Wikipedia:Request a query

This is a page for requesting one-off database queries for certain criteria. Users who are interested and able to perform SQL queries on the projects can provide results from the Quarry website.

You may also be interested in the following:

• If you are interested in writing SQL queries or helping out here, visit our tips page.
• If you need to obtain a list of article titles that meet certain criteria, consider using PetScan (user manual) or the default search. Petscan can generate list of articles in subcategories, articles which transclude some template, etc.
• If you need to make changes to a number of articles based on a particular query, you can post to the bot requests page, depending on how many changes are needed.
• For long-term review and checking, database reports are available.

Quarry does not have access to page content, so queries which require checking wikitext cannot be answered with Quarry. However, someone may be able to assist by using Quarry in another way (e.g. checking the table of category links rather than the "Category:" text) or suggest an alternative tool.

Page table slow query

Any way to speed up this page table query? CirrusSearch does it fast, but maybe elasticsearch has its own indexing or something to help make it fast. –Novem Linguae (talk) 18:08, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

Yes, CirrusSearch has full-text indices on page titles, while the main db only has normal (prefix) ones.

Using the page_name_title index speeds this sort of query up considerably, since titles not matching '%.js' can be filtered out there (even though every title still needs to be looked at, the whole row won't need to be fetched). There's no way to force that, though, since we only have access to views. Sometimes you can fool the optimizer into the indexed search if you say which namespaces you want instead of the ones you don't, even if the list is long, something like WHERE page_namespace IN (0,1,3,4,5,6,7,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,100,101,118,119,710,711,828,829), but that doesn't work here. So you're going to have to partition it into several (well, lots of) queries that look small enough that the optimizer uses the index instead of a full table scan - WHERE page_namespace = 0 AND page_title < 'M', WHERE page_namespace =0 AND page_title >= 'M', and so on for the other possible namespaces. —Cryptic 00:38, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

An alternate approach: since you know that there won't be many titles ending in '.js' except in userspace and mediawiki:, find the titles yourself by grepping enwiki-20240601-all-titles.gz from a dump. Link to all of them from a page in your userspace, then you can use pagelinks to find them in a query and check page_content_model and page_restrictions. —Cryptic 04:19, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

Links in common between two pages, with a twist

I realize PetScan can be used to show links that appear on two pages, but I have a need for it to show such a result sorted by the order in which they appear on the first page. Based on my limited understanding of the database, I don't think the order of the links on a page are tracked. But just in case I'm wrong, can someone show me a query to do this? Or suggest an alternative approach? Thanks. Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 23:49, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

No, that's not possible; Quarry doesn't contain information about the content of the page.

Could you give some additional information about what you want this for? There are several alternative approaches that would work, but I need to know a little more about what you want it for. BilledMammal (talk) 23:53, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

I thought Quarry knows the links on a page, so that's where I was coming from. Anyway, I have a page that shows links sorted by popularity (views, descending) and another page that shows links to articles having old issues. I'd like an intersection of the links between them, in order of popularity (order of appearance on first page). Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 00:03, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

It can see which pages a given page links to (or is linked from), but doesn't have any information on what order it's done in - that would need the page content.

Is this a one-time query, or will you need it repeated? —Cryptic 00:08, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

I'd like for it to be repeatable as the underlying pages will change. I'm fine with having to run it manually. Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 00:10, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

(edit conflict) It does, but it doesn't have information beyond that, such as about the text of the page.

I'm not aware of any tools that can help you with that, but I threw together the information you wanted using a quick and dirty script:

BilledMammal (talk) 00:23, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

I see you want something that can run repeatedly. I don't have time right now to put something together for you, but if Cryptic doesn't come up with something I'll do it sometime in the next couple of weeks - if I don't, feel free to remind me on my talk page. BilledMammal (talk) 00:24, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the list - that's good for a start. Would you mind giving me a few clues on your approach for the script you did? It might snap me into figuring it out. Also, I have thought of using a spreadsheet or text compare software, but was hoping for an on-wiki or otherwise online approach. Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 00:40, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

A few Regex operations to get just the links in order, and then a basic python script that works down the first list and if the item exists on the second outputs it. Unfortunately, nothing online ATM. BilledMammal (talk) 00:49, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the tips! Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 00:50, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Any pure-sql-against-the-wmf-databases approach would have to start with something similar to either "Make a page in your userspace with redlinks to 1!Tom Cruise, 2!Muhammad Ali, ... 1000!Frank Torre" or "manually edit this stupidly long query that includes all that data" (like how quarry:query/81948 includes the namespace names, but with a thousand items instead of 30). —Cryptic 01:04, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Indeed, those don't seem like tenable approaches. But this discussion has helped me figure out a solution, not optimal but workable:

1. Copy popular articles wikitext into a text editor, and break down into a flat list using a macro I constructed with regex and other tricks.
2. Use PetScan to create a flat list of articles with old issues (this didn't have to be in any particular order).
3. Insert both flat lists into their own column in a spreadsheet, then find matches of first column entries in the second column, then apply a filter of matches, and voila.

Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 04:18, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Redirects with Possibilities

Any way for someone to provide me a list from Category:Redirect-Class Green Bay Packers articles of redirects with possibilities ({{R with possibilities}}). Thank you! « Gonzo fan2007 (talk) @ 19:19, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

My first thought was WP:PETSCAN, but it looks like Category:Redirect-Class Green Bay Packers articles is on talk pages, whereas Category:Redirects with possibilities is on article pages. So yeah, will need an SQL query. Will see if I can whip something up. Testing note: 1994 NFC Wild Card playoff game (Detroit–Green Bay) meets the criteria and should appear in the result set. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:46, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Got it. Here you go. quarry:query/84446. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:58, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Thank you Novem Linguae! « Gonzo fan2007 (talk) @ 21:07, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

First edit

In 2013, I heard that about a quarter of newcomers' first edits were to create a page, and three-quarters were to edit an existing page. (My own first edit was to a Talk: page, which was a distinctly unpopular choice.)

