WikiProxy: Greasemonkey Edition
Stefan Magdalinski of whitelabel.org created a bit of a stir with his WikiProxy, which mashes the BBC’s famously link-averse news pages together with the appropriate Wikipedia entries. The site works by reading in a BBC page, extracting candidates for linking using specially tailored regular expressions, and then comparing these candidates to a list of head phrases from the Wikipedia database. Yet another example of how third parties can add value to sites independently of the site owner.
This begs the question of why to restrict this feature to the BBC site. Since proxying the entire web is a bit of an endeavor (if you’re not Google, that is), Stef and I whipped up a Greasemonkey-based implementation that does the term extraction and linking locally on the user’s machine. You still need to check the term candidates against the Wikipedia database, which at 18-odd megabytes would be difficult to shoehorn into a user script. So Stef kindly agreed to subject his server to further pounding by making the term lookup accessible as a web service. The script calls the service asynchronously when a new page is loaded in the browser and adds links to whatever terms are sent back. You can play with the web service directly on the script’s official homepage.
I’ve been surfing with the script turned on for the last couple of days, and I described the effect to Stef as “jump-up-and-down-giggling cool”. What’s interesting is that the information that a term has an entry in Wikipedia is arguably as valuable as the link itself. As I read down a page, I can now note effortlessly which people, places and TLAs have been bestowed with this not insignificant honor. Now if I can just figure out how to get it to link movie names to the IMDB, addresses to Google Maps, foreign terms to a translation dictionary and so forth, then we’ll really be on to something!
Update: Many thanks to Valentin Laube for adding nifty icons to the WikiProxied links!
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[…] June 9, 2005 @ 10:11 am · Filed under Uncategorized Matthew Gertner has taken the wikiproxy idea and ran with it. Using an API that I created to do the database […]
Pingback by Whitelabel.org » Wikiproxy Greasemonkey script — 6/9/2005 @ 12:00 pm
Jesse Ruderman has approached that problem. His userscript is written to allow additional filters. Neat!
Comment by Jeremy Dunck — 6/9/2005 @ 4:45 pm
Oh, also see his follow-up posting with tips.
Comment by Jeremy Dunck — 6/9/2005 @ 4:46 pm
Is it just me or is something not working? I installed the script and used it on the sample page but saw no difference in the before and after for the page content. It seems that the link http://www.allpeers.com/blog/greasemonkey is down? Does that break the script? Please email me and let me know.
Comment by Tim Chase — 6/10/2005 @ 9:00 am
There is no http://www.allpeers.com/blog/greasemonkey, so that can’t be the problem. The script seems to work fine for me. What page did you try it on? Anyone else having problems?
Comment by Matt — 6/10/2005 @ 9:19 am
I tried it on the recommended page — http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/uk.html
Correct me if I am wrong, but I expected to see hyperlinks in the body of the page connecting me to wikipedia. I am using Firefox 1.0
Comment by Tim Chase — 6/10/2005 @ 4:50 pm
Tim,
That’s correct. I’m not sure why it isn’t working for you. Do you have plain old Firefox 1.0 or some subsequent verson (i.e. 1.0.1, 1.0.2, etc.)? I’ve only tested personally with the latest version (1.0.4). Also, there was a problem with some intermediate version of the script, so you might want to try reinstalling the latest version. Finally, what version of Greasemonkey are you using?
Comment by Matt — 6/10/2005 @ 5:02 pm
BTW: Forgot to say, but thanks for the links, Jeremy! Very interesting stuff.
Comment by Matt — 6/10/2005 @ 5:02 pm
[…] passende Wikipedia-Artikel funktioniert und wirkt. Und in der Tat hat er nun, zusammen mit Matthew Gertner, eine groe Verbesserung durchgefhrt: Mit Wikiproxy als Greasemonkey-Script findet die a […]
Pingback by netbib weblog » Blog Archive » Wikiproxy berall und fr jedermann — 6/10/2005 @ 5:57 pm
Thanks for the suggestion about the GM version. I was running an older version. As soon as I upgraded, things started working like a charm! This idea is really great… thanks for taking the time to put it together and to help me fix my problem.
Comment by Tim Chase — 6/10/2005 @ 6:38 pm
Hola, nice work
I trying to adap the script for the spanish wikipedia. Now it fuction, but have some bugs.
I can redirect to the spanish wikipedia, but i think the grease Monkey script only show me the words/phases appears in english wikipedia.
1.- I dont find the way to say to wikiproxy to look into the spanish wikipedia.
2.- The scirpts untaslated spanish custom character, like ‘ñ’ or like accent vocals. Im working in that
Any suggestion is welcome
thnx
Comment by Pedro Del Gallego — 6/22/2005 @ 6:11 pm
Pedro,
I noticed that you posted this comment to Stefan’s blog as well. He’s responsible for the web service that tells you what terms are on the page, so hopefully he’s be able to help you out.
Comment by Matt — 6/22/2005 @ 8:08 pm
Yes, i double-posting becouse i not sure who made de services.
When i finish i post here, thanx.
Comment by Pedro Del Gallego — 6/22/2005 @ 8:47 pm
I tried it today. Oh My God, I just love it
There is such a HUGE potential behind GreaseMonkey!!!
Congratulations on this most excellent script!
Comment by seber — 6/23/2005 @ 3:16 pm
It doesn’t work for me. I checked the JS Console and it contains the following:
Error: GM_xmlhttpRequest is not a function
Source File: http://www.allpeers.com/blog/?p=165
Line: 123
I installed GM today and then the Wikiproxy client from the links on the GM site.
Comment by PEZ — 8/19/2005 @ 2:52 pm
OK. So I found out why it didn’t work. It turns out that Greasemonkey 0.3.5 had features needed by the wikiproxy client disabled. Using the beta for 0.5 things work.
One more thing. I made an adaptaption of ypur script that produces links to mywiki about Halo 2. Since Halo 2 is such a small terms domain I could preload the script with all terms instead of using a proxy. Check it out here:
http://h2wiki.halowiki.net/wiki/Greasemonkey_Web_Linker
Comment by PEZ — 8/22/2005 @ 9:10 am
Thanks, PEZ. I should state officially that this script (and many, many others) won’t work with the intermediate versions of GM that were rushed out to address the security issues identified by Mark Pilgrim. Luckily the solution is simple, as you indicate: upgrade to the latest, greatest beta version.
Comment by Matt — 8/24/2005 @ 2:39 pm
新浪娱乐讯 4月14日晚，中国电影资料馆放映了13届大学生电影节参赛影片《青红》。放映结束后，导演王小帅代表全体主创人员出席了见面会，与大学生畅谈创作感受。青红》这部片子就是在讲“三线”工人的，王小帅小时候也看到父辈的这段经历，片中青红的弟弟就有当年自己的影子。wow gold 拍《青红》之前，王小帅最初的打算是拍《我十一》，以一个十一岁小男孩的视角看三线工人的生活，这正好与自己当年的经历相符，但后来由于wow gold 种种原因先拍摄了《青红》。
Comment by wow gold — 4/17/2006 @ 8:52 pm
Matt,
Have used wikiproxy for months and loved it…
I have finally upgraded to FireFox 1.5.0.3 and GM 0.6.4 and wikiproxy appears to work no longer. I’ve searched the web for info re: this behavior and found no info really since mid 2005. Has wikiproxy been abandoned, or is this (not working behavior) a development brought about by the 1.5.0.x updates to FF?
Also, intrigued by the AllPeers project, looking forward to trying it out!
Thanks,
Tom
Comment by Tom Yates — 5/12/2006 @ 3:49 pm
Unfortunately I don’t have time to maintain WikiProxy, but if someone wants to pick up the ball that would be great!
Comment by Matt — 5/12/2006 @ 4:00 pm