[Toolserver-l] Experimental: Live template value search

[Magnus Manske]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 6:15 PM, Christopher Sahnwaldt
<jcsahnwaldt at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 10:25, Daniel Kinzler <daniel at brightbyte.de> wrote:
>> Magnus Manske schrieb:
>>> All in all, it would be much better directly integrated into MediaWiki
>>> (no need for text retrieval/parsing, no bulk updates). But I've been
>>> saying that for years, at least this is a first attempt.
>>
>> Actually, this is part of my grand plan for world domination. I'm pushing for it
>> behind the scenes... I have a few ideas on how it may be done nicely.
>>
>> I think the main problem is that semantic mediawiki looks like the obvious
>> answer. But i doubt it is. I only want a small subset of that functionality on
>> wikipedia. Maybe SMW can be chopped up to fit that, but i'm personally more
>> inclined to extend the RDF extension to store triples in the DB.
>
> I'm pretty new to MediaWiki and I'm not sure if I understand
> this correctly... Here's my attempt at spelling it out in a bit
> more detail:
>
> When a user edits a page and sends the new text to the
> server, the server / the RDF extension parses the text, extracts
> the desired data and saves it in a RDF store.
>
> I hope I got that about right - please correct me if not!
>
> Now when I think about the pros and cons of having this
> process run integrated in MediaWiki or on a different server,
> a few questions come up... again, I'm new to MediaWiki,
> so these may be newbie questions... :-)
>
> How much parsing does MediaWiki currently do when it stores
> new text for an article? Are templates expanded / transcluded?

Yes. It is parsed to generate HTML, which is then cached, and some
metadata like categories, which are already stored in the respective
tables.

> How are updates distributed? Do subscribers regularly poll
> the server for recent changes? Or is there some kind of
> store-and-forward / publish-subscribe?

There is a RSS/ATOM feed, but that's it in terms of "pushing". There's
an extensive API, though:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php

Cheers,
Magnus

P.S.: DBpedia does great work, it would just be so much better to have
it all live and in one place...