On 09/12/05, Paul Betts <paul(a)paulbetts.org> wrote:
is a program called Tomboy (the site is down, but the
wp article on it
is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomboy_%28software%29). What would be
really awesome is that same kind of simple interface, but attached to a
MediaWiki backend, so this personal note-taking tool would be a great
way to collaborate.
So, basically, this would be a kind of "desktop interface" to MediaWiki, right?
2. Add an RSS feed to get recently changed page names
and names of all
pages that exist, and use custom POSTs to submit new pages.
- Requires patching / adding to MediaWiki
- Still need to find a way to get the text of a page in MediaWiki
format
+ Other apps could still use it but it would only work on patched wikis
I think most of this could be done with already existing features (and
what couldn't would probably be useful for other things, so wouldn't
necessarily have to be external patches/extensions).
For instance, Special:Recentchanges and Special:Newpages can be viewed
as RSS or Atom already, and there is an open request for feeds of
Special:Log pages, which would include page moves
[
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4182]. Listing all
pages might be a little expensive, but Special:Allpages does exist
(some screen-scraping would currently be required, I'm afraid).
Getting the source of a page can be done via "...action=raw" (and see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers for help rendering
it) or unskinned HTML can be grabbed with "...action=render".
Like I say, other interfaces (e.g. a quick check for page existence,
even just returning HTTP 404s; a proper SOAP or REST or whatever API,
etc) would almost undoubtedly be welcomed into the main code, if
someone were to make them. Have a browse through
http://meta.wikimedia.org and
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org for other
people's thoughts and efforts. Oh, and you might want to look at
http://pywikipediabot.sf.net for how people have made tools which
exploit features already present.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]