Hello all,
I am happy to announce that the Software-Development Team at WMDE (TCB) developed the so called “Deepcat” gadget [1] that is now ready to use not only in German wikis but also internationally.
The possibility for intersection and subcategory search was one of the top-wishes from the TOP20 of the Germany Community Technical Wishlist [2]. DeepCat acts as an interface between a graph database and MediaWiki's search engine. The Wiki's category structure is stored via their page-ids in the graph database while the Gadget does the translation of the search string, retrieves the information from the database and sends it to the search engine. Tool developers interested in exploring possibilities for using the CatGraph database can find more information on the respective infopage [3] or can approach us directly.
The Deepcat gadget allows to go deeper in the category search and generates results not only for a certain category but also for its subcategories. Furthermore, it supports intersection search (among others: searching for articles or pictures that are in two different categories e.g. “Art” and “Technology”). The gadget works on Wikipedia, on Wikimedia Commons, as well as in many other wikis [4]. For performance and technical reasons there is a search limitation of 15 categories in depth and 70 categories in total that the gadget can search through (you will see a hint about that while using the gadget). The gadget doesn’t load on mobile devices however once you switch to desktop-view, it should work as usual.
The gadget can be used via typing the keyword “deepcat:” into the regular search field. An instruction how to install Deepcat and a detailed description of its functionality can be found on its infopage [5]. Bugs can be reported on Phabricator [6].
We hope it will serve you well!
Cheers, Kasia
[1] https://github.com/wmde/DeepCat-Gadget [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Umfragen/Technische_W%C3%BCnsche/Top... [3] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Nova_Resource:Catgraph [4] https://tools.wmflabs.org/cgstat [5] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Nova_Resource:Catgraph/Deepcat [6] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/create/?projects=DeepCat-Ga...