North Forge:AutoWikiBrowser for bulk edits

AutoWikiBrowser is a tool to fast-track and partly automate edits to mediawikis. It is helpful when you need to make the same or similar edit to many pages. It allows for things like regular expression pattern replacements. It also allows eg editing every page in a category. It pre-loads the next page for editing, reducing the amount of time otherwise spend on page loads. For the right tasks it can run entirely automated. Even in its facilitated mode it can hugely speed up the process. Its ability to facilitate rather than automate is probably the most powerful feature because it deals with the ambiguity of messy free text by allowing a human to supervise and vet as it steps through the tasks.

Installing

1. download at https://sourceforge.net/projects/autowikibrowser/
2. extract to a folder
3. run AutoWikiBrowser.exe (will need to give permission)
4. go to options, preferences, site tab
   • Project: Custom
   • enter address of the wiki
   • probably click 'Suppress "Usig AWB"'
5. go to File, Login, Profiles, and log in
   • save your user info with "Add..." if you want
   • or enter credentials at quick login

Example use case

Scenario: You need to edit the call to template:tool on each page in Category:Tool because you are adding a new parameter "lockout procedure" to the template and need to populate it.

Steps:

1. get all the pages in category tool on the Make List in the bottom left corner
   • leave "source" as "category"
   • type "Tool" into the Category box
   • click "Make list"
2. decide how exactly you will insert the new content
   • consider where you want to add the new field. You need to find something that every tool page would have and replace it with what you want. Have a look at a tool page using "Edit Source". Be reasonably sure that you understand the patterns and how common things are. Know that templates don't care about the order in which parameters show up, so you don't need to put this in the spot where you added it in the template, you just need to add the named parameter.
   • Pretty much all tool templates have a |other details= on them. We can stick the new parameter before this. Before because we don't know what the end of "other details" looks like.
   • so we will replace

   |other details=

   with

   |lockout=<some text we will type interactively>

   |other details=

3. set up AWB to do this:
   1. Look at the "options" tab on the bottom mid-left
   2. check the "find and replace" checkbox
   3. click the "Advanced settings" button
   4. click New Rule
   5. enter a Regex to find the portion you will try to find whether it has spaces or capitalization or not. ChatGPT can help with that.
      1. (?i)\|\s*other\s*details\s*=
   6. enter the replacement string into the "replace with"
   7. Test using the test button, copy what is in a few relevant pages in there to try it out
   8. close the settings window
4. click the "start" tab
5. enter a reasonable summary to be applied to each change, e.g. "Lockout template change"
6. click "start"
7. it will load the first page on the list, in this case the "tools" summary page, which is not one we want to edit. Click the skip button
8. Next page is an actual tool page. It will apply the change. Click on the portion you need to edit, edit it, and then click "Save"
9. proceed through the list

for all

TT to complete

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