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OniGalore:Current events: Difference between revisions
→External link review: linking to the script's location on our repo
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While MediaWiki makes it easy to find bad links to pages on our own wiki, marking them in red and providing tools like Wantedpages, there is no automatic check of external links. MediaWiki compiles all these links into a table, but it does not ping the URLs to see if they give any response. The most you are allowed to do is [[Special:LinkSearch|search]] through the links table, and even that isn't implemented well. Over the years, many links on our wiki have gone dead as the Web has changed and various file hosts have gone out of business. | While MediaWiki makes it easy to find bad links to pages on our own wiki, marking them in red and providing tools like Wantedpages, there is no automatic check of external links. MediaWiki compiles all these links into a table, but it does not ping the URLs to see if they give any response. The most you are allowed to do is [[Special:LinkSearch|search]] through the links table, and even that isn't implemented well. Over the years, many links on our wiki have gone dead as the Web has changed and various file hosts have gone out of business. | ||
So [[User:Iritscen|I]] have implemented an automated solution that will help us catch these problems more easily; a human hand will still be needed to fix the problems. Here's how it works: every day, a script written by Alloc dumps MW's external links table to [http://wiki.oni2.net/w/extlinks.csv this location]. | So [[User:Iritscen|I]] have implemented an automated solution that will help us catch these problems more easily; a human hand will still be needed to fix the problems. Here's how it works: every day, a script written by Alloc dumps MW's external links table to [http://wiki.oni2.net/w/extlinks.csv this location]. My automated script walks through the table and looks for URLs that return NG codes like 404. It will also detect other problems in the future. The script and related files are found [http://websvn.chrilly.net/listing.php?repname=Oni2&path=%2FValidate+External+Links%2F here]. | ||
===Coming features=== | ===Coming features=== | ||
*Detection of "external internal" links, which occur when someone puts the full URL to another page on this same wiki, like <nowiki>"[http://wiki.oni2.net/OniGalore:Current_events]"</nowiki> instead of <nowiki>"[[OniGalore:Current events]]"</nowiki>. | *Detection of "external internal" links, which occur when someone puts the full URL to another page on this same wiki, like <nowiki>"[http://wiki.oni2.net/OniGalore:Current_events]"</nowiki> instead of <nowiki>"[[OniGalore:Current events]]"</nowiki>.<!--Un-comment "external internal" advice above when this is done.--> | ||
*At a cursory glance, I can see that many external links no longer display the content that they were intended to display. In many cases, web sites are silently redirecting the user to their main page without using the appropriate code that indicates the content was not found. Only visual inspections of the pages can catch these issues. Once we have dealt with the low-hanging fruit of pages that return NG codes, the screenshot feature in the script will be activated, which will allow us to easily confirm if the "OK" links (and "OK" snapshots from the Internet Archive) are actually loading the intended page. | *At a cursory glance, I can see that many external links no longer display the content that they were intended to display. In many cases, web sites are silently redirecting the user to their main page without using the appropriate code that indicates the content was not found. Only visual inspections of the pages can catch these issues. Once we have dealt with the low-hanging fruit of pages that return NG codes, the screenshot feature in the script will be activated, which will allow us to easily confirm if the "OK" links (and "OK" snapshots from the Internet Archive) are actually loading the intended page. | ||