User defined structural searches in mediawiki

Abstract

Wikipedia has been the poster child of user contributed content using the space of MediaWiki as the canvas on which to write. While well suited for authoring simple hypermedia documents, MediaWiki does not lend itself easily to let the author create dynamically assembled documents, or create pages that monitor other pages. While it is possible to create such "special" pages, it requires PHP coding and thus administrative rights to the MediaWiki server. We present in this paper work on a structural query language (MediaWiki Query Language - MWQL) to allow users to add dynamically evaluated searches to ordinary wiki-pages.