User:The Transhumanist/Advanced

List of pages related to advanced features or operations, including helpful pages and pages to avoid, with notes.

Reading Wikipedia offline

• WikiTaxi – 3rd party program for installing and viewing Wikipedia offline. It is highly limited: it doesn't include project space, it doesn't include images, and it doesn't allow selecting/copying of content. It is helpful as a backup system to read articles when you don't have online access to Wikipedia. And it is easy to install (but installation is not quick).
• See #Running Wikipedia on your own computer, below

Advanced search operations

Off-line searches

• Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Database scanner – allows you to search the Wikipedia database off-line. Of course you have to download the database first.
  • Includes limited support for regex searches.
    • As far as I can tell, its search engine it does not recognize wiki-markup. So far, I've tried searching for headings by specifying an equal sign in searches. The search results come up as if the search string didn't include the equal sign.

Searching Wikipedia using regex

• Regex ("regular expressions") –
• Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Database scanner – includes limited support for regex searches (does not recognize wiki-markup).

Running Wikipedia on your own computer

Install MediaWiki

• MediaWiki – the software program that runs Wikipedia. MediaWiki is opensource and is available for download for free. You can use it for offline access to the Wikipedia database, or to set up a wiki of your own.
  • However, MediaWiki requires other software to be able to run. When bundled together, these are referred to as AMP (they are also open source and free). The components of AMP (and what the letters stand for) are:
    • Apache/IIS
    • MySQL4 or later (5 or later as of version 1.19)
    • PHP5. They are also open source and free.
  • The Manual Installation Guide explains how to install MediaWiki from scratch.
    • mw:Manual:Installing MediaWiki
  • You may find MediaWiki software bundles and MediaWiki hosting serviceswith 1-click installation and wiki farms to be convenient alternatives to manual installation.

Wikipedia database operations

• Wikipedia:Database download – Wikipedia offers free copies of all available content to interested users. These databases can be used for mirroring, personal use, informal backups, offline use or database queries (such as for Wikipedia:Maintenance).
  • m:Data dumps –
• [[]]
• [[]]

Script-related

Using scripts

• Wikipedia:Using scripts
• Passing pages to a script using WP:AWB – AWB (AutoWikiBrowser)

Writing scripts

• Wikipedia:Writing scripts

Writing perl scripts

• Wikipedia:Writing perl scripts
  • Strawberry Perl – free Perl implementation for MS Windows
  • Wikipedia:Computer help desk/ParseMediaWikiDump – Parse::MediaWikiDump is a Perl module created by Triddle that makes accessing the information in a MediaWiki dump file easy.

See also

• mw:How to become a MediaWiki hacker