WikiDocs Conversion

WikiDocs Conversion Process

The WikiWebService is a part of the planned WikiDocs system This page should list all conversions that the web service has to do.

Status:' This starts to be up to date again.

The current purpose of this page is to list all coversions that the WikiWebService should do. RobertKaye already implemented a part of this as a mason component that works on the html which it pulls from e.g. http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/WikiHome?action=print&rev=9. This starts, however, to become pretty complex. Therefore we should first list all required conversions, and then see how this could be implemented.

An alternative to the mason component would be to patch a MoinMoin module (e.g. a Theme or a Formatter). Not that MoinMoin has a ThemesMacro. If you install that you can call a theme via the url like this http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/ThemeMarket?action=theme&theme=matrix. So if the WikiDocsConversion starts to become complex, it might be a solution to do all this stuff with a theme, instead of with Perl meddling with html.

The remainder of this page lists all conversin tasks, one section each:

Correct URLs

There are a couple of URLs that will not work as expectet, when the content is transcluded through the WikiWebService:

• Links to attachements of wiki pages do not work. This needs to be fixed. A correct URL would be [[Image:OfficialBio?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=DonRedmanPortrait.jpg]]. However, the page on Attachements says that this link is subject to change. See HelpOnConfiguration/FileAttachments for details, security issues, and why they want to remove tht option in the future.
• Currently the WikiWebService already does some minor link rewriting to fix problems with relative links. It seems that the the wiki returns some links like http:/page.html (relative links). These are rewritten to absolute links like http://www.musicbrainz.org/page.html.

Remove the Link-to-Outside Icon

This only needs to be done on WikiDocsPages, wiki pages do not need this.

Liks to the outside world (of the wiki!) like this one are rendered with a special icon in formt of the link. This icon signals that you will leave the wiki if you follow the link.

The problem is that links to http://www.musicbrainz.org/ are external to the wiki. Therefore all links to static MusicBrainz pages will have this icon. The transclusion mechanism must therefore remove this icon. In a perfect world, it would only remove it for pages on musicbrain.org. But I suppose that this is too difficult and IMO it is ok if it just removes the icon alltogether.

A very simple solution would be this: Can the Theme (or the Formatter?) add a css class to this icon? In this case it could simply be removed with a css line like

.ExtraWikiIcon {display: none}

The InterWiki icon can be kept, IMO.

Differntiate Between Links to WikiDocs and Links to Wiki

This only needs to be done on WikiDocsPages, wiki pages do not need this.

When a user sees a WikiDocs page via the WikiWebService, those links that point to other WikiDocs pages should look like normal links, while those links that point to pages which only exist in the MusicBrainzWiki should look like links to somewhere else.

A simple formatting can just render inter-WikiDocs links bold and WikiDocs-to-wiki links plain. A fancy formatting could prepend a wiki-icon to WikiDocs-to-wiki links.

The following tabel summarizes, what conversion should be done in which case:

Page in TitleIndex of MusicBrainzWiki	Page in ModeratedRevisionTable	Action taken
Yes	Yes	Link is normal or bold
Yes	No	Link is thin or has wiki icon
No	Yes	Send a warning to admin. With MoinMoin this means that someone has renamed the page, effectively moving the history to the new page name.
No	No	WikiName should not be presented as a link at all

Deal with #REDIRECTs

Can the WikiWebService follow redirects? I do not know how such a redirect is done with MoinMoin. Whether and how the web service can figure out that a page is a redirect depends on the following:

• Is a http redirect header sent?
• Is an inline html meta redirect added (I suppose not)
• Does the redirect happen within MoinMoin entrely?

I could not find much information on how redirect works in MoinMoin. The only page I found is MarkupSpecification.

If this gets complicated, we should simply keep redirects out of the set of WikiDocsPages. That should not be too hard. Or if we really have to use a redirect we could perhaps use #DEPRECTATED instead (explained on that same MarkupSpecification page).

So, the minimum requirement is that the converter should display redirects for wiki pages.

Remove Unofficial Content

I am not at all sure, whether we need this. There might be some good way around this, like using discussion pages. However, should the need arise, then we could add our own "official" tag to the MusicBrainz wiki in an XML-style:

 <official>
   bla bla
 </official>

The MoinMion engine will of course ignore these tags. It will just display them. That is ok. Users will see the tags (when accessing the wiki via MoinMoin) and it will have meaning to them.

When the WikiWebService gets a page as a WikiDocs page, it will look for these tags, and if it finds such tags (in the text not in the html code!), it will remove everything outside the tags and then the tags tehmselves in the ShadowWiki version of that page. This way the source of a wiki page can contain stuff that will not be visible when transcluded.

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initial author: DonRedman