The Listeria Evolution
My Listeria tool has been around for years now, and is used on over 72K pages across 80 wikis in the Wikimediaverse. And while it still works in principle, it has some issues, an, being a single PHP script, it is not exactly flexible to adapt to new requirements.
Long story short, I rewrote the thing in Rust. The PHP-based bot has been deactivated, and all editing of ListeriaBot (marked as “V2”, example) since 2020年11月12日 are done by the new version.
I tried to keep the output as compatible to the previous version as possible, but some minute changes are to be expected, so there should be a one-time “wave” of editing by the bot. Once every page has been updated, things should stabilize again.
As best as I can tell, the new version does everything the old one did, but it can do more already, and has some foundations for future expansions:
- Multiple lists per page (a much requested feature), eliminating the need for subpage transclusion.
- Auto-linking external IDs (eg VIAF) instead of just showing the value.
- Multiple list rows per item, depending on the SPARQL (another requested feature). This requires the new one_row_per_item=no parameter.
- Foundation to use other SPARQL engines, such as the one being prepared for Commons (as there is an OAuth login required for the current test one, I have not completed that yet). This could generate lists for SDC queries.
- Portability to generic wikibase installations (untested might require some minor configuration changes). Could even be bundled with Docker, as QuickStatements is now.
- Foundation to use the Commons Data namespace to store the lists, then display them on a wiki via Lua. This would allow lists to be updated without editing the wikitext of the page, and no part of the list is directly editable by users (thus, no possibility of the bot overwriting human edits, a reason given to disallow Listeria edits in main namespace). The code is actually pretty complete already (including the Lua), but it got bogged down a bit in details of encoding information like sections which is not “native” to tabular data. An example with both wiki and “tabbed” versions is here.
As always with new code, there will be bugs and unwanted side effects. Please use the issue tracker to log them.