Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Miscellaneous/Provide a tool to efficiently analyze the usage of a template

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Provide a tool to efficiently analyze the usage of a template

  • Problem: Like last year, again I want to raise your attention to the fact that working with often used templates and making changes to them is a mess. Why? There is no tool or handy way to get to grips how the template has actually been used and which options one has to consider (or which pages where the template is used need to be edited) when rewriting a template. The tool https://tools.wmflabs.org/templatetiger/ written by User:Kolossos has been helpful for many years, but instead of providing live information it is based on dumps (most half a year old, some two years or even more), and there is no interface (you need to know how to manipulate the URL to filter the information). As someone wrote in last year's survey: While I have big respect to Kolossos' instrument, it's just not enough.
  • Who would benefit: Primarily users who curate and amend templates, secondarily authors who use templates in their articles
  • Proposed solution: Don't know if it is more likely to get Kolossos' tool improved or to get a whole new tool. Solutions that I'd like to see anyway:
    • For the timeliness of data: It'd be nice and a good start if there were at least a monthly update / a monthly dump that reliably gets fed into the tool. Having live data, of course, would be even more helpful.
    • Improving UX and usability: Please provide some interface to facilitate for example searching for a certain text in a certain template parameter, make the table sortable by mouseclick. The dream solution is an interface like the one we know from petscan.
  • More comments:

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