WikipediaFS

WikipediaFS
Developer(s) Mathieu Blondel
Initial release 11 June 2006 (2006-06-11)
Stable release
0.4 / 2 August 2010 (2010-08-02)
Preview release
r75[1] / 10 July 2015 (2015-07-10)[1]
Written in Python
Operating system Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD
Type Filesystem
License GNU GPL
Website wikipediafs.sourceforge.net

WikipediaFS is a virtual filesystem which allows users to view and edit the articles of any MediaWiki-based site as if they were real files on a local disk drive. This enables a user to edit articles directly with any text editor.[2] WikipediaFS is developed primarily by Mathieu Blondel on SourceForge.net.[3]

WikipediaFS is implemented in Python and uses the FUSE kernel module. The file system works by lazily downloading and uploading article sourcetexts — only sending HTTP requests to the selected site when a file is accessed. (Reading a file corresponds to a GET HTTP request, writing to a POST HTTP request.)

Advantages

  • Editing a long Wikipedia article can sometimes turn out to be painful and time-consuming due to web-forms limitations. Instead, when WikipediaFS is mounted on a directory, articles become like real files in that directory: it is thus possible to use a text-editor to edit files. Text-editors are generally more stable and less sluggish than browsers and have useful features such as spell checking and wiki syntax highlighting.
  • It is possible to write programs or bots transparently as if they dealt with simple files because WikipediaFS takes care of the HTTP layer. For example, WikipediaFS could be used to perform a massive content migration from one MediaWiki site to another.

Disadvantages

  • The project has been without maintainer since 2007.
  • It is difficult to go from page to page as the user must know in advance the name of the page to edit - WikipediaFS does not locally know what pages/files do or do not exist.
  • Software has been since deprecated

See also

References

  1. 1 2 http://sourceforge.net/p/wikipediafs/code/log
  2. ↑ Striegel, Jason (6 May 2007). "WikipediaFS – a Linux MediaWiki file-system". MAKE. Retrieved 2012-02-10.
  3. ↑ "WikipediaFS 0.3 released". www.mblondel.org/journal/ Mathieu's log: Machine Learning, Data Mining, Natural Language Processing...... 2007-05-27. Archived from the original on 2012-02-18. Retrieved 2016-04-17.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.