We need to keep better tracking records for the various types of ongoing experiments that are constantly getting set up as part of daily online life.

That’s a problem I’m trying to solve, and the aim may be to have an action logging app that covers this kind of documentation eventually, in order to manage all those spinning plates while on the move, I’m talking mobile now, but in the meantime we came up with the idea of using MediaWiki templates to create structured project pages incorporating multiple cycles, on the intranet and other wikis.

MediaWiki templates provide a consistent style, even if it does look a bit blocky, and can be used to prompt for missing data, to make sure everything gets put down in words, figures and dates. Links and images too.

There are two ways of passing specific data over from the project page to the Template itself, one is using parameters that are referenced by position – 1,2,3 etc and the other is to used named parameters and I think I’m going to try using named parameters for the Cycle template. See there, I’ve already modularised the system by plumping for nested templates with the Cycle Template being called a number of times within some kind of overall Project Header template. They may not actually be nested in practice, but simply chopped together on the calling page but we’ll see about that later on once we get to the coding stage.

The Project template describes the project in terms of an area of online activity to be worked on and a stated intention for improvement.

To start with I’m suggesting the following specification

DARproject $Domain, $Aim, $Strategy to test, $Notes Other variables to take into account

using the above 4 variables to define the project, we next move on to look at individual cycles:

DARcycle $Cycle number, $Action to be taken, $Date actioned, $End date, $data collected, $Observed Results, $Reflection, $Conclusion, $Next Action to try

So that’s what I’m up to today, using Mediawiki templates to try and prototype a system for tracking distributed action research projects better online.

I’ve got the basic templates up and working using the specification outlined above, tweaked just a little to use positional parameters for the first two variable in the Cycle template, and named parameters for the rest. Rather than nesting templates inside each other, I’ve plumped for a simpler system of just calling the Header then instances of Cycle then the Footer from the content page, so I now have three separate templates which work together. The result is as intended.

Here’s a screenshot from a fictitious example which shows a rudimentary colour scheme and other visual indicators to try and make the functioning of the system as intuitive as possible

The next stage now is to start using the prototype templates for a small but real project as soon as possible and see how it goes.

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Action Research Cycles MediaWiki Template

Version:

This wiki is powered by MediaWiki, copyright (C) 2001-2007 Magnus Manske, Brion Vibber, Lee Daniel Crocker, Tim Starling, Erik Möller, Gabriel Wicke, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Niklas Laxström, Domas Mituzas, Rob Church and others.

MediaWiki is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

MediaWiki is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. or read it online

• MediaWiki: 1.11.1
• PHP: 5.2.42-servage10 (apache2handler)
• MySQL: 5.0.75

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Wiki Web Hosting at Servage

So any tool which generates nice plain simple wiki text from other inputs is going to be great for migrating content from out of email attachments and intranet databases and out onto the flat hierarchy of the open wiki space.

I generally use this one for converting from HTML pages into mediawiki syntax:

HTML::WikiConverter

and the tip below for converting to html through gMail is a good one too. Did you know you can use that technique to convert pdf’s into editable text as well?

Convert Word doc or Webpage to wiki – A Consuming Experience

For me, the two ways which worked the best were:

• Convert Word to HTML via Gmail, then convert the Webpage’s HTML to wikitext with Emiliano Bruni’s excellent HTML2Wiki Converter (where you paste the raw HTML code into the top box, and the wiki code appears in the bottom box which you can copy and paste into your wiki). Or (less good in its conversions, I found) -
• Convert Word to wiki direct using a Word macro – Word2MediaWikiPlus worked OK, though nowhere near as well as the above, for a MediaWiki wiki and PBWiki wiki that I tried them on (and those are probably two of the more popular wiki software platforms around); the results needed quite a lot of tidying.

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How to convert a Word doc or HTML to Wiki Markup

Mediawiki Images

Mediawiki handles uploaded images on pages in a way which is perfectly suitable for a free encyclopaedia. If you click on an image you get taken to special page which tells you more about the image itself. Who uploaded it, where it came from, any revision history and which other pages link to it. But what if you want to use an image just as a graphical link, such as a button or banner that takes you to the page which the image is about? That’s quite a reasonable requirement because it’s how the internet usually works, it’s what what visitors are more likely to expect. Sending them to a dead end meta page full of technical data might not be what you want to do. So this article will show you how to make image links work properly in mediawiki.

For my example I’m going to upload a new image file to UsefulWiki. The file is a logo button for the Better Reading Partners section of the wiki, which I want to feature on the Main Page. Not all installations of mediawiki have enabled the uploading of images, but this one does. You can tell because there’s a link in the left hand side Toolbar: “Upload File” The upload process is straightforward, but it’s worth copying the hint which appears there, as it’s harder to find again later.

To include the image in a page, use a link in the form [[Image:file.jpg]],
[[Image:file.png|alt text]] or [[Media:file.ogg]] for directly linking to the file

I tried something like that in the Sandbox with this result (screenshot):

The orange BRP logo is a bit too large so I can adjust the syntax to ask for it to be rendered only 70 pixels wide.

[[Image:Brp-logo.gif|thumb|Description|70px]]

That’s better, but you see how clicking on the button takes you here? when you might expect to go to the Better Reading Partners page. I’m going to fix that by getting rid of the syntax for direct image linking and using the syntax for building an external link instead, using the full URL of the target page:

[http://usefulwiki.com/page/Better_Reading_Partners description]

then replacing the description with the sytax for rendering an external image directly onto a page – which is just the full url of the hosted image. In this case I can find out the exact location of the image file by right-clicking ( ctrl-click on my Mac ) the image itself and choosing “Copy image location”. That’s then pasted in instead of “description” above to give

[http://usefulwiki.com/page/Better_Reading_Partners http://usefulwiki.com/w/images/thumb/a
/a6/Brp-logo.gif/70px-Brp-logo.gif]

( all on one line, just one space chracter between the two urls )
What’s happening here is that the image is being retrieved and then used just like anchor text for the link, like a hyperlinked description, except that it’s a picture. That works fine in the sandbox, but there’s one more thing I can tweak. The little blue arrow which denotes an external link needs to go, because it’s an internal page which I’m linking to.

I can get rid of it by wrapping the whole piece of code in a little bit of CSS:

<span class=”plainlinks”>…….</span>

so all I have to do is transfer the code over to the UsefulWiki Main Page.

Done. Any questions? Ok….

You might use it with externally hosted graphics instead of uploading image files to the same mediawiki.

If your mediawiki does not have direct rendering of image files enabled, it won’t work. So in LocalSettings.php, set $wgAllowExternalImages = true;

more in comments….

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How to make image links in MediaWiki

I tried installing the wikihow version of mediawiki software because it’s admired, and I need to know how it does some things. The nice people at wikihow have included what claims to be a compete bundle of all the skin modifications and extensions used by wikihow software in one big compressed file called

wikihow-source-code.tar.gz

So I uploaded the above file, extracted all the contents and ran through the usual mediawiki ‘one click’ install procedure – creating the MySQL database and user manually, editing adminsettings.sample, running the install script from the browser and then moving localsettings.php up to the parent directory. It told me it had installed mediawiki software successfully, but at the next step throws out a fatal error message that Article.php is failing to call PatrolHelper.php

PatrolHelper.php appears to be missing.

I tried commenting out the broken call but that caused more errors from lines depending on class variables having been initialised by said missing subroutine.

Any suggestions for getting the wikihow software working?

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wikihow : How to install wikihow mediawiki software