finding things in the wiki?

[ratcreature]

I have a question about searches in the wiki via the the "what links here" function.

As I mentioned in my last post, right now I'm putting fanzines that are being added or have been added in lists so that people using the wiki might have a chance to find them. The problem is that finding the fanzines that have pages is not always easy for me. The search engine is less than helpful, and I was trying to find a way around the lack of the fandom category. So I figured out (fanlore is really the first wiki I'm using a lot) that clicking on the "what links here" link in not too large fandoms works as a decent substitute as most pages that link to a fandom are related to it, because the zines usually link to all fandoms they belong to. However in large fandoms there are naturally a lot of pages that aren't fanzines, so what would be really awesome would be if you could somehow combine queries.

What I mean is that the wiki can tell me what pages link to say "The Sentinel" and it can tell me what pages are in the "Category:Zine", so is there some way I can get the wiki to tell me the overlap, i.e. what pages both link to "The Sentinel" AND belong to "Category:Zines"? I mean, surely the wiki must be able to tell me that somehow?

Comments

[morgandawn]

the only other fan wiki I;ve ever seen handles zines like this
Category: Zines
Category: Starsky & Hutch Zines

I was easily able to find it and click and found all the fanzines in my fandom

Fanlore needs a better way to handle media. I am also new to wikis but I think expecting people to clinks on "what links here" and then wading through every link for every topic that connects to that fandom is not easy. Look at this and try to figure out how to find the Due South fanzines
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Special:Whatlinkshere/Due_South


But to answer your question: I don;t think there is a way to sort out the links - because Categories and 'what pages link here" are different. There is a spot below 'what links here" for subpages - http://fanlore.org/wiki/Due_South/Fanzines
But they only connect to one page. And unless someone goes in and manually adds each zine as it is added to the wiki, the page will be incomplete. Plus not every fandom has a dedicated page for zines in x fandom

what we need is a zine template that had preloaded categories linking the template to category: zines + category: fandomX zines

[ratcreature]

yeah, I've been creating these sub-pages so that people would have that kind of list. And I mean I think having those would be useful even if the categories were better because after finding the zines by going through the wiki slowly and gathering all up as first step, I've then been reformatting them into tables adding the publishing year and such from the individiual pages. But frankly I feel like an idiot having to go through lengthy lists of entries clickin pages upon pages to see which zines go into which fandom, when I'd hoped a content management system such a wiki that already has the data ought to present it to me somehow. :( I imagined that somehow the content could be queried with Boolean operators like in databases.

If the what links here and the categories were too different for that I'd also take a "what links to Sentinel AND fanzine" that would cut things down too.

[melina]

I'll add looking into more robust search plugins as an item on our bug/issues list.

[ratcreature]

That would be awesome.

From GreenReaper

[greenreaper.livejournal.com]

It sounds like you need DynamicPageList (//www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DynamicPageList_%28third-party%29) with the linksto (//semeb.com/dpldemo/index.php?title=DPL:Manual_-_DPL_parameters:_Criteria_for_page_selection#linksto) and category (//semeb.com/dpldemo/index.php?title=DPL:Manual_-_DPL_parameters:_Criteria_for_page_selection#category) selectors.