En:WP rewiring
Contents
[hide]Deconstructing the tools
Some writing from the Chief Technical Officer of the WMF:
- coauthor (proceedings), 1992: "Newthink: An Orwellian specification language for real time safety critical systems" [1]
- coauthor, 2017: "Reclaiming U.S. Defense Leadership on Innovation: Three Priorities for the New USD(R&E)", Heritage Foundation
Toolz for finding authorial rights & responsibilities
Developing more than the current attitude of "healthy skepticism" concerning WP is necessary, particularly for en.wiki. Teachers could fairly simply construct wrappers around assignments related to Wikipedia. For example, I could ask students to use the tool WikiBlame (revision history search) to find the author of a specific sentence within a WP article (Check lots of versions with a reasonably high skip number). For example to find out who added the bit about concerning Cubans to Jill Stein's page, I skipped 25 versions, ignored the first 50 and suggested checking 5000 versions. (Pushing the skip number up increases the likelihood of finding what you are looking for relatively quickly, I think.)
Likewise it would be good practice to encourage newbies to read a different history page than the chronological revision history provided by default, favoring instead the one given by the WMF-Tool Wikihistory.
https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/wikihistory/wh.php?page_title=
The results of this tool should be read with caution however. For example, I have more edits to the page Jill Stein (by far) than any other editor. To conclude from that fact that I wrote the page on Jill Stein would be quite erroneous, as most of my edits were a product of my naive sentence-by-sentence editing style. It is only by comparing the first and second editor's contributions (1 | 2) to that page with yet another WMF tool (sigma) that the history becomes clearer concerning who wrote more of the page between our two front-runners. A transparent foundation, it seems to me, would want its users to have a more powerful combination of these two tools.
The students would probably very quickly suggest a simple improvement to the WikiHistory tool: replace the links to each page contributor's WP user page (which if you think about it is really, really senseless) with a link to their contributions to that page. This would be a chance to talk about variables, perhaps.
Bonus: MediaWiki ↹ HTML (links)
here's a short procedure for converting external Wikilinks in a document to HTML using PRCE (Perl regex cheatsheet):
Replace
- ]] with @
- [[ with §; which gives §OutBoundLink@
- ] with µ
- [ with £; which gives £InternalLinkµ
- | with €
External links: MediaWiki ↪ HTML
- replace
£(\S+) (\S+)µ - with
<a href="\1">\2</a>
External links: HTML ↪ MediaWiki
- replace
<a href="(.*?)"> - with
[\1
- replace
</a> - with
]
Anyone want to do internal links? ^^
(The problem will be the pipe and spacing...)
unpiped
piped
Note on BBcode
The BBcode-Mediawiki extension page is archived out of shame: here's what it looked like prior to archival.
Note on HTML Rendering
On this Mediawiki page, I learned that just by typing ?action=render at the end of an address, it will publish HTML for you to save if you so desire. It even works on Wikipedia hoax pages. ^^
It must be said that the HTML produced is thick with handles (classes and such).
Also on HTML enabling (and the dangers that implies), cf. [here]
Strip References from Wiki
Unnamed References
Search for: \<ref\>.*?\</ref\>
Replace with:
Named References
Search for: \<ref.*?>
Replace with:
Strip text leave blue-links
Search for: ].*?\[
Replace with: ,
This does leave some manual work...
