Greg Rundlett (freephile) suggests:
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.
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which the old elements have been replaced by new *concepts*, not just new names.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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