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 Tablehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table article, but what about the thousands of other articleshttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&profile=default&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
Hi Dan,
Changing your wiki into a semantic wiki with Semantic MediaWiki will definitely prevent some of such problems or help you solve them without too much of a headache.
Have a look at http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki.
Ad
Wikibase Solutions www.wikibase.nl
Op 3 nov. 2014, om 15:45 heeft Daniel Barrett danb@VistaPrint.com het volgende geschreven:
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 Tablehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table article, but what about the thousands of other articleshttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&profile=default&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
_______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
Since MW is designed around a crowdsourcing model, I would just get volunteers from all parts of the company to help update the wiki. That will 1.) point-out the helpful employees of the company, 2.) be very educational for the editors about the new company organization, 3.) promote collaboration amongst diverse groups within the company. Yes, updating the whole wiki with just a handful of editors would suck and the quality would probably suffer too. But, with fifty to a hundred editors, a piece of cake and the results would probably be much better.
Al
From: Daniel Barrett danb@VistaPrint.com To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Monday, November 3, 2014 7:45 AM Subject: [MediaWiki-l] Reorganizing your wiki when the whole world changes...?
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 Tablehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table article, but what about the thousands of other articleshttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&profile=default&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
MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
On 3 November 2014 18:35, Al alj62888@yahoo.com wrote:
Since MW is designed around a crowdsourcing model, I would just get volunteers from all parts of the company to help update the wiki. That will 1.) point-out the helpful employees of the company, 2.) be very educational for the editors about the new company organization, 3.) promote collaboration amongst diverse groups within the company. Yes, updating the whole wiki with just a handful of editors would suck and the quality would probably suffer too. But, with fifty to a hundred editors, a piece of cake and the results would probably be much better.
In my experience of intranet wikis, any plan that starts with "1. Other people will lift a finger" doesn't ever work out that way :-)
It's possible a bit of applied SMW will do what Dan needs, or pointing AutoWikiBrowser at it maybe. (I've never pointed AWB at anything other than en.wikipedia,org, so I have no experience in actually doing that last one.)
- d.
From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2014 12:36 PM Subject: Re: [MediaWiki-l] Reorganizing your wiki when the whole world changes...?
On 3 November 2014 18:35, Al alj62888@yahoo.com wrote:
Since MW is designed around a crowdsourcing model, I would just get volunteers from all parts of the company to help update the wiki. That will 1.) point-out the helpful employees of the company, 2.) be very educational for the editors about the new company organization, 3.) promote collaboration amongst diverse groups within the company. Yes, updating the whole wiki with just a handful of editors would suck and the quality would probably suffer too. But, with fifty to a hundred editors, a piece of cake and the results would probably be much better.
In my experience of intranet wikis, any plan that starts with "1. Other people will lift a finger" doesn't ever work out that way :-)
Of course, that option/directive would have to come from company leadership. You tend to find more volunteers the higher-up the asker ;0) SMW would be just as much work, if not more, if they aren't already using it.
al
It's possible a bit of applied SMW will do what Dan needs, or pointing AutoWikiBrowser at it maybe. (I've never pointed AWB at anything other than en.wikipedia,org, so I have no experience in actually doing that last one.)
- d.
MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
On Mon, Nov 3, 2014 at 9:45 AM, Daniel Barrett danb@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 Tablehttp://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=defau... 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
MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
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@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@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 Tablehttp://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
MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
_______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
Doesn't a whole new world deserve a whole new wiki? You could keep the old one for historical purposes. Maybe import some pages to the new wiki where it makes sense.
From: Daniel Barrett danb@VistaPrint.com To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Monday, November 3, 2014 7:45 AM Subject: [MediaWiki-l] Reorganizing your wiki when the whole world changes...?
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 Tablehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table article, but what about the thousands of other articleshttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&profile=default&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
MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org