Hi All,
You used to be able to use GET requests to preview edits to the Wikipedia.
For example, this link worked in January 2005:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=East_Balmain&wpTextbox1=%23R…
Clicking this link used to preview adding a redirect at the "East
Balmain" article, with the article text being "#REDIRECT [[Balmain
East, New South Wales]]", and the edit summary being "Redirect to
[[Balmain East, New South Wales]]". All the user had to do then was
click "Save". It was incredibly useful, because it meant software
could generate new possible articles and redirect, and then a human
could yes/no veto them. It also meant that these possible items could
be listed on the Wikipedia itself, because the Wikipedia allows GET
arguments but not POST arguments in links - and this in turn allowed
the Wikipedia to be used to extend the Wikipedia - it was, in short,
extremely useful.
( Of course this functionality could be abused, in the same way that
_any_ technology can be used for both positive and negative purposes.
An example of project that used this in a positive way can be seen
here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nickj/Redirects )
Now however it seems like these GET requests no longer work. Have I
missed something obvious (i.e. it's just a dumb-user problem with the
GET request) ? Or is it something to do with the Wikipedia itself
(i.e. a server-side thing) ? If so, is it intentional? If it's not
intentional, can we please have this functionality back? (At least for
new articles: I can understand why it's a bad idea for edits to
existing articles because it allows thoughtless overwriting of
previous content - but this argument doesn't apply if there isn't
something there already).
All the best,
Nick.