[Mediawiki-l] link picker

[John Moorhouse]

Jim Wilson wrote:
>> Probably showing my 'lack of knowledge ', but there must already be a
>> function that is  called when a user clicks on a link and the wiki tries
>> to match the link to a current page and fails, as it then autoloads the
>> editor so the user can create a page, it would be in this step that you
>> could offer a choice.
>>     
>
> Well, sortof.  When you click a red link, it takes you to the edit page of
> the chosen article.  At this point, the decision to show you the edit form
> (as opposed to the "this page is empty" message) has already been made. If
> you do a view-source of the link URL, you'll see that "action=edit" is
> already in there.
>
> You _can_ hook into MediaWiki at the "show edit page" event and do some cool
> things with it, but there's no good way to know the article from which the
> user came - which would be a prerequisite for modifying said article's
> links.  Technically you could use the browser's provided "referrer", but
> this is unreliable (proxies) and easily spoofed or disabled.
>   
Ah - I see that would be a problem, knowing where you came from, as they 
are in effect separate actions - may be in wiki 3.7.3 !!!
> I'm not trying to say that you're idea is a bad one - or flawed in some
> way.  It sounds like useful functionality to have (in some form), it's just
> that MediaWiki, in its current form, is not amiable to the development of
> such an extension
>   

An alternative might be some form of page search button actually on the 
edit page, like the current button that allows you to put the [[ ]] 
round selected text, that would put in front:- [[Selected Page| and 
after:- ]] round the selected text where 'selected page' would be the 
name of the page selected in the search window.

Ta

John