User:Nuno Tavares/JMWE
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This is the user manual for JMWEditor, which is under development. Feel free to join or ask any question on my PT discussion page.
Starting the application[edit]
The JMediaWikiStudio lies on the concept of an abstract source of information. This means you can work from virtually any source, and edit it as long as the source allows updates. For instance, JMediaWikiStudio can behave just like a dedicated reader, if your source doesn't allow updating (or even if it does, as well), or and editor, if it does. So, first of all, you need to provide some source information, for what we will call it accounts.
The account manager[edit]
Bear in mind that you need at least an account to use the studio, and at least one source (account) which allows updating (i.e., editing) to use it as an editor. Go to Edit|Accounts to setup your accounts.
On the panel provided, you will have a table where the existing accounts are listed. Obviously, if this is your first time using JMediaWikiStudio, the table will be empty. So, let's setup an account to work on the Wikipedia, as an example, since it's both a MediaWiki source (besides being a very customized one) and an updatable source. Be sure to select "Wikimedia project" as the "New account..." type, and click the "Enter account information" button.
Now, a new dialog pops up, asking for a few parameters. These should be self explanatory: set automatic login to 1 if you want the account to login automatically as soon as it is used; set user to be your username on the Wikipedia, or leave it blank if you wish to work as anonymous; set password as your Wikipedia's username's password; and, finally, the most important (and obligatory) parameters: the language and the project family. The second one, in this test run, should be "wikipedia"; however, if you wanted to work on Wiktionary you would want to write "wiktionary". The first one will be the wikipedia's language project you use to work most. Let's set it to "en", for the english Wikipedia. In the end, the concatenation of language + "." + project + ".org" should give us the name of the server we will be working on.
Press OK, and notice that the new account is added to the table we mentioned earlier. Now that we have a connection, just press the "Close" button on the account manager.
Customizing[edit]
- [INCOMPLETE]
The editor[edit]
The editing form[edit]
The editing form has the standard MediaWiki buttons: bold, italic, wikilink, hyperlink, etc, aligned on the left and some extra buttons (as of May-2006, the form layout is still a test layout), aligned to the right. The functions provided by these extra buttons are:
- VfD
- Automatically marks the article for deletion, and submits it on the project's specific VfD page (under construction);
- disambig
- This invokes the Assisted Disambiguator.
- bioData
- This is a helper to subscribe the article in the project's biography lists (very buggy).
- chkLinks
- Just a link checker: checks for links to disambiguations and to redirects. As of May-2006 it shouldn't really do nothing, as the core is still unstable.
Previewing[edit]
- [INCOMPLETE]
JMediaWikiStudio provides three methods for previewing your changes, whose default may be specified on the Preferences dialog.
Tools[edit]
Assisted Disambiguation[edit]
To use the assisted disambiguation tool, which is accessible from the Editor form, you need to open a disambiguation page. The check [if it is a disambiguation or not] is done against each project/language's specific tags, being the most typical the {{disambig}}.
After you open the disambiguation page, you should click the disambig button, which will pop up a small dialog window, after getting the references for that disambiguation. These will be present in the combo box labeled "", and each occurrence on the combo's selected item will be listed as a context in the table below: the first column has the expression you are disambiguating wrapped with some context text (extracted from the reference) — click on it to see the whole context text — and second column will host the solution, after you manually write it (double clicking the table cell in question), or after you double click one of the solutions provided on the listbox at your right. These solutions are the links provided in the disambiguation page, which will tipically be the disambiguated articles — note that you may find non-interesting links, which is due to a controversial concept of what a disambiguation page should look like.
Try to resolve some disambiguations on a page you have opened. Use the left and right signs next to the combobox to navigate through contexts (they will automatically jump to the previous or next pages if there are no more contexts on the page selected at the combobox). When you're done, just click OK (don't use the accept button, it does nothing, yet).
The changes will be massively submitted as soon as you press the OK button, so you should check all your changes before submitting them.
Assisted Uploader[edit]
- [INCOMPLETE]
The Assisted Uploader (formerly known as Image Transporter) is a small tool that helps you in transferring images from one wikimedia project to Commons.
Monitors[edit]
The monitors are a set of panels which listen Special:Recentchanges for changes, and splits them into each specific list. Thus, you can sit watching only Special:Newpages, or the creation of new users, etc. As of 20060524, these monitors use IRC to listen for changes, so you will need IRC access to use them.
In the future, the monitors will be allowed to do load-balancing by registering a kind of online status on a project's specific page to announce that it is online and what is it doing that can be balanced. This will allow to split the load and resources across multiple users running JMWSMonitors simultaneously.
Configuration[edit]
- Since 20060930, the (JMWS)Monitors were splitted from the Studio, thus allowing to be ran as a standalone application.
