[kde-doc-english] Introducing Myself

[Adrián Chaves Fernández]

Hello,

My name is Adrián Chaves Fernández (Gallaecio), and my constributions to KDE 
are mostly Galician translations. Talking to Valerie and Claus in the 
Documentation BoF yesterday, they suggested that I introduce myself to the 
list.

While I do not plan to work on KDE documentation — not in the short term 
anyway — I am a Technical Writter in my Real Life™ job, and my company works 
with MediaWiki. Because of that and because of my involvement in the Galician 
edition of the Wiktionary project, I am quite interested in MediaWiki and 
related technologies.

So, even if I don’t contribute actually writing documentation, I would not 
mind (and it would be actually kind of fun :) to contribute to make working 
with MediaWiki easier. And I can do that with PyWikipediaBot and Editora.

—

PyWikipediaBot is a Python framework to work with MediaWiki sites. It’s a 
powerfull framework that allows to automate almost any task that a MediaWiki 
user can perform.

Just by using regular expressions I can perform replacements in any wiki 
easily. That includes spellchecking, fixing links, and almost any replacement 
you can think of.

I can also use the framework to write Python scripts that you can use to 
perform more advanced tasks, such as renaming bunches of pages, uploading 
files, and such.

So please, if there is any repetitive task that you are about to perform that 
you think I might be able to automate (I probably can), just let me know. If 
using the framework is enough, I might be able to perform the task in less 
than 24 hours. If I need to write a script, I will happily do so (it’s fun!) 
and we can maintain a Git repository somewhere where anyone can fetch the 
script and use it.

—

Editora is the name — I would not mind changing it, ideas are welcome! — of a 
KDE MediaWiki editor I’m working on. The long-term goals of the editor are:

	• Syntax highlighting and code completion of MediaWiki code.
	• Live preview of the resulting page while writing MediaWiki code.
	• Offline edition, with session/project support.
	• Visual edition.
	• Plugin support.

I’m not an experienced developer, so I do not expect to reach those goals any 
time soon; in fact, since this project does not have my full attention (none 
of my projects do), it might take a year or so to reach even one of those 
goals. 

However, I will definitely continue with this project, I’m sure many of you 
might benefit from some of its features, even if it’s only the syntax 
highlighting which will be available in the first release.

The source code can be found on Gitorious: 
https://gitorious.org/galicionario/galicionario-editor (do not believe the 
information there, it’s wuite outdated). As soon as I have a first release, I 
would like to move the project to the KDE infrastructure.

Currently, the application is just a text editor which can load pages from the 
Galician wiktionary (it’s hard-coded) using Kate’s MediaWiki syntax 
highlighting (which I’m developing as well) and send the changes back to the 
wiki as an anonymous user. For the first release (0.4), I want to implement 
the following features:

	• Availability of a predefined list of MediaWiki sites (those that 
PyWikipediaBot supports by default, for example).
	• Ability to define a custom MediaWiki site. For example, to manually add 
KDE UserBase to the list of MediaWiki sites that Editora can interact with, in 
case the site is not supported by default.
	• Ability to define a user account (username and password).
	• Ability to define a connection profile (combination of MediaWiki site and 
user account).

As you can see, the only long-term goal that the first release will include is 
syntax highlighting, as it comes “for free” with the editor component.  After 
the release, I plan to add spellchecking and tab support as well before I turn 
my focus to the remaining long-term goals.

I would like to take the chance to ask all of you for feedback regarding the 
long-term goals. That is, which other features would you also like to have in 
a MediaWiki editor, and which ones do you consider the most important ones.

—

I think that’s enough for now, and I hope most of you get at least to read the 
PyWikipediaBot stuff, as I don’t want to get rusty in Python programming or 
regular expressions :)

Cheers!