Extension talk:Page Exchange

This is the talk page for the Page Exchange extension.

Bug tracker
Is there any? Alex Mashin (talk) 19:15, 1 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Not yet, unfortunately - just this talk page. Yaron Koren (talk) 01:52, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

This extension is a good idea
For some time I thought about the idea of "git for wikis", and now you have done it. It is a big achievement, and is likely to be useful, especially for wiki farms.

I have several ideas: Alex Mashin (talk) 03:54, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Is it necessary to define packages in ? Why can't they be stored in the database, or, better, in the pages of a special namespace, perhaps, with its own data model?
 * A locally defined package can exist without its remote source. The pages that have to be downloaded and updated can either be listed locally; or their list can be extracted from a certain remote page, like a category, using text parsing tools similar to ones provided by External Data. The latter option requires extending package syntax to make it "dynamic".
 * Sources of data for a package don't even need to be wikis.
 * Another interesting topic is preprocessing foreign texts before their import. Thinking along these lines, I recently made a server-side wikifier tool (as a Lua module) that reproduces the behaviour of the current version of its JavaScript prototype.
 * "Pushing" packages to remote wikis could be interesting, although it will require authentication. Again, before pushing, texts can be preprocessed, and a package can define push requests other than using remote wiki's API.
 * If this extension develops according to these ideas, it can come to a point, when some of its code will become common with External Data. That may require librarisation.