[14:00:20] Rhododendrites: no real easy solution. ideally you'd use past snapshots of the templatelinks table (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Templatelinks_table). Internet Archive might have old snapshots but I've never had great luck finding old snapshots of wiki dumps. i don't know of any edit tags or logging tables that would help you more quickly identify the addition of templates like infobox. i think you're right that you need to [14:00:20] go back to the edit history dumps and grab the page wikitext closest to your date of interest and use a regex to look for template names. [14:01:14] if you're working with smaller wikis, you could PAWS (https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/PAWS) or Toolforge to get local access to the dumps so you can avoid downloading/processing them locally at least [14:01:42] i say smaller because the jobs will almost certainly timeout if you try to do e.g., English Wikipedia [17:27:35] isaacj: thanks. how would I go about finding those snapshots on the internet archive? do you mean that there might be older quarry queries? I may not understand well how it works [17:29:04] Rhododendrites: never really had luck but this page suggests it's possible: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps/Finding_older_xml_dumps [17:30:26] i don't think any current systems like Quarry maintain old snapshots of the pages so your only hope really is using full history dumps or finding someone who is hosting the dump files from an older snapshot (but i assume all of that is the xml or sql.gz files, not the data loaded into a database you could query) [17:46:53] more basic question: while I keep up with a lot of the research, the stuff I've done myself has been more from a humanities perspective (some verbal data analysis which just involved downloading a few hundred pages and extracting lines with matching strings for coding, but that's not particularly helpful here). it's something I've been meaning to get more familiar with for a while now. can you recommend a resource that [17:46:53] would help a [more or less] beginner start working with the database? [17:59:43] hmmm well since one of the main things I want to look at is protection, maybe it would be easier to just download the whole protect log and play with that... [20:05:02] Rhododendrites: do you mean a SQL tutorial? Or a tutorial on the MediaWiki DB schema? [20:13:57] Nemo_bis: more the latter [20:14:49] Rhododendrites: the highest level overview is https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:MediaWiki_architecture#Database_and_text_storage [20:15:38] Rhododendrites: but if you're not already familiar with the data stracture of MediaWiki nor with databases, then it might be easier to look at some clients like https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mediawiki-utilities [20:44:34] Nemo_bis: thanks. I'll take a look :) [22:37:09] Rhododendrites: yes, I think the link from Nemo_bis is a good one. It's almost too big to have a simple overview so asking more specific questions as you run into issues is probably the best way to learn it. but generally, there are database tables that are nice and compact and store things that are important to the efficient operation of mediawiki (many tables are specific aspects of what pages link to what other pages -- e.g., [22:37:09] images, templates, wikilinks, etc.) if you're looking for code examples, the PAWS examples are good ones for that: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/PAWS/PAWS_examples_and_recipes