Support alternative separator for the “nodes” parameter (avoid hard-coded comma)

[marclajoie123]

Environment
MediaWiki 1.43.3
Semantic MediaWiki 6.0.1
KnowledgeGraph: 3.0.0-beta (37872ef)
PHP 8.1.33 (fpm-fcgi)
MySQL 8.0.37
Elasticsearch 7.10.2
Pygments 2.14.0
LUA 5.1.5

Summary

The “nodes=” parameter of the #knowledgegraph parser function currently uses a comma as a hard-coded separator. This creates problems when page titles themselves contain commas, especially in legal, academic, and bibliographic contexts where commas are common. As a result, KnowledgeGraph incorrectly splits such titles into multiple nodes.

Current Behavior in KnowledgeGraph.php

In applyDefaultParams(), parameters of type “array” are parsed using this regex:
preg_split(’/\s*,\s*/’, $val, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY); (line 436)

Since the “nodes” parameter is declared as:
‘nodes’ => [ ‘’, ‘array’ ],

any page title containing a comma will be split, preventing KnowledgeGraph from resolving the correct Title object and causing missing or broken nodes.

Why this is a problem

Many wikis rely on page titles that legitimately contain commas, such as:
• legal citations
• court decision titles
• bibliographic entries
• company name, institution, etc

In my use case, it is caselaw. For example I have a page for a Canada Supreme Court Decision : 2747-3174 Québec Inc. v. Quebec (Régie des permis d'alcool), 1996 CanLII 153 (SCC), [1996] 3 SCR 919

These pages cannot be used as nodes in KnowledgeGraph because the comma forces a split.

Requested Feature
Please consider allowing an alternative separator for the “nodes” parameter, such as:
; (semicolon)

or a configurable option in LocalSettings.php or KnowledgeGraphOptions.js.

Example:
{{#knowledgegraph:
nodes=Page A; Page B; Page C
|properties=HasRelation
}}

This would preserve commas inside page titles.

Possible Implementation

A minimal backward-compatible approach could be:
• Only modify the separator for “nodes”, not for other parameters
• Allow both commas and semicolons, for example:
if ( $key === ‘nodes’ ) {
$val = preg_split(’/\s*[;,]\s*/’, $val);
} else {
$val = preg_split(’/\s*,\s*/’, $val);
}

Benefits

• Full support for page titles containing commas
• Better interoperability when titles follow standard citation formats
• Increased usability of KnowledgeGraph for legal, academic, and bibliographic data
• Minimal impact on existing functionality

Thank you for considering this enhancement.