WikipediaFS
Encyclopedia
WikipediaFS is a virtual
filesystem which allows users to view and edit Wikipedia
(or any Mediawiki
-based site) articles as if they were real files on a local disk drive. This enables a user to edit articles directly with any text editor. WikipediaFS is developed primarily by Mathieu Blondel on SourceForge.net
.
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.)
Virtual
The term virtual is a concept applied in many fields with somewhat differing connotations, and also, differing denotations.The term has been defined in philosophy as "that which is not real" but may display the salient qualities of the real....
filesystem which allows users to view and edit Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
(or any Mediawiki
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...
-based site) articles as if they were real files on a local disk drive. This enables a user to edit articles directly with any text editor. WikipediaFS is developed primarily by Mathieu Blondel on SourceForge.net
SourceForge.net
SourceForge is a web-based source code repository. It acts as a centralized location for software developers to control and manage open source software development. The website runs a version of SourceForge Enterprise Edition, forked from the last open-source version available...
.
WikipediaFS is implemented in Python and uses the FUSE kernel module. The file system works by lazily
Lazy evaluation
In programming language theory, lazy evaluation or call-by-need is an evaluation strategy which delays the evaluation of an expression until the value of this is actually required and which also avoids repeated evaluations...
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 highlightingSyntax highlightingSyntax highlighting is a feature of some text editors that display text—especially source code—in different colors and fonts according to the category of terms. This feature eases writing in a structured language such as a programming language or a markup language as both structures and...
. - 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
- Version 0.3 does not work with the current Wikipedia. (An old version does not work, fixed but several distros have not updated their version)
- 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.