Could I ask that you guys make this an “opt in” feature. Both because it’ll
speed up the bot and also because once you start identifying which books people
own, you start to develop a profile on people.
v/r,
TP
Sent from Mail for Windows 10
From: Huji Lee
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2018 11:42 AM
To: Labs
Subject: [Cloud] List of users who have access to certain references
This is an idea that came up on fawiki, and there is some merit to it. I just
want to figure out the best approach to implement it and would love your input.
TL;DR: We want to sweep through the recent edits in articles, look at each
diff, see if it contains the addition of a "{{cite book}}" template, and if so,
set it aside for future processing by another code.
I wonder if there are already scripts in pywikibot that would help initiate
this. If not, I wonder what is the best strategy to implement this using MW API.
Thanks,
Huji
------------
Long version:
The idea is to identify users who probably have access to certain offline
sources, so that if another user needs something to be checked in that source
and they don't have access to it, they know who to ask. For instance, if I have
access to a physical copy of Encyclopedia Britannica (let's say it is a book
and is not available digitally), and you want me to check if it has an entry
for Sir Isaac Newton, it would be great if instead of or in addition to asking
on the village pump (which I might not follow), you would ask me directly.
The assumption is that if the same user keeps adding the same "{{cite book}}"
template in many articles (e.g. if I add the {{cite book | title = Encyclopedia
Britannica | ... }} in several edits across several articles), then that user
most likely has access to that source. And if these edits are relatively recent
and the user is still active, then chances are the user can still access that
source if another user asks them to.
So if we find all such edits, we probably can aggregate them into a table that
shows "Huji" added a {{cite book}} for a book titled "Encyclopedia Britannica"
17 times, and so on and so forth. Sorting it by the frequency column, we might
have a good list of user-source pairs.
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