"Magnus Manske" <magnusmanske(a)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)