How good do you reckon you are at telling what a Wikipedia article is about, just from its article name? Find out, using this quick fun quiz.

Wikipedia FS allows you to treat MediaWiki articles like files on a Linux system. You can view the wiki text, and edit the wiki text, all using your standard editors and command-line tools.

Steps for setting up

If you want to have a quick play with Wikipedia FS, here are the series of steps I used today on an Ubuntu 6.04 system to get it installed from scratch; Most of these you can probably cut-and-paste directly onto a test machine, and should hopefully work on any modern Ubuntu or Debian system:

# Load the FUSE module:
modprobe fuse

# Install the FUSE libs:
apt-get install libfuse-dev libfuse2

# Get, build, and install the python-fuse bindings:
cd /tmp
mkdir python-fuse
cd python-fuse/
wget http://wikipediafs.sourceforge.net/python-fuse-2.5.tar.bz2
bunzip2 python-fuse-2.5.tar.bz2
tar xf python-fuse-2.5.tar
cd python-fuse-2.5
apt-get install python-dev
python setup.py build
python setup.py install

# Get, build, and install WikipediaFS
cd /tmp
mkdir wikipediafs
cd wikipediafs/
wget http://optusnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/wikipediafs/wikipediafs-0.2.tar.gz
tar xfz wikipediafs-0.2.tar.gz
cd wikipediafs-0.2
python setup.py install

# Install the “fusermount” program (if not installed):
# First “nano /etc/apt/sources.list”, and uncomment the line to enable installing from universe, e.g. uncomment the line like this: “deb http://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper universe”
apt-get update
apt-get install fuse-utils

# Mount something:
mkdir ~/wfs/
mount.wikipediafs ~/wfs/

# The above line will create a default configuration file. Edit this now:
nano ~/.wikipediafs/config.xml
# You may want to create a throwaway login on the Wikipedia for testing wikipediaFS now. This
# will allow you to edit articles. Or you can use your main account instead of a test account,
# it’s up to you – but I preferred to set up a separate test account. Either way, keep note of your
# account details & password for the <site> block below.
#
# Now, uncomment the example FR Wikipedia site, and change to the English site. For example, the <site> block should look something like this:
# — START —
<site>
<dirname>wikipedia-en</dirname>
<host>en.wikipedia.org</host>
<basename>/w/index.php</basename>
<username>Your-test-account-username</username>
<password>whatever-your-password-is</password>
</site>
# —– END —–

# Then unmount and remount the filesystem to ensure the above gets applied:
fusermount -u ~/wfs/
mount.wikipediafs ~/wfs/

Using it

# Can now use the filesystem. For example:
cat ~/wfs/wikipedia-en/Japan | less
# This should show the text of the Japan article.

# See what’s in the sandbox:
cat ~/wfs/wikipedia-en/Wikipedia:Sandbox

# Now edit the sandbox:
nano ~/wfs/wikipedia-en/Wikipedia:Sandbox

# Change some stuff, save, wait about 10 seconds for the save to complete, and (fingers crossed) see if the changes worked.

Probably not production ready

I have to emphasise here that WikipediaFS does seem a little flaky. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. In particular, I wanted to reset the Wikipedia’s sandbox after playing with it from this wiki text:

{{test}}
<!– Hello! Feel free to try your formatting and editing skills below this line. As this page is for editing experiments, this page will automatically be cleaned every 12 hours. –>

To this wiki text:

{{Please leave this line alone (sandbox talk heading)}}
<!– Hello! Feel free to try your formatting and editing skills below this line. As this page is for editing experiments, this page will automatically be cleaned every 12 hours. –>

I.e. a one-line change. Simple, you say? … well, sorry, but you’d be wrong! In particular there seems to be something about “}}” and the character before it that caused my WikipediaFS installation to behave very strangely. It would look like an edit had saved successfully, but when you went back into editing the file, all the changes you made would be lost:

No indication that the above save has failed, but actually it has.

So, I tried breaking the above change down into smaller and smaller pieces, until the save worked. Here are the pieces that I could get to work:

1. Adding “{{Please leave this line alone (sandbox talk heading)” (note no closing “}}”, because it wouldn’t save successfully with that included)
2. Deleting “{{“
3. Deleting “t”
4. Deleting “es”
5. Deleting the newline
6. At that stage, I simply could not successfully delete the final “t”, no matter want I did. Eventually I gave up doing this with Wikipedia FS, and deleted the “t” using my normal account and web browser.

