WikidataPositionHistory

Rewrites Mediawiki pages that include a PositionHolderHistory template, to show a timeline of people who have held a particular office, along with helpful diagnostic warnings for common errors.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'wikidata_position_history', github: 'tmtmtmtm/wikidata-position-history'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Usage

WikidataPositionHistory::PageRewriter.new(
   mediawiki_site: 'www.wikidata.org',
   page_title: 'User:Mhl20/Prime_minister_test'
).run!

This looks for a Template call in that page of the form:

{{PositionHolderHistory|id=Q14211}}

If such a template is found, a table is inserted after it listing all people who have held (i.e. have a relevant P39 "position held" statement) position Q14211.

A sentinel HTML comment is also inserted, so that on subsequent runs only the text between the template and that comment are rewritten.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/tmtmtmtm/wikidata-position-history

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

History

This was originally developed by Tony Bowden and Mark Longair at mySociety as part of a Wikimedia Foundation grant-funded project.

This version is now maintained independently by Tony Bowden.