Wikipedia:Tip of the day/October 17

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Power search Wikipedia using AutoWikiBrowser

AutoWikiBrowser is a semi-automatic page loader and editor designed for working on large batches of Wikipedia pages. One of its tools, the database scanner, lets you do exhaustive searches of the encyclopedia's content. It can search article titles and article contents. The tool supports regex, so you have unlimited possibilities for search criteria.

The tool works off-line, directly on a copy of the Wikipedia database that you have downloaded.

It will find absolutely every occurrence of an entered search string, and return the names of all the articles that it comes across that contain it. Unfortunately, it only presents a maximum of 30,000 page names, at which point it will stop. So, the more specific the search criteria, the better.

For on-the-fly general discussion and support requests for AWB, try the AWB IRC channel: #AutoWikiBrowser connect