Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:36 UTC
I believe there should be a feature where you would be able to enter any text you want into a textbox, and when you press enter it gives you back the text, except any term that exists in the wikipedia is changed into a hyperlink, such as the articles on wikipedia. This could be used when people are talking on forums, and someone doesn't understand what a certain term means. An even more impressive addition would be an add-on to popular forums such as phpBB and IPB, that automatically adds the links when you post.
Sounds interesting, except you'd have a lot of links to trivial articles like [[is]] (In reply to comment #0) > I believe there should be a feature where you would be able to enter any text > you want into a textbox, and when you press enter it gives you back the text, > except any term that exists in the wikipedia is changed into a hyperlink, such > as the articles on wikipedia. This could be used when people are talking on > forums, and someone doesn't understand what a certain term means. An even more > impressive addition would be an add-on to popular forums such as phpBB and IPB, > that automatically adds the links when you post.
Although it's a nice idea, I'm resolving this "wontfix" because: * it's not as trivial as it might seem to define "any term that exists in the wikipedia"; for instance, how do you decide whether to link "King John" as "[[King]] [[John]]" or "[[King John]]"? * as pointed out, such a tool would not exclude unnecessary links such as "the", which would be a pain. With nearly half a million articles on the English Wikipedia, the chances are that most words in a paragraph would get linked to something. * due to amibiguity, not all of the links created would be relevant (some would point to the wrong meaning of a term, and in some cases the relevant meaning might not have an article); similarly, not all would be spelt exactly the same as the equivalent article on Wikipedia. * we already have a box where you can type an article name and click "Go" or "Search"; if you need to explain a term to someone, you can look it up easily enough. Indeed, you could just type "wikipedia.org/<the term>" into your browser. * incorporating it into phpBB, etc, is a problem for the developers of that software, not us - or, of course, for an outside enthusiast. Which leaves me on the note I want to leave on: such a tool *could* be created, and might even have some use, but it would probably have to be completely separate from the site, perhaps using the dumps of Wikipedia's content (from http://download.wikimedia.org). With both servers and developers overworked, I don't think such a tool will ever be a priority.
(In reply to comment #2) > ... > * incorporating it into phpBB, etc, is a problem for the developers of that > software, not us - or, of course, for an outside enthusiast. > ... And there is at least one product doing just that, see Trillian at http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/learn/index.php?select=6 . Other existing integrations include the use of search plugins and javascript bookmarklets in web browsers to do wikipedia lookups from selected or entered text.
