Question

I am trying to find corresponding text records for a category.

For example if I have the ID 5 for a “categorylinks” record, how would I find which texts go into that category?

Answer 1

Edit: I’m still not sure if you are asking for the text of a category page or the text of the pages in a category so here’s both:

Text of a category page:

select old_text from text, revision, page, categorylinks
where rev_text_id = old_id
    and rev_id = page_latest
    and page_namespace = 14
    and page_title = cl_to
    and cl_from = <cl_from entry in categorylinks table>

Text of a page in a category:

select old_text from text, revision, page, categorylinks
where rev_text_id = old_id
    and rev_id = page_latest
    and page_id = cl_from
    and cl_to = <cl_to entry in categorylinks table>

More explanation:

Basically, in categorylinks, the cl_title is the title of the category page. So you can look that up in the page table using page_title and page_namespace = 14 (the category namespace). Once you have the correct page, the page_latest field for that row equals the rev_id in the revision table. This gives you the latest revision for the category page. The revision table has a rev_text_id field which equals the old_id field in the text table. old_text in the text table is your text.

Any time you want the text for a page it basically works like this. Find the page database record. Then: page.page_latest = revision.rev_id and revision.rev_text_id = text.old_id.

See also: The MediaWiki database schema.