storage, faster lookup, but more false
>  positives)
>  * The hash values will only give good candidates (pages that *might*
>  intersect in these categories). The candidates have then to be checked
>  in a second run, which will have to be optimized; database people to
>  the front!
>  * Table to store hash values has to be created manually; SQL is in the main file
>  * I didn't implement code to fill the table for an existing
>  installation; however, since hash table updates solely hang on the
>  LinksUpdate hook, this should be easy
>  * There is no code covering page moves and deletions yet; do those
>  hang on LinksUpdate as well?
>  * SQL queries are currently "plain text" and not constructed through
>  the DB wrappers; I wan't sure how to do that for the subqueries
>
>  Cheers,
>  Magnus
>
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