WikipediaFS

Updated on Jan 01, 2024

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Developer(s) Mathieu Blondel Written in Python		Development status Unmaintained
Initial release 11 June 2006; 10 years ago (2006-06-11) Stable release 0.4 / 2 August 2010; 6 years ago (2010-08-02) Preview release r75 / 10 July 2015; 20 months ago (2015-07-10)

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. 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.)

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 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

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.

References

WikipediaFS Wikipedia

(Text) CC BY-SA

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Advantages

Disadvantages

References