Wiki publishing

From XPUB & Lens-Based wiki

Wikis as publishing platforms

Pad: https://pad.pzimediadesign.nl/p/specialissue-2017-09-18

Wikis

introduction

Wikis as writing interface with separate reading interfaces

Projects


investigate

  • What does the reading interface reveal that the writing interface hides? And/or vise-versa.
  • What wiki elements structure the reading interface?
  • What alternative reading interface would you create for the project?


wiki elements

For a more extensive list see Wiki

Users

To edit a wiki you need most wikis to register as user.

Different user's groups have different privileges:

  • user: can edit and create pages
  • administrators: can delete pages, put other users into a different group
  • bot

Wiki Markup language

Wiki Markup: structured text, simplified version of HTML, easily converted to HTML.

Wiki Markup Cheatsheet

Pages

Pages Creation

Pages can be created by:

  • creating an empty page link, clicking it, and start editing. The following [[my empty page]] will translate to my empty page
  • adding the page name to URL bar, you'll be directly to the empty page, and start editing http://publicationstation.wdka.hro.nl/wiki/index.php/my empty page
  • Red link = previously non-existing page.
  • Blue link = existing page.

Talk Pages

Every Page has its respective Discussion or Talk page.

Talk pages are the site of discussion and conflicts that go on to the making of an article.

An example: Talk page on Invisible Pink Unicorn Wikipedia article


User Pages

[http://beyond-social.org/prototypes/author-maps/wiki-author-articles.html Beyond Social Users & Articles Map]. A SVG map of the Users and the articles each has edited in the Beyond Social wiki. It uses:

Source code

Files and Images

To include non-text media (images,pdfs,audio-video) on the wiki, a File page needs to be created as a place-holder for the file

  • [[File:myimage.png]]
  • the page must be saved
  • click on the red link, of the file you want to upload
  • Follow the instruction to upload your file

Pages' Revision History

The history of versions or revisions of a page is stored.

They can be accessible via "View History"

Each revision shows its author, time, action, and at times summary.

Revisions can be compared, edited and undone.

Artworks exploring Wikipedia's Revision History

The Iraq War: A History of Wikipedia Changelogs, James Bridle, collects the history of changes from the Wikipedia's article on The Iraq War between 2004 and 2009.

Epicpedia Annemieke van der Hoek transforms Wikipedia's revision history into a theater script.

Cramer, Florian. 2011. “A Brechtian Media Design: Annemieke van Der Hoek’s Epicpedia.” In Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader, 221–26. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/critical-point-of-view-a-wikipedia-reader/

Structuring a wiki

What situations require an overall structure, more elaborate than its "flat" systems of pages?

Subpages: simple hierarchy

Subpages are useful for organizing information hierarchically, as parent/child/grandchild

A subpage of a given main page, is create by adding a slash, followed by the sub-page's name, to the main page name. 

[[main page/subpage/sub-subpage]]

Example: this very page Courses/Wikis-Publishing Platforms is a sub page from the Courses page

{{Special:PrefixIndex/{{FULLPAGENAME}}/}} can be placed on a parent page to display all its children.

Namespaces: separate spaces

Namespaces are container for specific content.

  • Example: the Namespace Wrecks in this wiki was created for material dedicate to Wrecks project and not a part of the Publication Station Wrecks:Main_Page and FIN:Main_Page
  • Note: Namespaces need to be created in the configurations of the wiki.

Categories: Tags, Hierarchies, Spaces, States

Categories are (the only) ways to tag content.

[[Category:courses]] a page to the courses category

Problems: No limit to the categories that can be added to a page.

Sematic Mediawiki

Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) to MediaWiki

While traditional wikis contain only text which computers can neither understand nor evaluate, SMW adds semantic annotations that allow a wiki to function as a collaborative database.


Properties and types (datatypes) are the basic way of entering semantic data in Semantic MediaWiki. Properties can be viewed as «categories for values in wiki pages». They are used by a simple mark-up, similar to the syntax of links in MediaWiki: 

   Property name::property value



API

An API or application programming interface is an interface that allows interaction via other software. It allows things such as apps to be build on top of existing services, where the apps use the API to interact with the service.


Web APIs

Mediawiki API is a Web API.

Essentially it means that the API is accessed thought HTTP requests and responds using JSON or XML object.

Note: might be helpful to install a JSON add on to your browser, to pretty-prints JSON content.

Mediawiki API

Mediawiki API allows many and very intricate request for information (and editing) from Mediawiki installations.

A few examples will follow, you can request using your web browser. Including a Pretty-prints JSON extension on your browser, as it will help you read the API's responses.


Example: Page basic info

http://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mw-mediadesign/api.php?format=json&action=query&titles=Main_Page&prop=info PZI MD wiki Main Page

http://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mw-mediadesign/api.php?format=json&action=query&titles=Wiki_publishing&prop=info This page

Example: Page content

http://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mw-mediadesign/api.php?format=json&action=query&titles=Wiki_publishing&prop=revisions&rvprop=content This page Page


action=render

action=render

Action render is a simple way of obtaining just the page content as HTML markup.

http://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mw-mediadesign/index.php?title=Wiki_publishing&action=render

Decomposing an API request

http://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mw-mediadesign/api.php? format=json & action=query & titles=Wiki_publishing & prop=revisions & rvprop=content
  • https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mw-mediadesign/api.php? - endpoint - the home page of the MediaWiki web service. It can be found by going to the Version:Special page of a wiki a searching for the API entry point
  • format=json - the format of the output. Can either be JSON of XML, although XML is being phased out
  • action=query - what action to you want to performed. query is the most used, but there many more available options, such as editing and deleting pages.

Then comes the action specific parameters

  • titles=Wiki_publishing - the page queried
  • prop=revisions - what properties you want from of a page: revision. As no particular revision is specified the latest will be returned
  • rvprop=content - what specific properties you want from the page revision in question: content. You could also ask for the user who created the last revision, or the comment left by the user. These properties can be combined in a single request. rvprop=content|user|comment

Example: Page revisions

Example: Images in a page

http://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mw-mediadesign/api.php?format=json&action=query&titles=Main_Page&prop=images

Example: categories a page belongs to

http://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mw-mediadesign/api.php?format=json&action=query&titles=Wiki_publishing&prop=categories

Example: Category members - Pages belonging to a category

http://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mw-mediadesign/api.php?format=json&action=query&list=categorymembers&cmtitle=Category:Special Issue

Documentation: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Categorymembers

Examples: Contributors to a page

http://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mw-mediadesign/api.php?format=json&action=query&titles=Main_Page&prop=contributors

Example: Users of a wiki

http://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mw-mediadesign/api.php?format=json&action=query&list=allusers&aulimit=100

limit of 100 users

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