User:Bongolium500/Beginners Guide to Semantic MediaWiki

Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is an incredibly powerful MediaWiki extension that this wiki is lucky enough to have installed. This page aims to give a simple but quite in-depth overview of the extension to help the average editor gain enough of an understanding to make important decisions around it. I will aim to use as simple language as possible but if anything is unclear you can feel free to ask on my talk page.

Before we start properly, lets return to the first sentence of this guide: "Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is an incredibly powerful MediaWiki extension that this wiki is lucky enough to have installed."

- This page, just up a bit

I'm going to break this down piece by piece as it is essential that this is understood. Semantic MediaWiki is the tool being discussed here. Semantic, in this case, means that the information on a page can be understood by a machine (without the need for any form of AI). SMW is a common shortening for Semantic MediaWiki. MediaWiki is the base software that Fandom, Wikipedia and many other wikis use. An extension is a piece of software that extends the base functionality of MediaWiki.

It isn't particularly important but the reason this wiki is lucky enough to have the extension is that Fandom no longer lets wikis request it.

Demonstrating the extension in action
I feel that the best way to learn about Semantic MediaWiki is to use it. Open Special:Ask in a new tab. This page allows you to ask the wiki questions through SMW. Let's say you want to find all of the times Russell T Davies has been credited as a writer. To do this, simply type the following into the top-left box, 'Condition': writer::Russell T Davies Scroll down and click 'Find results'. After waiting for about a short period of time, you will be presented with a list of every time Russell T Davies has been credited as a writer.

Let's try another example, this time in universe. If you want to find out all of the individuals who have the Doctor as their grandparent (e.g. all of the Doctor's grandchildren), you would type the following into the same box (remember to remove writer::Russell T Davies first): grandparent::The Doctor Click 'Find results' and your presented with a short list of all the individuals who have the Doctor as their grandparent.

Now let's say we also want to find out who the parents of all of these people were. In the top-right box, 'Printout selection', type the following: Father Mother Clicking 'Find results' once more will add 2 more columns to the table with the father and mother of each of these people (when the information is available).