man mount.wikipediafs (1): A program to mount WikipediaFS, a filesystem that allows one to view

SYNOPSIS

mount.wikipediafs mountpoint

DESCRIPTION

This manual page documents the mount.wikipediafs command and general usage of WikipediaFS.

WikipediaFS allows one to view and edit Wikipedia articles as if they were real files. mount.wikipediafs mounts a WikipediaFS filesystem.

To connect through an HTTP proxy, it is possible to use the $http_proxy environment variable.

CONFIGURATION

The first time WikipediaFS is run, an XML configuration file is generated in ~/.wikipediafs/config.xml. It is possible to edit it later to add more Wikipedia or Mediawiki-based sites. Each site entry can define the following elements. Elements marked with an * are mandatory.

dirname*: Is the name of the directory through which you will access to the site.
host*: Is the host of the site. For Wikipedia, it will be lang.wikipedia.org
basename*: Is the base of urls used by the site. Most of the time, it will be /dir/where/mediawiki/is/installed/index.php. For Wikipedia, it will be /w/index.php.
username and password: Enables to edit articles with one's login.
httpauth_username and httpauth_password: Can be used for Mediawiki sites protected with HTTP authentication (Apache's .htaccess).
https: Use HTTPS instead of HTTP.

MOUNT

mount.wikipediafs mountpoint/

To run mount.wikipediafs without root privileges, you may have to set the right permissions for /usr/bin/fusermount and /dev/fuse if your distribution has not already done it for you. For example,

# adduser your_username fuse

# chmod 4750 /usr/bin/fusermount

# chgrp fuse /dev/fuse /usr/bin/fusermount

(You may have to log out and log in again so that changes are taken into account.)

UNMOUNT

fusermount -u mountpoint/

or simply

umount mountpoint/

FSTAB

Alternatively, you can mount WikipediaFS through fstab.

To do so, add this line to /etc/fstab:

none /mnt/wfs/ wikipediafs noauto,nouser

Replace noauto by auto if you want WikipediaFS to be mounted at boot.

Replace nouser by user if you want to allow simple users to use WikipediaFS.

A symbolic link from /usr/bin/mount.wikipediafs to /sbin/mount.wikipediafs is needed if WikipediaFS is mounted through fstab.

Then, traditional mount and unmount commands can be used with WikipediaFS.

SAMPLE USAGE

This section demonstrates possible usage of WikipediaFS via the command line, though it is also possible to use WikipediaFS with a graphical file explorer.

$ mount /mnt/wfs/
WikipediaFS is now mounted in /mnt/wfs/

$ cd /mnt/wfs/
We are now at the WikipediaFS root.

$ ls
mblondel.org/
This directory has been defined in the configuration file.

$ mkdir wikipedia-en/
WikipediaFS recognizes the "site-lang" pattern for the sites from the Wikimedia Foundation.

$ ls
mblondel.org/ wikipedia-en/

$ ls wikipedia-en/
Nothing is listed because we have not used any file yet.

$ cat wikipedia-en/Japan.mw | less
The Japan article is fetched on en.wikipedia.org and displayed. Note that the .mw extension is required.

$ ls wikipedia-en/
Japan.mw
Japan.mw is now listed because it has been accessed once.

$ vi mblondel.org/Test.mw
An article can be edited with a text editor. Looking at the article with a web browser, the changes have been performed correctly.
To give a summary to your changes, use [[Summary: a sentence summary]] in the body of the article. It will be removed before the article is saved.

$ cp wikipedia-en/Japan.mw ~/Desktop/
This backups the online article to the local disk.

$ cp wikipedia-en/Japan.mw mblondel.org/
This copies the wikipedia-en article to the mblondel.org entry.

$ rm mblondel.org/Test.mw
This only removes the article from the directory, not from the site, hopefully.

$ mkdir -p mblondel.org/Foo/Bar/

$ vi mblondel.org/Foo/Bar/Code.mw
Subpages are supported. You need to create the directories first.

AUTHOR

This manual page was written by Mathieu Blondel .