So, although WikipediaFS is fun to play with, and is certainly an interesting idea, I do have to caution you that WikipediaFS may sometimes exhibit dataloss behaviour, and so in its current form you might not want to use it as your main editing method.

MediaWiki 1.10 has been released – yay! From a brief email exchange with Brion, the release manager, the next release is currently planned for the start of July, so as to make up ground for the longer than normal 1.10 release cycle. This means that instead of the usual 3 months between releases, this time you may have around 1 month and 20 days (nearly half the usual time). So, if you wanted to integrate anything largish into the next release (MS SQL support could fall into this category, as could the rev_deleted work), starting sooner rather than later could be a good idea.

There is an automated documentation system for the MediaWiki code, that produces online documentation from the comments and tags in the code.

This system uses a open-source documentation system called doxygen ; There are other open-source systems too, such as phpDocumentor, which I think MediaWiki might have used previously. However, there is significant amount in common to what both systems understand, if you use the fairly neutral documentation style that most MediaWiki code does.

So anyway, I was looking at phpDocumentor out of curiosity, and ran it over MediaWiki, and it gave a list of errors or warnings about MediaWiki’s documentation, so I fixed some of those, whilst checking the Doxygen documentation to try and ensure that I wasn’t stuffing things up for everyone else. What happened next when people saw this can (with much poetic license) be described by the following diagram (an arrow between two blue things = something I was trying to change; an arrow between a person and something = their position, or what’s on their mind) :

Oh, and just in case anyone takes this too seriously, creating this diagram was actually just a glorified excuse for me to experiment with Inkscape, something I had been meaning to do for a few weeks. If you’re looking for a vector-based open-source drawing package, it seems pretty good to me, and works fine for me on Windows (as well as being available for Mac OS X and Linux), so give it a whirl if you haven’t already.

Is it just me, or can anyone else not read the new Citizendium site without logging in, including the following pages:

• About the citizendium, on the citizendium itself.
• How to get started with the Citizendium pilot.
• Citizendium’s finest approved articles.

Having to login to edit, that I can understand (given the vandalism problems, and that it’s a pilot), but surely the above pages at the very least should be open for public viewing? Surely this stuff is “need-to-know” information for potential editors trying to determine if the project is for them?

I find hiding that stuff rather curious, and it made me curious about what else they’re doing. A couple of tech notes after a quick bit of poking around the new site, but not logging in :

• Despite the URL of the main page, they seem to have placed the site in the root directory, rather than the “wiki/” folder.
• The API interface is disabled.
• Seem to be running MediaWiki 1.8.2 (since we cannot check Special:Version without logging in).
• You can access these wiki pages without logging in: List of special pages and the login screen, and the Main page, and that’s basically about it.
• From the 404, they’re running Apache/2.0.59 (CentOS), and from the HTTP headers are using PHP 5.1.6.
• From this 404, they probably haven’t tried to make any static dumps yet.
• From the absence of an error on this page, they have created a “profiling” table in their database.
• They probably want to associate .inc files and .phtml files with PHP in their apache2.conf.
• They should probably delete the config directory.
• From the different apache error messages (“Forbidden” versus “Not found”), they have the cite extension installed, as well as CategoryTree, and CharInsert (like the Wikipedia). However, unlike the Wikipedia, they probably do not have these extensions installed: ImageMap, EasyTimeline, Inputbox, ParserFunctions, Poem, wikihiero, LuceneSearch, Filepath, SiteMatrix, Renameuser, Makesysop, Makebot, Filepath, and OAI. I say probably, because some extensions got reorganized a bit in subversion at the start of this year, so depending on when they downloaded their extensions, it could have a different default directory structure. Nevertheless, some of those extensions are used in Wikipedia content (e.g. ParserFunctions, ImageMap, wikiheiro), and I suspect it would be easiest to just use the same extensions, especially those that alter parser behaviour, if you’re planning on building on Wikipedia content.

As a personal opinion, at the very least I think they should allow anon access to Special:Export for pages in the main namespace, as well as the list of recent changes, because that way information can be shared in a two-way street between the Wikipedia and Citizendium. That would certainly be an interesting bot project for someone (to keep the two sites in sync, and flag those edits that cannot be automatically synced for human review), and if it results in better quality articles for either or both sites, then I’m all for it.

Also, there is a concept of interwiki links in MediaWiki (which makes linking to a special list of external sites easier). It could be nice to have the citizendium included in this list by default, if their articles are publicly accessible. Heck, if they come to the party, and share what they’re doing in an open way, I’ll even add it myself! (Of course, it may get reverted by someone else, but that’s up to them, not me).