Photo: Flickr user lifeontheedge

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Wikipedia undelete is a script for greasemonkey/firefox. Every time you visit a deleted article, a bunch of links appear showing versions of the page that are cached on archive.org. (Like this one.)

Caveats:

  • Needs firefox (duh).

  • Only works (for me) when visiting w'pedia as a logged-out user.

  • The links only show up when visiting one particular "not found" page -- for example, on /wiki/List_of_fictional_expletives, which is where incoming links will take you, but not /wiki/Special:Search?search=List+of+fictional+expletives&go=Go or /w/index.php?title=List_of_fictional_expletives&action=edit, where internal links and the search field lead.

  • Doesn't clearly indicate what content is added by the script and what content was already there, so you're sort of in your own web-browsing universe. This is a common greasemonkey problem.

  • The author of the script didn't know that every "deleted" wikipedia article is actually still on the server. If he did, he might have arranged a better system whereby people collaboratively request that deleted pages be moved to their userspace; the script's links would point there (or somewhere else the articles can be edited), instead of archive.org.

No comments: