I was trying to download from the article pages, but had success when I downloaded from the image's page, as per previous answer. At 06:18 PM 1/2/05, you wrote: James Birkholz admin, Posen-L mailing list and website http://www.Posen-L.com

I've been really pleased with my progress as a newbie, especially with incorporating my database into displayed tables using the extensions that this group told me about. Here are some additional needs/questions that I would appreciate pointers to from those who've gone before... 1) I'll want to merge the registration for the wiki portion with the non-wiki existing site. I'm thinking that I need to have all users go through the wiki registration and then ask them if they want to record the additional info required for the non-wiki portions. So I'll need to modify the non-wiki to recognize users that have logged in to the wiki. 2) What is the best way to modify the pages templates? For example, if I wanted to add a "Donations" link likes WikiPedia's? Or links to the non-wiki sections? Or display the time in Timbuctoo in the bottom left corner? Or have a second image randomly selected that morphs out of the main logo image? Obviously I'm looking for general pointers, not specific solutions here. (That may come later :] ) 3) I've been transferring articles by hand from WikiPedia to my GenWiki, but am wondering if there's a better way. I've looked at the WikiPedia's data dump downloads instruction pages, but frankly they don't make it seem too easy, especially if I'm using a remote web server that I don't admin. Is this the case? Besides, even if I could magically transfer the data, I'd need to weed out most of it. Also, the storage space would be a problem until I weeded. I doubt that it exists, but what would best serve my needs would be some spider that given a start page, crawls my GenWiki looking for empty articles and then goes to WikiPedia (using approved behavior of one page per second, etc) and copies the edit box material and pastes it back into my GenWiki. It should be configurable to limit the levels of linkage so that it only drills down to that many links. Given enough time, I can create such a spider in Perl (but I'm not set up right now, nor am I proficient in Perl. I played with a couple of years ago.), but wonder if someone has a better, more immediate solution to point me to. TIA, James Birkholz admin, Posen-L mailing list and website http://www.Posen-L.com

Rowan Collins wrote: Unified login will be extremly hard, as it requires changes to lots of functions. In the future we should have a way for scripts to 'talk' to each other and syncronize login information. I'm working on something for my own seperate project, which wont be done for a while. We should really make it easier to modify templates without breaking everything. Wikipedia specifically recommends NOT spidering the site. I would grab the dump, install it into a local MySQL, then just grab the ones you want. Or, you can try loading the entire database into your webserver via PHPMyAdmin. But that may take a while... or overload your server... or just eat up all your disk quota.

Sam Rowe wrote: Probably. Although you would need to set up a directory server, on a different port, meaning it wouldnt work for anything other than a colocation. Interesting idea though.

Sam Rowe wrote: You would need a host with LDAP services or your own server, as you cant install an LDAP yourself on a shared server, and bind to the required port.

On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 13:50:38 -0700, Jot Powers <misc(a)bofh.com> wrote: Well, there's two ways, basically: 1) using pywikipediabot (or a bot you write from scratch) to "pretend to be a user" - i.e. access "...&action=edit" pages, fill in the contents you want to be there, and submit the form back. 2) using some *server-side* scripts to push the data into the database directly. Basically (in 1.3.x), you need to create each page as an entry in the 'cur' table, but for things to behave properly you need to observe the other things the "normal" page editing code does - off the top of my head, that includes moving links *to* a new page from 'brokenlinks' to 'links' (so they don't appear as redlinks any more) and checking the new text for links *from* the page, to correct the various links tables (e.g. for "What links here" listings)(that's one of the jobs of Parser::preSaveTransform() I think). In short, for the moment at least, running a bot is probably the only sane way to do it. (Be sure to run it under a user with the 'bot' user_rights flag, so the flood can be hidden from RecentChanges - see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Setting_user_rights_in_MediaWiki) -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]

On Wed, 05 Jan 2005 22:00:26 -0600, =James Birkholz= <j.birchwood(a)verizon.net> wrote: Probably using a version other than 1.4 Beta -- [[en:User:Dori]]

At 11:10 PM 1/5/05, you wrote: No, I can click on the "foo" link and it goes to the article to which it is supposed to go. I didn't check the action before, but just did and it works ok, just not as "purty" as the WikiPedia. Does WikiPedia run off *beta* versions? The arrow graphic seems new, Dori must be right.

On Thu, 6 Jan 2005 07:36:56 -0500, Jamie Bliss <astronouth7303(a)gmail.com> wrote: No, that's an urban myth; the check for "#redirect" is case insensitive. Dori has it right, this is new to v1.4 (currently in late beta). While we're on the subject, though, there is something that annoys me about that feature: because it's been placed as special case code in the article handling, rather than just added to the "parser", redirects still show up as numbered lists when you do a preview. This rather defeats what would otherwise be a big advantage of the feature: the easy ability to spot if you've typed the redirect in correctly. If I get round to it, I'll write an alternative implementation where it's in the parser, where it should have been all along (as soon as a "don't follow redirect" condition is detected, the page should just be rendered as it is, with "#redirect" being rendered as the arrow). -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]

On Thu, 06 Jan 2005 17:33:58 -0600, =James Birkholz= <j.birchwood(a)verizon.net> wrote: http://www.birchy.com/GenWiki/index.php?title=Special:Version "... MediaWiki: 1.3.9 ..." http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Version "... MediaWiki: 1.4beta3 ..." You can't see the feature, because you're running a version that predates it. Simple as that. -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]