For the records: Here some notes on the import of http://www.vim.org/tips to this wiki.

I (bastl) joined the discussion on vim@vim.org on the wiki thing late, but since I love the idea (and technical possibilities) of wikis, I joined in and in the end did it on my own. But I was standing on the shoulders of giants. Let me give some credits here:

Credits

• vimtips.py by Ali Polatel

This was a great python script, I used and adapted heavily. Well documented, well structured. It was very easy to dive in with nothing more than some general object-oriented experience and some more specific experiences with Regexes. (have you read Mastering Regular Expressions ??)

• bulkinsert.php

A Mediawiki bot that allows to upload pages in bulk. Not too elegant, but useful.

• wikipediafs by Mathieu Blondel

Even cooler than bulkinsert.php: A filesystem that allows to deal with mediawiki articles as with normal files. Edit them with vim, moven them with mv, copy them with cp. Great piece of work.

• mwdumper

A great little tool to process mediawiki dumpfiles.

• #wikia on freenode

The Wikia community. Very kind ppl that help immediatly with everything that's related to mediawiki or wikia. Thanks to Splarka, Rieke, Datrio, Sannse and everyone I forgot ... The support is great.

• Tom Purl

Tom originally started this wiki, and pushed the discussion on vim@vim.org forward by setting arbitrary deadlines. Very cool :-)

• vim@vim.org

The maillist of vim was quite eager in discussion of this task. Thanks for all tips and remarks!

Procedure

1. wget all the HTML from http://www.vim.org/tips
2. install a local mediawiki to test, mount it with wikipediafs
3. use vimtips.py to generate files directly in the wikipediafs (two files at once: VimTip123 as a redirect to the real page)
4. some tips failed since wikipediafs is a very young tool. catch these tips and process them with bulkinsert.php to my local mediawiki.
5. do a dump export of the local mediawiki
6. post process it with mwdumper (filter out only vimtips)
7. send the dumpfile to wikia.com and let the wikia-admins do a dump import

Sounds complicated? It was :-) Many different tools and programming languages (python, php, bash, mediawiki-markup, regexes) made life complicated, but in the end it was fun ...

Notes on vimtips.py

to be done

bastl 15:42, 12 June 2007 (UTC)