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mail-to-wiki gateway: allow adding or creation of pages through SMS or E-Mail
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Description

Author: afreytes

Description:
I would like to propose the following idea

Basically, the ability for a user to add pages to the wiki by the way of sending
e-mail messages to it, or sms messages from a mobile phone, and receive a
response back.

I do not know if this feature is actually useful for wikipedia, but it could be
for those running private or personal wikis.

Detailed:
Any user can send a new entry to the wiki with the subject of the mail or sms
message the name of the entry and the wiki formatted body of the message
becoming the new page's content. The system could then process the entry and
accept or deny it, replying with the outcome as such: confirmation if the page
was added or a text of the current page if it was not.


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
URL: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mail-to-wiki_gateway

Details

Reference
bz831

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Lowest.Nov 21 2014, 7:00 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz831.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

I have such a program _ready_ . Please watch this bugzilla when I submit the
code (in short time)
Tom
It is tested for MediaWiki 1.3.7, 1.3.10. and 1.5 (soon for 1.4.0)

jeluf wrote:

*** Bug 1675 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

This sounds like it would be a huge spam magnet.

(In reply to comment #3)

This sounds like it would be a huge spam magnet.

Brion,
you _might_ be right. It is meant for Intranet-Wikis, not for wikipedia.
Tom

(In reply to comment #3)

This sounds like it would be a huge spam magnet.

Secret codewords need to be placed into the mail to "open then gate". otherwise,
the mail doesn't do anything

Changed the title to add the technical term "gateway":
because also _reading_ of wiki pages via e-mail will become possible; get
wikipage as mail by triggering this by an e-mail.

For special applications, such as "dumping" backup log or status messages to a
wiki page and to allow users to simply send mail to a wiki page, instead of
editing, we developed a script (bot) editpage.php.

Basically, the idea of mail-to-wiki is not new, see for example [1], [2].

The script can be run

  • from commandline with parameters
  • can read from a file or
  • from stdin.

The latter allows to commence script execution from a simple call via POSTIFX ->
PROCMAIL -> .procmailrc

Commands are placed into the first lines of the mail; the currently implemented
commands are

  • append the mail body to a wiki page (default), append:page
  • prepend the mail body to a wiki page prepend:page
  • create a new wiki page create:page

A keyword Summary: allows to define an wiki edit summary; if summary is empty,
the mail _Subject_ is copied as edit summary and appears in recent changes (as
usual).

The code is stable, tested for Mediawiki 1.3.7, 1.3.11, CVS HEAD 1.5. It works
with both the new and old edit collision detection
mechanisms, because it takes care of wpEdittime _and_ wp EditToken and treats
them both for user convenience.

References, which also show mail-to-wiki gateways:

[1] http://collab.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Mail2wiki#nid1GA
[2] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CvWiki

My first version is ready for download, it works with 1.3.7, 1.3.10, 1.5 (1.4
currently untested).

Download from http://www.tgries.de/mw/editpage.php (current version 1.14)
Description: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mail-to-wiki_gateway

Tom

Summary: filename changed, no further changes

I had chosen a name for my script (editpage.php), which is in use for the main
script (mediawiki/includes/editpage.php).

Today, I renamed my script to editpagebot.php to avoid any confusion. The zipped
file has been renamed to
http://www.tgries.de/mw/editpagebot.tgz (still version 1.14).

addition to list of references:
http://doc.tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php?page_ref_id=142 TikiWiki: The Wiki
mail-in feature

Added for tracking purposes. My script editpagebot.php also knows the proposed
functions (except wiki-get, which fetches a wiki page via mail. This is
currently not implemented).

(In reply to comment #3)

This sounds like it would be a huge spam magnet.

Agreed. WONTFIX.

(In reply to comment #11)

This sounds like it would be a huge spam magnet.

not necessarily, when a token is used, sent along the mail.