For editors who made their first edit during 2023, is it possible to find out how many of those first edits were page creations vs editing existing pages, and which namespaces they happened in? I imagine a set of numbers like this:

Namespace	New page	Existing page
Article	5339	24209
Talk	249	3590
User	1934	781
User talk	429	9045
Draft	1930	89

all adding up to 100% of first edits. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:06, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

Lots of ways for this to go wrong. Consider deleted edits, and that there's no way to reliably tell where a page was when an edit was made to it (unless it's also in the page creation log, but that still means at least half the data is bad). Also no way to tell which of two deleted edits with the same timestamp was actually earlier, but a user making a second edit in the same second as their first is going to be rare enough that we can just pick one. Getting a list of users whose first edit was in 2023 is impractical; a list of users created in 2023 and have made at least one edit is at least close, so that's what I'm doing. quarry:query/84486 should finish in about 15 minutes. It may or may not be right - I haven't seen the results yet - but I've got to get to bed. Will take another look tomorrow. —Cryptic 07:47, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

Hm, corrected query finished a lot faster than the obviously-broken ones I ran before (which is usually to be expected, but I didn't think the data would cache that well). Something's not quite right - there shouldn't have that row with the completely blank namespace and 52458 existing-page edits, for starters, and that one creating a page in the MediaWiki namespace looks really suspicious - but otherwise the numbers seem at least plausible. —Cryptic 07:59, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

Pretty sure I know why the blank namespace happened, should be fixed when it completes again. The first-edit-was-to-namespace-8 was at MediaWiki:Campaigns-event-discovery-survey-question. —Cryptic 08:15, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

If we ran that for, say, last week, would that give us an estimate of how many first edits are being 'lost' or 'misplaced' due to deletion and moving pages? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:34, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

Well, I can run the numbers (quarry:query/84512), but I don't know how much to infer from the comparison with the longer time period. The only edits that are going to be 'lost' are ones that have been revdeleted or oversighted, and in most cases - other than, perhaps for copyvio revdels - that will happen pretty quickly after they're made. I wouldn't care to guess how quickly a typical page gets moved between namespaces after creation, either. —Cryptic 08:17, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

Does it only lose revdel edits, and not ordinary/whole page deletion?

A lot of deletions for WP:UGLY articles happen after draftification, and borderline articles often don't get draftified for a couple of weeks. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:00, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

Just revdelled and suppressed edits. Everything about deleted pages and edits except for edit summaries and page text is in the public database replicas; accounting for those is most of why the query is as complex as it is. —Cryptic 10:52, 2 July 2024 (UTC)

So here are a few things I notice:

• Last week, 4,754 newbies made their first edit on an existing page and 1,842 newbies made their first edit to a new page.
• Last week, if your first edit was to an existing page, then about 90% of the time, it was to the [i.e., a page most recently in] mainspace.
• Last week, if your first edit was to create a new page, then about 70% of the time, it was to the User: namespace and about 20% of the time, it was to the Draft: space.
• Within the first week, about a third of User: space pages and a third of Draft: space pages get deleted.
• In 2023, 342,087 newbies made their first edit to an existing page and 144,181 newbies made their first edit to a new page.
• In 2023, if your first edit was to an existing page, then about 90% of the time, it was to the mainspace.
• In 2023, if your first edit was to create a new page, then about 70% of the time, it was to the User: namespace and about 20% of the time, it was to the Draft: space.
• Within the last 18 months, looking at pages created on the first edit during 2023, about a third of User: space pages and almost 95% of Draft: space pages were deleted.
  • Conclusion from last week vs 2023: If your User: space page is going to get deleted, it'll happen in the first week. Draft pages are much more likely to get deleted, but it takes longer.
• Within the last 18 months, only 1.6% of pages created as the account's first-ever edit were moved to the mainspace. 20% of those were also subsequently deleted. One in 75 first-edit page creations are still visible in the mainspace.
  • Actual User: pages probably aren't meant to get moved to the mainspace, and the existence of these pages depresses the overall 'success' numbers. An unknown proportion User sandbox pages probably are meant to move to the mainspace, while others are probably meant to be used for test edits. We don't have a good way to differentiate between these two types of user space contribution.

WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:17, 2 July 2024 (UTC)

Within the last 18 months, looking at pages created on the first edit during 2023, about a third of User: space pages and almost 95% of Draft: space pages were deleted. - this is a shocking statistic but if I understand correctly it can't be taken at face value because the namespace is where the page is now, right? That is, 95% of drafts that were never moved to mainspace are deleted, which is explicable in terms of G13 (I assume the 5% is drafts less than six months old?) – Joe (talk) 20:35, 2 July 2024 (UTC)

@Joe Roe (mobile), all of the drafts created in 2023 are more than six months old at this point. There were probably one or two drafts that were a few hours short of being six months old when the query was run, so it's like 0.05%. The 5% that have been retained were probably created later in the year and had an edit made (by anyone) since then. For example, the 5% probably includes articles that were submitted to AFC in December, declined in January, and will be deleted – just not quite yet.

The namespace listed is the namespace in which either the page exists now (more specifically, at 30 Jun 2024 08:21:10 UTC) or where the page existed at the time that it was deleted (e.g., ordinary CSD or AFD, not revdel or OS/suppression – those latter ones are invisible to the query). WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:14, 2 July 2024 (UTC)