On Mon, Nov 3, 2014 at 9:45 AM, Daniel Barrett <danb(a)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
Table<http://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=defa…
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
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