MetaWiki

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Are you looking for WikiMedia?

The search engine with sauce.

: http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl

An IndexingScheme for many wikis, not just one wiki. Along similar lines to TwinPages and InterWiki. Allows titles searches on multiple wikis at once. Only known, supported wikis will be searched, however. To petition for more, please add the index page to the list on AllPages and then send an e-mail to mailto:sunir@sunir.org. For discussion regarding problems of the indexing process, or improvements to the technology, see MetaWikiDiscussion.

There's also a nice magic mode where you can use MetaWiki by just appending the search terms onto the end of the script:

: http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl?MetaWiki

And another magic mode where you can do a title search on only one wiki:

: http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl?wiki=MeatballWiki&words=Wiki+Category

And another magic mode where you can use MetaWiki as a redirector:

: http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl?wiki=JargonFile&redirect=AirplaneRule
: http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl?redirect=MetaWiki
: http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl?wiki=ZWiki&redirect=MetaWiki

And yet another magic mode where you can jump to a RandomPage of a particular wiki, or of any indexed wiki:

: http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl?random=WikiWiki
: http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl?random=all

And still one more magic mode where you can get the page listings of any indexed site:

: http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl?list=MeatBall

And still another magic mode that implements LikePages:

: http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl?like=DesignPatterns
: http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl?like=LikePages&wiki=MeatBall

Source code available at http://sunir.org/src/meatball/IndexingSchemes. The data files are available at

http://sunir.org/meatball/MetaWiki/metadb: The database. Very large.

http://sunir.org/meatball/MetaWiki/metamap: MetaWiki's version of the InterMap.

http://sunir.org/meatball/MetaWiki/metastats: Daily statistics.

Fun things to do with bookmarks

At least in InternetExplorer there's a link bar which holds a bunch of bookmarks that you want to get to in one click. If you make the URL of the bookmark JavaScript, you can do nifty things. Create a bookmark with the URL

: javascript:Qr=document.selection.createRange().text;if(!Qr){void(Qr=prompt('Keywords...',''))}if(Qr)location.href='http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl?'+escape(Qr)

For Mozilla

javascript:Qr=document.getSelection();if(!Qr){void(Qr=prompt('Keywords...',''))}if(Qr)location.href='http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl?'+escape(Qr)

and put it under Links in your Favorites. Then you can search MetaWiki automagically by selecting text and hitting the button, or just hitting the button. This is "cleverly" adapted from something FridemarPache showed me once (I just changed the URL).

How to use MetaWiki to implement TwinPages

There is a special superfast interface for other wikis to get all its TwinPages known by MetaWiki. It uses HTTP POST as the transport, if you know how to do that. The parameters are "twin" for the index listing and "wiki" for your InterWiki name (if you have one). If you don't know how to use POST, use [this HTML] to do it by hand:

<HTML>
<BODY>
    <FORM
        METHOD="POST"
        ACTION="http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl"
        ENCTYPE="application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
    >
        Your wikis name here: <INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="wiki" VALUE="">
        Your index here:
        <TEXTAREA NAME="twin" STYLE="width:80%;height=80%"></TEXTAREA><P>
        <INPUT TYPE="submit" VALUE="Search">
    </FORM>
</BODY>

The input format is very simple. Send an list of the titles on your wiki, space delimited. It's faster if you alphabetize the list, case insensitive. If you allow spaces in your page names escape them as you would normally in the URL. e.g.

PageOne
PageThree
PageTwo

The script will return plaintext. Each line is of the following format: the first word is the title on your wiki matched, the second word is the title on the foreign wikis matched, the remaining words are the foreign wikis with TwinPages. If a page matched nothing, it won't appear in the output. If a page matches multiple renditions of the same title, it will appear on multiple lines but with different foreign titles. A blank line signals the end of the TwinPages list. The next section is the InterMap file used. Its form is a sequence of lines, the first word being the InterWiki name, the rest of the line being the URL pattern. In the URL pattern, the first space (including the newline) is a placeholder for the page name. e.g.

PageOne PageOne MeatballWiki WikiWiki
PageOne Page%20one UseModWiki
PageTwo PageTwo Tavi

MeatballWiki http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/
AndStuffWiki http://andstuff.org/
DolphinWiki http://www.object-arts.com/wiki/html/Dolphin/ .htm
Tavi http://tavi.sourceforge.net/
UseModWiki https://www.usemod.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?
WikiWiki http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?

