Question

I am trying to find a MediaWiki bot or extension that would do the following:

I sometimes copy external content to MediaWiki to display it in proper context and to make it searchable. That is not very DRY.

I would like to keep a live link to the original content using a special tag and have a bot update the MediaWiki page if the original content changes.

For instance, the snippet could be a configuration file in Subversion that I want to reference in documentation. I would like to do something like:

<external-content 
    url="http://svn/config.txt" 
    start="#begin snippet" 
    end="#end snippet">
</external-content>

The MediaWiki bot would download http://svn/config.txt, retain everything between the #begin snippet and #end snippet comments, and paste the result right between the external-content tags.

This way I can be sure that as I change the config.txt, my MediaWiki documentation stays in sync.

There are numerous other uses. I am not looking only into referencing Subversion content, there are many other web-based systems with data I would like to integrate in this manner.

Does anyone know of a bot that would do this?

Answer 1

You could probably do this with a MediaWiki parser tag extension. In fact, the “Include” extension seems to do something very much like what you’re asking for.