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Then maybe you should tag each article with a "Version"-template,
which specifies for which structure the article was written and adds
an appriopriate category. I recently saw this being used at
Greg Rundlett (freephile) suggests:
The Replace Text extension works pretty well, and
even warns
about conversions that can't be undone [1]
that's what
you're referring to when you mention automatic search
and replace.
Thanks Greg. I've used ReplaceText and it's pretty handy. We also
use Pywikibot for similar things. However, these are one-to-one
syntactic changes. The example I gave -- of revamping the periodic
table of the elements, analogous to a company reorg -- requires
more intelligence. I'm not talking about Hydrogen being renamed to
"Bydrogen." I'm talking about a paradigm shift in chemistry in
which the old elements have been replaced by new *concepts*, not
just new names. Instead of "elements" we now have "Foobles" that
don't correspond one-to-one with the old elements. That's what
happens in a corporate reorganization: team names don't just
change. People are shuffled into an entirely new organizational
shape. A company that was formerly organized by geography (USA,
Europe, Asia) gets reorganized by function (Global Sales, Global
Technology, Global Human Resources). In one second, all your wiki
content about company structure becomes deeply wrong.
In some ways, this is the wiki equivalent of database schema
evolution, in which one set of organized data must be transformed
into another. It's a very, very hard problem. I was wondering if
anybody has successfully handled it.
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...
We did this too, years ago, creating a {{CompanyName }} template.
And then something amazing happened. Our company split into TWO
companies, a parent and a subsidiary. Now, human intelligence is
required to change each instance of {{CompanyName}} either to
{{ParentCompany}} or {{ChildCompany}}. No automation can do this,
short of A.I.
DanB
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