Configuration for Third-Party Wikis

[ckoerner]

I'd love to see some information how how one could set this up for their own MediaWiki installation. What's required on the websockets end to use this on non-wikimedia wikis?

[mahmoud]

So, Listen to Wikipedia is powered by Wikimon: https://github.com/hatnote/wikimon/

Wikimon in itself is pretty easy to set up, but because it's based off of an IRC stream, you would need to enable that feature in your instance of Mediawiki, and that would involve setting up an IRC server, not impossible, but there's definitely effort to keep it all running if you don't already have one up. (Thankfully the Wikimedia Foundation runs that for us.)

There are lots of other specifics, but if you want to get Mediawiki hooked into an IRC, I'm happy to help from there (and any specific questions along the way). There should be just a couple modifications necessary for Wikimon (which I'll gladly handle).

I'd note while assessing whether you'll undertake such a task that unless your Wiki has fairly regular editing, it can get very peaceful. English Wikipedia edits happen between 60 and 140 times per minute. Other, smaller wikis (such as Hungarian) may only see a couple edits per minute, and they have hundreds or thousands of active users still. At these levels L2W is mostly useful as a notification tool for admins and dedicated Wikipedians, but we're happy to support all uses of Wiki(pedia)s!

[darenwelsh]

I'm working my way through learning how to set up IRC (I went with UnrealIRCd) and all the dependencies, but I'm lost when it comes to configuration and how to get this thing running. Would you mind providing more directions for someone with a Linux (CentOS) machine running MediaWiki (non-Wikipedia)? And feel free to talk to me like I'm a 5th grader, because a lot of this is new to me.

[mahmoud]

So @darenwelsh you do have IRC running? I'll be straight with ya, you'll probably need to be a 5th grader that knows a bit of Python and Javascript to make some minor modifications to get it to work on a non-Wikipedia project.

The thing I emphasized above and will emphasize again, is that unless you're fairly certain you'll have decent edit traffic, Listen to Wikipedia won't give you much to listen to. If you're going to use it as a passive notification system, we can start making some changes, but I want to make sure I set expectations. :)

[darenwelsh]

Err ... I installed UnrealIRCd. I haven't actually tested to see if I can chat on it since my main goal is to get this thing running. I'm somewhat comfortable with PHP and JS, so I'm hoping I can hack my way through this. We have roughly 300-400 edits per day and probably at least 10x that in views on the wiki I'm looking to configure this on. I'd be happy to just get it working for edits, even if it's not as verbose as Wikipedia. But it might be cool to also incorporate page views.

I'm going AFK for a couple weeks (vacation), but I'd like to dig into this when I return. I appreciate any guidance you can give.