I've done successful bulk-updates by using the API (api.php) and writing a Java client
to make the changes I need. If the change is a simple Replace-X-with-Y, it works pretty
well.
-----Original Message-----
From: mediawiki-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Greg Rundlett (freephile)
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2014 1:59 PM
To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list
Subject: Re: [MediaWiki-l] Reorganizing your wiki when the whole world changes...?
On Mon, Nov 3, 2014 at 9:45 AM, Daniel Barrett <danb(a)vistaprint.com> wrote:
Imagine the impact on Wikipedia if, say, the periodic
table of the
elements from chemistry was completely revamped, changing the name of
every element, the groupings of elements, etc. It's easy enough to fix
the Periodic
Table<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table>
article, but what about the thousands of other articles<
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&profile=def
ault&search=hydrogen&fulltext=Search>
that include the word "hydrogen"? They are all instantly wrong.
Fortunately this doesn't happen often!
However, this kind of situation happens all the time in companies that
have internal MediaWiki sites. The company reorganizes, changing the
names and missions of all the teams, repartitioning into groups that
don't map one-to-one with the old teams. Suddenly, in one second,
thousands of wiki articles are wrong.
I'm wondering if anybody has been successful at getting a company wiki
to survive this kind of change...?
My company has a very successful wiki with 200,000 topics, and these
company reorganizations are extremely destructive to the wiki.
Thousands of article titles contain the names of teams. Tens of
thousands of articles include team names in their content. Every
article that doesn't get fixed is an error, waiting to confuse a new employee.
Automatic search-and-replace does not really help except in the
simplest cases.
We've mostly relied on recategorization and mass article renaming,
both using Pywikibot. But this does not fix the article content. In an
ideal world, each page would have an "owner" who would take the
initiative to fix the content; but in companies, everybody is busy
with other work, and pages don't really have owners... some were even written by
ex-employees.
Any suggestions appreciated!
DanB
(Just saw this now.)
The Replace Text extension works pretty well, and even warns about conversions that
can't be undone [1]
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Replace_Text Perhaps
that's what you're referring to when you mention automatic search and replace.
One thing I do is to create and use templates like {{CompanyName}}, {{PrimaryDomain}},
{{EngineeringTeam}} so that you can use them throughout the wiki and update the template
if ACME Widgets changes to ACME Rocket Motors due to merger, acquisition etc. The problem
then becomes the glossary of tokens and getting people to use them. You don't want to
get too obscure because that would be a pain, but it's pretty easy to occasionally use
the Replace Text extension to find new instances of ACME Widgets popping up in article
content.
[1] If you want to replace "ACME Widgets" with "ACME Rocket Engines"
and Replace_Text finds existing occurrences of "ACME Rocket Engines", then it
warns you that you may not be able to undo the replacement.
Greg Rundlett
http://eQuality-Tech.com
http://freephile.org
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