WikipediaFS

Virtual filesystem

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WikipediaFS

Developer(s)| Mathieu Blondel
Initial release| 11 June 2006; 19 years ago (2006-06-11)
Stable release|

0.4 / 2 August 2010; 14 years ago (2010-08-02)

Preview release|

r75[1] / 10 July 2015; 10 years ago (2015-07-10)[1]

Repository|

* svn.code.sf.net/p/wikipediafs/code/

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

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* 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

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* The project is no longer maintained as of 2007; the software has since been deprecated.
* It is difficult to go from-page-to-page; users must know the exact name of a page in order to edit it, as WikipediaFS has no local knowledge of what pages exist and which don't.

## See also

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* Wikifs

## References

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1. ^ a b "WikipediaFS / Code Commit 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.

## External links

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* Official website
* MediaWiki Manual:External editors
* proposals for improvement
* Collection of all available patches Archived 2023-11-29 at the Wayback Machine