== WikiVitals An exploratory Rails single-serving app designed to take a query for a person and output whether that person is alive or dead, based on their Wikipedia article. Topics to explore include TDD, robust template parsing with regular expressions, data relationship modeling, performance optimization, AJAX forms, and jQuery UI.

== Features

• Fetches raw Wikipedia Templates for article names and parses to determine vitals, personhood
• Attempts to translate entered queries into likely article names
• Follows article redirects
• Saves downloaded Wikipedia articles in database as a cache
• Disambiguation pages presented interactively to the user

== Roadmap

• Twitter Bootstrap theming
• AJAX page updates
• Live global feed showing other users' recent queries
• Link to submit problem if data is incorrect

== Examples Some functionality examples from the Rails console (with some debug output):

=== Basic operation $ albert = Person.find_person("Einstein") opening connection to en.wikipedia.org... opened <- "GET /w/index.php?action=raw&title=Einstein... -> "#REDIRECT [[Albert_Einstein]] {{R_from_surname}}" <- "GET /w/index.php?action=raw&title=Albert_Einstein -> "{{Infobox scientist\n| name = Albert Einstein\n...

=> #<Person id: 65, alive: false, updated_at: "2012-07-11 18:13:40", name: "Albert Einstein", ...

   $ albert.alive?
   # => false 
   albert.article_title
   # => "Albert_Einstein"
   albert.birth_date
   # => Fri, 14 Mar 1879

=== Personhood detection $ WikiRecord.fetch("Sherlock_Holmes").person?

=> false

=== Disambiguation page parsing $ smiths = WikiRecord.fetch("John_Smith")

=> #<WikiRecord id: 467, article_title: "John_Smith", article_body: ... >

   $ smiths.targets.count      # Get the number of people linked to from this disambiguation page
   # => 150
   $ smiths.targets.select(&:alive?)
   # => 57