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.

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  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:/[Iinfobox book.*[Aa]utomation/' ]