It would be nice if it was possible to negate page generators, in order to have the scripts operate on all pages that do not match a given page generator.
I think the syntax -no-pagegenerator would be good for that. There are some page generators for which negation does not seem to make sense (like -randomredirect), but many for which it could be useful (-no-usercontribs, -no-lonelypages, -no-transclude, -no-titleregex, -no-grep, -no-page and others).
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Declined | None | T56537 pagegenerators: follow redirects, intersection, exclusion | |||
| Open | None | T76431 pagegen regex 'none' filter command line argument | |||
| Open | None | T103779 Negation of page generators | |||
| Resolved | Xqt | T167580 Add -exceptns to pagegenerators.py |
One use case discussed on IRC was excluding certain namespaces. (all pages except namespace 0) -- any implementation of that will need to ensure it does not exceed the limit of namespaces and reintroduce T67981: WARNING: API warning (categorymembers): Too many values supplied for parameter 'gcmnamespace': the limit is 50.
Another idea would be to allow a filter mechanism like the implementation inside EventStreams.