On 08/01/11 17:29, Diederik van Liere wrote:
I am wondering whether the Mediawiki db contains a foreignkey relationship between a main namespace article and the associated talk page (if present).
We do not have any foreign key in the database schema. Constraints are handled at the application level (read: Mediawiki).
Having this information would greatly simplify analytic projects to monitor editor behaviour and understanding revert behaviour (among other topics).
Currently, I am manually matching these two sets of pages by matching titles.
That is how you have to do it. Finding a title with the same name but in the associated talk namespace. Core namespace are given a number between 0 and 99, by convention odd ones are the talk pages.
I have two questions:
- If this foreignkey does not exist, would it be worthwhile to create it?
I do not think we want to add database constraints. It is probably a good thing but I am almost sure it will break the software in a lot of different and "interesting" ways.
- If this foreignkey does exist, what would it take to expose this in
the XML dumps?
Maybe we can change the XML format. Adding a new field indicating there is a talk page for the given page should be trivial.