Mailing List Archive

External/non-web automated updates to mediawiki articles
Hi!

At my mediawiki-site, I wish to include some articles where the content has
been generated by parsing some external sources. I could of course copy &
paste, but since there are quite a few articles, most of which will be
updated periodically, I'd prefer to automate it as much as possible.

The simple way is to create every article manually, then simply "UPDATE cur
SET cur_text = 'new text' WHERE cur_title LIKE 'Title' AND cur_namespace =
0" with title and text set appropriately. However, I'd like to have "Page
History" and "Special:Recentchanges" reflect the updates, so that the users
can see that something has happened to these articles and what the changes
are.

Has anyone looked at doing something like this? Perhaps even made a
utility/tool for this purpose? I searched the web and the mail-archives for
this, but I may have missed stuff.

Any do's/don'ts I need to keep in mind if I start making such a utility?

Regards,
Arne Meyer
Re: External/non-web automated updates to mediawiki articles [ In reply to ]
On Tue, May 18, 2004 at 02:51:11PM +0200, Arne Meyer Hansen wrote:
> Hi!
>
> At my mediawiki-site, I wish to include some articles where the content has
> been generated by parsing some external sources. I could of course copy &
> paste, but since there are quite a few articles, most of which will be
> updated periodically, I'd prefer to automate it as much as possible.
>
> The simple way is to create every article manually, then simply "UPDATE cur
> SET cur_text = 'new text' WHERE cur_title LIKE 'Title' AND cur_namespace =
> 0" with title and text set appropriately. However, I'd like to have "Page
> History" and "Special:Recentchanges" reflect the updates, so that the users
> can see that something has happened to these articles and what the changes
> are.
>
> Has anyone looked at doing something like this? Perhaps even made a
> utility/tool for this purpose? I searched the web and the mail-archives for
> this, but I may have missed stuff.

http://pywikipediabot.sf.net
Uses Python, and can communicate no only with the offical wikipedias
but also other wikipedia-farms/families.
You might have to write your own bot, but that's easier than you imagine.

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