Wikipedia:Reading infoboxes

In January 2016 I proposed a system for automatically extracting information from infobox templates. Such a system was also suggested in the 2010 paper Extracting Structured Information from Wikipedia Articles to Populate Infoboxes.^[1]

Uses

Searching Wikipedia
Helping with the creation and addition of categories or lists on Wikipedia
Helping with Wikidata
Data mining Wikipedia

Examples

One could search all books that use the {{Infobox book}} template and its subject parameter for searching books about a certain topic. So for instance if I'm interested in technological automation and would like to find notable books on Wikipedia about the subject I could search for subject:automation which brings up all books which have the word "automation" somewhere in their |subject= parameter (e.g. Automate This). Wikilinks as parameter-values could also allow for that search to be linked on the respective/relevant Wikipedia articles so that one could find books with Wikipedia articles about whatever topic one is currently reading about.

By now for such things one has to use other websites, Google or Wikipedia categories (in this case Category:Works about automation; however many subjects don't have their own categories).

The above example could be used for creating a new Category:Books about automation. The potential level of automation for the creation of a category by this ranges from simply being an aid to an editor who is looking for articles to add a category to to identifying possible new categories by detecting terms, wikilinks or other parameter-values with multiple occurrences in specific infoboxes. Of course this might also be a help to creating or expanding lists; in this case List of books about automation.

Current methods

The insource-search can be used to search for articles with a specified infobox and term used anywhere in the article. However this doesn't just search within the infobox parameter values but the whole article. Example: 'insource:/[Ii]nfobox book.*[Aa]utomation/'

References

^ Lange, Dustin; Böhm, Christoph; Naumann, Felix (1 January 2010). "Extracting Structured Information from Wikipedia Articles to Populate Infoboxes" (PDF). Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. ACM: 1661–1664. doi:10.1145/1871437.1871698. Retrieved 29 January 2017.

[1] Lange, Dustin; Böhm, Christoph; Naumann, Felix (1 January 2010). "Extracting Structured Information from Wikipedia Articles to Populate Infoboxes" (PDF). Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. ACM: 1661–1664. doi:10.1145/1871437.1871698. Retrieved 29 January 2017.

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