Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Miscellaneous/Provide a tool to efficiently analyze the usage of a template

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

Provide a tool to efficiently analyze the usage of a template

  • Problem: As in previous years (2017), 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 peculiarities 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 a year and a half old, some even more), and there is no interface (you need to know how to manipulate the URL to filter the information).
The tool https://tools.wmflabs.org/bambots/TemplateParam.php developped by User:Bamyers99 only supports Commons and enwiki. There is some interface, and according to the discussion of last year's proposal it provides live information upon request, but I can't really talk about its pros and cons as I didn't test the tool very much, as it doesn't support the wikis I regularly visit.
  • Who would benefit: Primarily users who curate and amend templates, secondarily authors who use templates in their articles.
  • Proposed solution: I don't know if it's better to amend one of the two tools I mentioned above or to build something new, but the following characteristics should be considered:
    • for the timeliness of data: For an efficient curation of templates we need to be able to analyze live data, not an old dump. Permanently scanning the entire wikiverse sounds like an overkill, providing an analysis on request seems fine for me.
    • scope: I think it is fair to ask for a tool that is able to analyse all Wikimedia wikis, not just a couple of popular wikis.
    • features: The tool should be able to answer different inquiries such as:
      • table of all pages which use a template with all parameters (like this)
      • sortable list of articles in which parameter X is defined.
      • list of articles in which parameter X is defined as or contains Y (with Y being a regular expression).
    • usability: The tool should have an interface which is easy to get to grips with, lets say similar to petscan.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets: phab:T120767
  • Proposer: → «« Man77 »» [de] 21:49, 6 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Voting