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[edit] Explanation

For selected pieces of info, below is some explanation.

[edit] Location

Shows what the subject is located in, and all other things located there. This result depends on the annotation "location of" (not as widespread as the inverse) at the other page.

Shows what is located in the subject, and in what else these are located.

For a location I, gives nearby stops S (S "stop near" I), with for each stop the lines L that stop is on (S "stop of" L), and the nearby locations I1 (S "stop near" I1), including I itself.

[edit] Discussion

[edit] Recent changes way too specific

Patrick, surely queries like

Monday closing time convenience store

don't belong in a generic {{ask}} template?! Are you trying to get around the current limitation of inline queries that it's hard to find everything where X is the object of a relationship? It would be better to fix the inline query code.

I believe the primary intent of Template:Ask was to generate a list of everything using a particular relation or attribute. We should get that "for free" on every Attribute:Foo and Relation:Bar page just like Category:Baz shows everything in a category; however, that's a difficult change to make to MediaWiki code.

Cheers, -- Skierpage 00:13, 4 October 2006 (CEST)

As mentioned on the template page: Use is made of the fact that if the set of pages selected in a query is empty, no header row or blank line, not even any blank space, is produced, so that queries which are not applicable do not clutter the output.

However, if parameters are used, substitution of the template is necessary, so that gives a lot of wikitext.

Also I can imagine that for server efficiency queries which are only infrequently relevant can better be moved to a separate template.--Patrick 02:22, 4 October 2006 (CEST)

I fully agree with Skiepage. This template was not meant to be a collection of all conceivable queries, and its name "ask" was ill chosen since it does not reflect this. I strongly suggest to stop using {{ask}} on real content pages. Explicitly, the reasons are:

1. The output, in general, is not useful for reading articles. It is far too long to make something out of it, and it sometimes lists data that is just not interesting in the given context. Many articles already contain inline queries nicely integrated with the text, which are much more adequate than a mechanical "ask".
2. Some of the result are confusing, since they do not make sense in the context of the given article or since the labels of the tables are not clear.
3. The output is far too long. Some articles (e.g. categories) are multiple times as long as they would normally be. The long ask-results move the more relevant Factbox, Categories, and (for category pages) instances out of sight.
4. The implementation of {{ask}} is wildly inefficient. It just can't scale in a medium-sized wiki if you have one template that asks for everything that might possibly be relevant. Sure, some queries return empty pages, but they still need to be executed. Note that there is also a configurated limit for the maximum number of queries per page.
5. The name "ask" causes confusion with <ask>. I have already received emails from SMW users who inquired why {{ask}} does not work properly in their installation. Note also that this means users are copying stuff like ask from ontoworld, and that we should really try not to suggest such technically inefficient solutions to them.
6. A future version of SMW will provide facetted-browsing through all semantic data. This makes many parts of ask redundant, and will be better integrated into the interface. In general, if we wanted something like ask on every page, then we could easily have made this part of the software. We didn't.

--Markus Krötzsch 16:46, 8 November 2006 (CET)

[edit] Ask broken by GeSHI

Hi there anybody any ideas why the <ask> tag is broken by installing the GeShiHighlight-Extension as you may see unter http://www.self-qs.de/m3WDB/Vorlage:Ask or under http://www.self-qs.de/m3WDB/Kategorie:Anforderungsdefinition. Would you state this a missing feature in wfAskExtension or in GeShiHighlight or probably even in phpGeSHI?

--Emwede 11:25, 12 January 2007 (CET)