En:WP rewiring

From Creolista!
Revision as of 11:23, 14 October 2017 by WikiSysop (talk | contribs) (Toolz for finding authorial rights & responsibilities: forum mentions)
Jump to: navigation, search

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.

https://tools.wmflabs.org/sigma/usersearch.py?name=ADD_NAME_HERE&page=ADD_PAGE_HERE&server=enwiki&max=

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]

Parsers

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...