NOTE THE SPACE IN DolphinWiki?'s URL

And it's super fast. I can search all of WikiWiki's pages in less than 10 seconds. But that doesn't mean you should abuse it. You probably only need to update your information once a week as that is how often the server fetches new indices.

The title matching uses WikiNameCanonicalization.

Currently indexable engines

MoinMoin

MoinMoin:TitleIndex

: NOTE: J¨¹rgenHermann, author of MoinMoin, has added a special mode to index MoinMoin in response to the MetaWiki search engine. Nonetheless, provided you use the same TitleIndex? format as the original MoinMoin, I have a script that will read in your page listing.

PhpWiki: http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/phpwiki

TwikiClone: http://www.twiki.org

UseModWiki: https://www.usemod.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl

WikkiTikkiTavi: http://tavi.sourceforge.net/

ZwikiClone: http://www.zwiki.org

Recent Additions

[September 25, 2003] BookShelved, ReformSociety?.

[March 1, 2003] GreenCheese.

[February 26, 2002] I tried adding the WordList to point to the dictionary, but that was intractable. I think I'll have to do something more intelligent, like binary searching for each term in the WordList and display a link like Google did. That's actually more the direction I wanted to take. However, for TwinPages, that might get complicated. Maybe I should just mergecrawl through the WordList like I crawl through the metadb?

[February 12, 2002] Added IAwikiDotNet. Re-added WikiPedia. That forced me to optimize more, but it's still slower than before (not that it's slow). Renamed MeatballWiki to MeatBall and AndStuffWiki to AndStuff.

[February 11, 2002] I upgraded the interface and added LikePages.

[July 25, 2001] WhyClublet, DarachWiki?. (Actually, Why was added a week ago.)

Recent Deletions

[December 8, 2003] I removed ZWiki because the regex is crashing the server.

[January 13, 2003] PhpWiki has been de-listed as its SourceForge home is crawling. Hey, what's up with the AllPages implementation? Is it done?

[November 11, 2001] WikiPedia. It's been failing to list for over two months. Also, no one links to it, nor are there many TwinPages, so there's no point trying to make it work.

Recent Hacks

[September 25, 2003] Changes AndStuff's AllPages URL.

[March 1, 2003] Fixed a bug in the LikePages implementation that would list the entire page database when only one word was given. Now it tries to match that word as either the first or last word in each title. e.g. http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl?like=pattern

[January 13, 2003] The caching mechanism has been fixed to be more forgiving to sites that are down and less server intensive. Cached indices are kept for a week before being refreshed. The server will attempt to refresh the index every day for another week before giving up. Once it gives up, the server will delete the old index and the site will be out of the database. This means indices may be two weeks stale, however that isn't really much of an issue if you think about it.

: The metamap also now implements InterMapPostFix using a space as the delimiter instead of the kludgy $PAGE. This is inline with UseMod 2.0 and it is backwards compatible with the previous UseMod InterMap format (including MeatBall's InterMapTxt).

Bugs

Sunir, the Wiki:RandomPage script you've created is intermittently failing for me. Sometimes it redirects to http://sunir.org/apps/SamplePage instead of http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SamplePage. I've been unable to detect a pattern in the failures. Maybe you have an idea? -- JohannesGijsbers

JargonFile.

A trillion other wikis. See metastats.

I heard community-wiki is not referred in meta-wiki. Could you please add it? Meta-wiki seems to get of special interest in connection with [clean linking], see also [community-wiki: clean linking]. I will get of even more importance in connection with [community-wiki: topic-nodes] -- MattisManzel

Sunir I tried to use MetaWiki to search for page names on MeatBall by a specific search like (http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl?wiki=MeatballWiki&words=Community). It failed but this (http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl?words=Community) works and shows all sites. -- DavidLiu 5Apr05

Might there be a way to piggyback on DelIcioUs? or TechnoRati as a directory server? http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/z2005-09-30-DeliciousForSisterSites --BillSeitz

This is interesting. I have thought of SwitchWiki in such a way that might benefit from this idea. -- MarkDilley

CategoryIndexingScheme CategoryWikiTechnology CategoryInterCommunity