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69 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
69 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
## Revisiting Epicpedia (2024)
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[Epicpedia](https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Epicpedia) was a graduation work made in 2008 by then Networked Media student Annemieke van der Hoek.
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Sadly, the site is no longer online, however via the wayback machine, a [partial snapshot](https://web.archive.org/web/20100331135533/http://www.epicpedia.org/
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) is visible.
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Several screenshots are available on the [pzi wiki page](https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Epicpedia).
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## Wikipedia articles as conversations...
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Though we tend to read Wikipedia articles as a unified linear text representing the latest revision, they are in fact are written in a much more conversational manner with often thousands of individual edits, corrections, deletions, and contestations. All these edits are (meticulously) tracked and are made publically available when one views the *history* of an article. Besides the edits themselves, edits are associated with the user account or IP address (if made *anonymously*) of the author, a timestamp, as well as an optional comment, often the justification of the edit, and a flag for whether or not the edit was is considered "minor".
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A wikipedia edit may be small, as in fixing a typo, or large, such as the addition of a new section, or contentious, such as changing existing wording to reflect a different point of view. No matter the size or intent, however, each edit contains a collection of *meta-data* about the edit. In Epicpedia, this *meta-data* was likened to the meta-text of a stage play, ie the stage directions, and other texts in a screenplay besides the actual lines that are spoken. In invoking the figure of Berthold Brecht, and the ideas of Epic Theater, a parallel is made between the intents of Brechtian "distancing" as a means of heightened engagement with a theater piece through an acknolwedgement of its construction and artificiality, with the experience of engaging with a contemporary web publishing platform such as Wikipedia.
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## Hands-on with the API
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Let's consider this article on the english language Wikipedia about recent Nobel prize for Literature winner Han Kang:
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Kang>
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Looking at this articles [history](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Han_Kang&action=history), we can go back in time (click on "oldest" near the bottom) to find that the article was created in August 2010:
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Han_Kang&oldid=376586279>
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Note that when you click on "View history", the URL changes to reveal the actual underlying URL structure. The URL of the api is the same, just replace "index.php" with "api.php".
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To work with the history of an article in javascript, you can use mediawiki's [Revisions API](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Revisions)
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The examples given on API:Revisions page, show for instance how to access the last 5 edits of an article:
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<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&titles=MediaWiki&rvlimit=5&rvprop=timestamp|user|comment>
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or the first 5 edits:
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<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&titles=MediaWiki&rvlimit=5&rvprop=timestamp|user|comment&rvdir=newer>
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Adding ids and flags
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<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&titles=MediaWiki&rvlimit=5&rvprop=timestamp|user|comment|ids|flags&rvdir=newer>
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Now, let's adapt this to an article on the English-language wikipedia, to Han Kang's page (note the change of host!)...
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&titles=Han%20Kang&rvlimit=5&rvprop=timestamp|user|comment|ids|flags&rvdir=newer>
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The API also provides a [Compare action](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Compare) to show the differences between two versions (revisions) of an article.
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There's a so-called [API sandbox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox#action=compare&fromrev=1&torev=2) that allows you to play with different parameters to the API.
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=compare&format=json&fromtitle=Han+Kang&totitle=Han+Kang&torelative=next&formatversion=2&prop=diff%7Cids%7Ctitle%7Cuser%7Ccomment%7Cparsedcomment%7Ctimestamp&difftype=inline&fromrev=376586279>
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## A sketch
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See: [showdiff](showdiff.html).
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