Editing Wikiq Pattern Matching (section)

== Use cases ==

We want to support a broad range of research applications that extend beyond the needs of any particular project. Since we indent to support this project in the long-term, we want to minimize the complexity of our code implementation while maximizing the breadth of projects we can support.

Consider the following examples of analyses that will be enabled by this feature:

# Imagine a study of heterogenous notions of quality between editors and wikiprojects that looks at how different wikiprojects have rated the same articles. Using pattern matching in wikiq, a researcher could compose regular expressions that match wikiproject templates left on talk pages and extract the name of each wikiproject and the associated quality rating.
# A researcher might be interested in the effects of warnings left by algorithmic tools. By writing regular expressions that match the warnings left by known tools on user talk pages, she can find each revision where an editor was warned.
# You might be interested in studying policy invocations. If you collect a list of policies of interest, you can build a regular expression to match any of them and capture which ones were added in a given revision or were referenced in a revision summary (comment).

These use cases are meant to illustrate the broad array of applications this feature can support. They ''are not'' meant to define a scope for the feature. The scope is defined by the API.