User:Xhiris

= Who I am and What I Do =

Hello! I've been playing World of Warcraft for nearly two years now. My main is Xhiris on the Blackwater Raiders server, and I'm an officer of the Insane Gnome Posse guild. Mostly I'm in charge of running old-world instances, and am the unofficial Addon Guru.

Addons
Lua is a wonderful wonderful language. That said. many addons out there could be improved. My mission is to find the best qualities of addons out there, and contribute back to the community.

My current pet project is displaying WoWWiki articles in the game, using LightHeaded as a basis. WoW supports a limited subset of HTML, allowing us to convert the parsed MediaWiki into something WoW can render.

I've been using a combination of regular expressions (and PowerGREP) with scripts in Groovy, Java, and the Bliki MediaWiki Java renderer.

Wiki
I've been experimenting with Semantic Mediawiki over the last week. Wikia supports this on request. Using this would greatly simplify management of data on WoWWiki, as this permits us to store data in one and only one place.

For example, there are several templates to transclude or display data on items. Typically, item data uses the tooltip template. However, the item quality, icon, and other aspects must be repeated each time.

With Semantic MediaWiki, one can define these properties on the item article itself, then query for the properties for the templates.

Much can be done simply by putting the property references (e.g. has item quality::Common )

Notes on converting the wiki to Semantic properties

 * Some templates put link braces on their fields while others do not. Those that don't (e.g. npcbox.location) will not record properly if these have braces entered in the field value.  We can accomplish linking using Semantic Mediawiki tools instead.
 * Compound or list properties such as the attributes on an item. As is, it is not possible to query for items that add intelligence, or greater than a certain amount, unless they're entered separately.

More on this later. I'd like to propose installing Semantic MediaWiki on the wiki once I've become more familiar with it.

= Everything From Here Down Is Not Meant for Human Consumption: By Martians For Martians =

Simplifying template calls
To

Improvement?

Local version of WowWiki or any Wikia wiki)
General steps


 * Download the database dump
 * Import with php raw import (slow), mwdumper (flaky) or the python compiled alternative (FAST, misses some fields in new MediaWiki versions)
 * Setup MediaWiki and config files
 * Install Extensions
 * Run maintenance scripts

Problems

 * Links of form Something do not work out of the box. It redirects to the File-x page which acts like an ordinary page.  Apparently it doesn't recognize the file namespace, problem w/ my install? (using Mediawiki 1.13 for the Halo Extension.  Wikia uses 1.14, would like 1.15)