[sorry, resending, got mistakenly posted in a reply thread earlier]
70% of web traffic on any page of my wiki (I assume the same is true for most other wikis and sites) comes from a search engine. In search results, people see two things and use them to decide in a few seconds whether to click on the link or not:
1- page title
2- meta tag description (if defined) OR the first sentence of the page.
#1, the page title is fine in Mediawiki. It is: {{PAGENAME}} - "the wiki name".
#2 is not right. For example if we search "America", we see:
- "This article is about the United States of America. For other uses of terms redirecting here, see US (disambiguation), USA (disambiguation), ..."
Ideally this should be something that the editors put into the page like other article text.Let them handle the description such as "An article about the USA, its history, government and politics, culture, economy and other topics". This is better than the disamb. notice that comes up currently in search.
We can install an external extension to define meta description however this should be a built-in feature of Mediawiki where people should be able to use: <metadesc> for making sure our search engine results are what we want them to be.
Eric
Hello,
We've recently installed a wiki for IT dept usage but came to the conclusion
that it would be very useful to let end users see some of the articles. The
thing is we don't want them to see all the content mainly because it would
confuse them. For instance, if they search for "Accounting" we want to
provide definitions and troubleshooting on the Accounting system that might
help them, but not every server list, SQL code and tech spec that we have.
We've been looking around and found a couple of options based on namespaces,
which we're still not sure will work the way we need (for one thing,
limiting search results for end users) and seem kind of hard to maintain.
The simplest option seems to be keeping two separate wikis, but I don't want
to disconnect the end users documents from our wiki because it's valuable
info for us too. What we're thinking about is having both wikis but
maintaining them in sync with some batch process that could export and
import all articles that belong to a certain category or even backup and
restore the entire database and afterwards delete non-end user articles.
That way, the end user wiki would be read-only and get updates every day. In
both cases we'd have to know how to deal with images (seems easy with the
backup/restore option but no so much with the export / import).
Do you think we're on the right path with any of these? Any other
suggestions? Here is our version info:
Product Version
MediaWiki 1.15.1
PHP 5.2.10 (isapi)
MySQL 5.0.22
Thank you in advance!!
> From: Ron Laufer <gonzoron(a)hotmail.com>
>
> I've had a couple images uploaded to my wiki that are so big, it
> seems they make my thumbnail program crash.
Are you using ImageMagick?
We've had no problems using the biggest files a 12 megapixel camera
can produce.
----------------
An American is a person who demonstrates against a new power plant,
then goes home and flips on all the lights, turns up the air
conditioner, puts a tape in the stereo, opens the refrigerator door,
plugs in the coffee maker and sits down to see if the television
cameras caught him protesting. -- Wendell Trogdon
:::: Jan Steinman, EcoReality Co-op ::::
Hi,
I went through the sample steps in the API
example<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Edit_-_Create%2526Edit_pages#Example>
on using the api to edit a page:
1. login your bot: ( I just used my admin login) - it succeeds
2. get a token - it suceeds
3. post to api.php - this is the form I
use<http://pathboston.com/forms/mw/append21.html>- after I get the
token I replace the +\ with %2B%5C
Alas, I get this error:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<api>
<error code="badtoken" info="Invalid token" xml:space="preserve">
my form code is:
<form id="form1" name="Update" method="post"
action="../../hum310/api.php?action=edit">
<label>title: <input type="text" name="title" id="textfield"
value="Talk:Main_Page" /></label><br />
<label>section: <input type="text" name="section" id="textfield"
value="new"/></label><br />
<label>summary: <input type="text" name="summary" id="textfield"
value="Hello%20Worldwide"/></label><br />
<label>text: <input type="text" name="text" id="textfield"
value="Hello%20everyone!"/></label><br />
<label>watch: <input type="text" name="watch" id="textfield" /></label><br />
<label>basetimestamp: <input type="text" name="basetimestamp"
id="textfield" value="2008-03-20T17:26:39Z"/></label><br />
<label>token: <input type="text" name="token" id="textfield"
value="96a50d37e6c48e6d0def3dd64dc9450d%2B%5C" size=50/></label><br />
<input name="" type="submit" value="send" />
</form>
<a href="http://pathboston.com/hum310/api.php?action=query&prop=info|revisions&intok…">get
token</a>
Thanks,
Timothy S. McKenna
Humanities teacher
Parkway Academy of Technology and Health, a Boston Public High School
1205 VFW Parkway, Boston, MA 02132 rm404
tim(a)sitebuilt.net, http://sitebuilt.net
exp. course news on twitter, id: mrtmckenna
class wiki sites:
http://pathboston.com/hum Humanities 3
http://pathboston.com/poets class159
(857)498-2574 (mobile), (617)524-0938 (home)