On 09/12/05, Paul Betts paul@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?
- 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]