DPL:Overview

Assume you have written some articles about countries. Typically these articles will have three things in common:

• They will belong to a common category
• They will have a similar chapter structure, i.e. they will contain sections named 'Religion' or 'History'
• They will use a template which is used to present highly structured short data items ('Capital', 'Inhabitants', ..) in a nice way (e.g. as a wikitable)

DPL generates reports on articles

Let us assume that there is an article on Islam. You want to give some information about the spreading of this religion over various countries. But you do not want to create redundancy by repeating information that was already given in the articles on each country.

In our scenario the natural approach with DPL would be to generate a list of 'countries' (=category) where Islam plays a role (i.e. restrict your selection to articles of category 'Country' which contain a link to 'Islam'). Typically you would want to include part of the text chapter on 'Religion' from each of the relevant countries. You might also want to give the number of inhabitants for each country. The output should be shown as an alphabetically ordered table. It would be nice if the user could easily sort the table by inhabitants or some other criteria.

DPL can

• generate a list of all those articles (or a random sample)
• show metadata of the articles
• show one or more chapters of the articles
• show parameter values which are passed to the common template
• order articles appropriately
• present the result in a sortable table (e.g.)
• use multi column output

Which steps are necessary?

Find the articles you want to list:

• select by a logical combination (AND,OR,NOT) of categories
• specify a range for the number of categories the article must be assigned to
• select by a logical combination (AND,OR,NOT) of namespaces
• define a pattern which must match the article´s name
• name a page to which the article must or must not refer
• name pages from which the article must be referenced
• name a template which the article must or must not use
• name a user which must or must not have created or modified the article
• exclude or include redirections
• restrict your selection to revisions before/after a certain date
• restrict your selection based on the contents of included chapters

Order the result list of articles according to

• name
• date of last change
• popularity
• user who changed them last
• size
• restrict the output to the fist n articles or to a random sample
• use descending or ascending sequence

Define attributes you want to see

• article name
• article namespace
• article size
• date of last change
• date of last access
• user who changed them last

Define contents you want to show

• link to article, image, category
• use category, show image
• include whole article
• include contents of certain chapters (identified by headings)
• include text portions (defined by special marker tags in the article)
• show values of template calls

Define the output format

• specify a headline
• use ordered list, unordered list
• use tables, sorted tables (using javascript)
• use category style listing
• truncate title or contents to maximum length
• add a link to the article or to one or more of its chapters