Disputatio Vicipaediae:PetScan

de initio huius paginae

"CatScan is a tool for selecting articles by intersecting categories and categories/templates. It can seek down a given level of categories (recursive search)."--Rol, can you expand upon that a bit, so I can give a proper latin version?--Ioshus Rocchio 04:00, 11 Iunii 2006 (UTC)

contenta mota ex pagina Disputatio Categoriae:Poetae saeculo digesti

Useful?

This series seems to have been started without discussion. It could well be a very good way to divide up our Categoria:Poetae (since they should all divided by country and by language already): do we agree to continue it? Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 14:11, 7 Novembris 2010 (UTC)

I wonder whether categorizing poets by century is worth to our readers the effort of those who maintain this category: The information is more or less already present in our category system (categories for year/century of birth and year/century of death are already present). Poets by century can thus already be queried (example query: poets born in the 17th century) using CatScan. This possibility, however, is admittedly too little known and maybe rather difficult to use for first-time users. Possibly improving our help page on CatScan and/or putting a template explaining how to query people-by-century or the like would eliminate the need to create and maintain these nearly-redundant categories? --UV 23:09, 7 Novembris 2010 (UTC)

That query fails to find Gulielmus Shakesperius, a nontrivial seventeenth-century poet. IacobusAmor 12:08, 8 Novembris 2010 (UTC)

No doubt because he was born in the 16th century. UV's search happened to be for those born in the 17th century. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 12:42, 8 Novembris 2010 (UTC)

No doubt. IacobusAmor 12:45, 8 Novembris 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I've just checked. Adjusting the search to those born in the 16th century catches him; no doubt searching for those who died in the 17th century (which might be a wiser option generally) would also catch him. The problem with that CatScan page is that it's too powerful: too many options for the beginner (but I guess some of those options are offered as default). If we could guide the beginner to the most useful choices, it would be even handier. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 13:03, 8 Novembris 2010 (UTC)

I must say I was too little aware of the CatScan option myself :) Thanks for the example. Whatever we decide in this case, I agree that CatScan could save us a lot of time in cross-categorization. To offer a good help page about this method will be an excellent idea. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 09:57, 8 Novembris 2010 (UTC)

I am thinking about adding a table like the one below to Categoria:Homines and all of its subcategories. I might (if I have some time during the next few days or weeks) write a program that extracts the relevant data from a dump. Thoughts? Should I go ahead and try to write such a program?

The "explicatio et opes" link could link to a dedicated help page that explains how to use CatScan for the purpose of querying people-by-year-of-death.

(I am aware that the figures currently given in the table below are grossly illogical, they are just for the purpose of testing.)

{{Homines hac in categoria secundum annum ultimum vitae}}

--UV 00:03, 9 Novembris 2010 (UTC)

This looks to me potentially an extremely useful facility. It builds on our basic categorisation of birth and death dates, in which we are much more consistent than many other wikis, and saves us from the double effort of cross-categorising (which could never be complete anyway). So long as we then offer good guidance at the CatScan page. I'm happy to work on that.

Looking again at the CatScan options, I think anyone who wanted to do this could use it to produce a list page in Vicipaedia, e.g. of living architects or 19th century poets.

I see that it is also possible for us to translate Magnus Manske's CatScan interface into Latin. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 09:40, 9 Novembris 2010 (UTC)

Please see Categoria:Homines and Categoria:Poetae (where I have added the template for testing purposes), and the example above. The formatting does not look too good, but the data is usable. Please feel free to improve the formatting of the template! Whenever you think that this template should be added to all ~3000 category pages below Categoria:Homines (with Categoria:Homines secundum annum natalem and Categoria:Homines secundum annum ultimum vitae and their subcategories excluded, because the template would not make much sense there), just tell me, Usor:UVbot can do this easily. Greetings, --UV 00:46, 15 Novembris 2010 (UTC)

I have made small changes to the wording (I hope that's OK) and I have now worked on the page Vicipaedia:CatScan. I have one point of doubt: pages on which this formula is used seem to be slow to load. Is that likely always to be the case? Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 14:39, 15 Novembris 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for your improvements! I fear that the long time these pages take to load is likely to be always the case whenever the page or the template or the data was changed and the page is constructed for the first time (subsequent queries to the same page should run fine). I do not know what exactly causes the slow loading time – Robert Baruch's Data Asteroidum templates appear to use the same system and they run fine. In the worst case, Wikimedia's server administrators will tell us to stop using the template, if the slow loading times not only adversely affect user experience but also adversely affect server performance. --UV 00:07, 16 Novembris 2010 (UTC)

Wow, we don't want to be the straw that breaks the camel's back! My impression, late yesterday, was that all of Wikipedia was running slow. Well, if it's likely to happen only when the data is updated, we could surely live with it! It seems a very useful guide to users about what further information they can derive. Let's see if anyone else comments, and then roll it out (as people say these days). Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 09:54, 16 Novembris 2010 (UTC)

I have asked the template experts at de:Wikipedia:WikiProjekt Vorlagen/Werkstatt (WikiProject Templates on de.wikipedia) what they think/have to say about the performance issue. --UV 21:54, 18 Novembris 2010 (UTC)

I followed the expert's advice – in my view, performance is much better now. It is still not as good as would be desirable, but in my view, performance is acceptable now, what do you think? --UV 00:40, 20 Novembris 2010 (UTC)

I'm afraid I missed this last comment of yours. Just for the record, I agree that performance is now quite acceptable! Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 20:14, 21 Ianuarii 2011 (UTC)