wonderful world of programming

wiki! wiki!

One of the nice things about Java is there seems to be a friendly (or at least relatively friendly) API for everything.

Java Wiki Bot Framework (JWBF) is a Java framework for working with wikis running MediaWiki (the wiki software used by Wikipedia and all the other Wikimedia Foundation projects).

A little off subject: who thought it was a good idea to name two distinct but related things WikiMedia and MediaWiki? Good luck keeping those terms straight.

Back to JWBF: It is pleasantly easy to use. Admittedly, my needs are far from complex: replace the text of a couple of templates on a regular basis. It’s hardly glamorous programming, but it should save us some time at work. Now we’ll have more time to sing along with
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Invent a freeze ray.

Happily the library exists in the central maven repository, so getting it included in my project is easy enough:

    <dependency>
      <groupId>net.sourceforge</groupId>
      <artifactId>jwbf</artifactId>
      <version>1.2-186</version>
      <scope>compile</scope>
    </dependency>

Actually using the framework is as easy as this:

        MediaWikiBot mediaWikiBot =
            new MediaWikiBot( "http://hostname/wiki/" );
        mediaWikiBot.login( "CurrentlyDeployedBot", "password" );
        Article article = new Article(mediaWikiBot.readContent(
            "Template:Currently deployed/Arinc" ), mediaWikiBot );
        article.setText( "Test" );
        article.save();

It’s always nice when things are this easy. *cheers*

One more thing: if you’re looking to create a bot or script for automatic or semi-automatic usage of Wikipedia, please review Wikipedia’s bot policy first.