WikipediaFS

WikipediaFS

Developer(s)	Mathieu Blondel
Stable release	0.4 / 2 August 2010 (2010-08-02)
Operating system	Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD
License	GNU GPL
Website	wikipediafs.sourceforge.net

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.)

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

• 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.

See also

• Wikifs

External links

• Official website
• Mediawiki Manual:External editors
• proposals for improvement