To use JMWSMonitors, you need to have at least one account of type "Wikimedia project". The project language and family information will be automatically extracted from the account manager and you may only operate on those wikimedia projects were you do have a valid account.
Each monitor is allowed to be independently customized. To access the configuration panel, you need to open the monitor and select the "Options" button. There you will find a lot of switches that allow to filter some of the changes being monitored:
- New entries at the top — by default, new entries are added to the bottom of the list. Check this option to add them to the top of it;
- Limit listings to X rows — the listings will keep growing and growing, unless you clear them periodically, or use this option to recycle the list, so it discards the oldest changes to give room to new changes;
- Recording log — This option sets the file where the Sleep log shall be written. See the Sleep log section;
- Ignore XXXX — this set of options will allow you to ignore whole namespaces. Check those that you wish to ignore;
- Automatically grey [...] if page deleted — by setting this, you will allow the monitors to be notified whenever a page is deleted; if that page was listed in any panel, it will be greyed so it looses enphasis and you can be aware that there's no page to check;
- Run triggers before filters — by default, the filters (see section Filters) are ran before any trigger (see section Triggers) is fired. This means that, if the edit has been filtered, it won't fire any trigger related to. Check this option if you wish to fire the triggers before the edit is filtered.
Filters[edit]
All filters apply directly under the editing information, not its content — for that, see section Triggers. Filters are a quick way to skip groups or types of edits - like those made by User:X, or those in a specific domain. For specifying the filters, you use the Ignore/Watch lists.
Ignore/Watch lists[edit]
There are two basic types of lists: those which include articles you don't care about at all - the ignore list (IL) - and those you care most - the watch list (WL). The first one will simply ignore edits on the articles included; the second will highlight changes on the articles included. You can also specify groups of users: those you wish to ignore (p.e., that you trust, like +sysop) - the white list (WL) - and those you want to watch (p.e., if you don't trust a user) - the black list (BL). Allong with these, there is also the option to ignore bot edits (B). Finally, you may want to highlight edits that include specific words, the bad words list (BWL).
Sleep log[edit]
- [TODO]
The sleep mode will allow you to record edits to a file while displaying them immediatelly to the screen. After you stop the sleep mode, you are allowed to review past edits, just like if they were being performed live. This is specially usefull when you leave the monitors open for a long period, to avoid wasting of system resources: after a time of inactivity, the monitors will automatically activate the sleep mode.
Note that the Sleep log is functionally different from the STOP function: the latter will simply ignore any recent changes, which means that they will be forever lost.
Triggers[edit]
The triggers are a set of actions that can be ran automatically when a set of conditions are met. For instance, you can automatically check for "copyright violation" for every new page created, or check it only if the edit inserts a great amount of text without interlinks. Another use might be giving the welcome template information to recently created users.
To activate triggers for a monitor, open the monitor and click the "Triggers" button. You will find it pretty simple to setup a trigger: just use the arrow buttons to activate/deactivate it, and click the "Setup..." button to check its configuration. Note that each trigger has its own configuration parameters whose explanation is beyond the scope of this document.
As of 20060930, the available triggers are:
- WelcomeNewUsers: Automatically welcome newly registered users;
- MediaUploaded: Automatically checks an upload for a valid license and if it doesn't find any, resets the upload's description page (with a tag such as incomplete license information) and requests more info about it to the uploader.
- UnlinkDeletedImages: Automatically removes any links to the image by checking its usage. This trigger acts in a per-account provided basis, so it's fairly simple to monitor Commons's deletions and unlink the deleted media in multiple projects.
In the forge, there are others (see feature requests):
Helping the development[edit]
Eventually, you might cross with weird behaviour from the application, like clicking on a button and nothing happening. Bear in mind that most of the error output (debugging) is printed on a somewhat hidden stream, so that we can spare the user from reading lots of garbage. However, if you want to help us tracing, catching and/or fixing the bugs, we will eventually need to have access to that output.
This can be accomplished if you run the application from the command line (or MS-DOS console, as some would call it). If you are using Linux, you should be familiar with it. If you are using Windows, got to the Start menu → Programs → Acessories, and select "Command line prompt". In the meantime, you need to locate the JAVA.EXE binary, which is installed along with the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). It tipically installs to C:\Program Files\Java\J2re...\bin\java.exe, the ellipsis being the JRE version number. Now, you need to know the path to the JAR file of the application. Let's suppose you download it to C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\My Documents\. This is the commands you would need to type to get the program running on this scenario:
C: CD "\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\My Documents" C:\Program Files\Java\J2re...\bin\java -jar JMediaWikiStudio.jar
And that's all. Now retry doing the things you were doing before, and notice that a lot of (probably not understandable) output is dumped to the command line window.