Hi,
No responses to your specific questions, but just to mention I worked some
years ago on an extension [1] aiming at retrieving the
as-exact-as-possible display of the page at a given past datetime, because
the current implementation of oldid is only "past wikitext with current
context (templates, images, etc.)".
I mainly implemented the retrieval of old versions of templates, but a lot
of other smaller improvements could be done (MediaWiki messages,
styles/JS, images, etc.). With this approach, some details are
irremediably lost (e.g. number of articles at given timedate, some tricky
delete-and-move actions, etc.) and additional informations would have to
be recorded to retrieve more exactly the past versions.
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:BackwardsTimeTravel
~ Seb35
Le Fri, 01 Nov 2013 20:50:06 +0100, Shawn Jones <sj...@cs.odu.edu> a écrit:
Hi,
I'm currently working on the Memento Extension for Mediawiki, as
announced earlier today by Herbert Van de Sompel.
The goal of this extension is to work with the Memento framework, which
attempts to display web pages as they appeared at a given date and time
in the past.
Our goal is for this to be a collaborative effort focusing on solving
issues and providing functionality in "the Wikimedia Way" as much as
possible.
Without further ado, I have the following technical questions (I
apologize in advance for the fire hose):
1. The Memento protocol has a resource called a TimeMap [1] that takes
an article name and returns text formatted as application/link-format.
This text contains a machine-readable list of all of the prior revisions
(mementos) of this page. It is currently implemented as a SpecialPage
which can be accessed like
http://www.example.com/index.php/Special:TimeMap/Article_Name. Is this
the best method, or is it more preferable for us to extend the Action
class and add a new action to $wgActions in order to return a TimeMap
from the regular page like
http://www.example.com/index.php?title=Article_Name&action=gettimemap
without using the SpecialPage? Is there another preferred way of
solving this problem?
2. We currently make several database calls using the the select method
of the Database Object. After some research, we realized that Mediawiki
provides some functions that do what we need without making these
database calls directly. One of these needs is to acquire the oldid and
timestamp of the first revision of a page, which can be done using
Title->getFirstRevision()->getId() and
Title->getFirstRevision()->getTimestamp() methods. Is there a way to
get the latest ID and latest timestamp? I see I can do
Title->getLatestRevID() to get the latest revision ID; what is the best
way to get the latest timestamp?
3. In order to create the correct headers for use with the Memento
protocol, we have to generate URIs. To accomplish this, we use the
$wgServer global variable (through a layer of abstraction); how do we
correctly handle situations if it isn't set by the installation? Is
there an alternative? Is there a better way to construct URIs?
4. We use exceptions to indicate when showErrorPage should be run;
should the hooks that catch these exceptions and then run showErrorPage
also return false?
5. Is there a way to get previous revisions of embedded content, like
images? I tried using the ImageBeforeProduceHTML hook, but found that
setting the $time parameter didn't return a previous revision of an
image. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a better way?
6. Are there any additional coding standards we should be following
besides those on the "Manual:Coding_conventions" and "Manual:Coding
Conventions - Mediawiki" pages?
7. We have two styles for serving pages back to the user:
* 302-style[2], which uses a 302 redirect to tell the user's
browser to go fetch the old revision of the page (e.g.
http://www.example.com/index.php?title=Article&oldid=12345)
* 200-style[3], which actually modifies the page content in place
so that it resembles the old revision of the page
Which of these styles is preferable as a default?
8. Some sites don't wish to have their past Talk/Discussion pages
accessible via Memento. We have the ability to exclude namespaces
(Talk, Template, Category, etc.) via configurable option. By default it
excludes nothing. What namespaces should be excluded by default?
Thanks in advance for any advice, assistance, further discussion, and
criticism on these and other topics.
Shawn M. Jones
Graduate Research Assistant
Department of Computer Science
Old Dominion University
[1] http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/rfc/ID/#Pattern6
[2] http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/rfc/ID/#Pattern1.1
[3] http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/rfc/ID/#Pattern1.2
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