I’ve just released Wiki Widgets 0.2. You can find the download link on this page.

The main new things in this release are:

• GraphViz Widget (alpha, not ready for production use)
• Allow arbitrarily named arguments via the xargs attribute

Thanks to Juan Zubeldia for pointing out the need to pass arguments with non-alphanumeric names to Google Gadgets.

From the wikipedia-l archive:

List:       wikipedia-l
Subject:    [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia rocks!
From:       "Larry Sanger"
Date:       2001-01-22 0:02:42

Welcome, o ye five initial members of wikipedia-l, to wikipedia-l!

Actually, the point of this post is to put something in the archives.

On the assumption that all wikipedia articles have the letter "e" in
them, there are now 184 Wikipedia articles.  I added a "best of" page
you might be interested in:

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?BrilliantProse

Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
are 14 not-bad articles so far, and that's great.

Larry

For some reason I had the idea Wikipedia was older than that; I suppose it just seems like a lot more than six years’ work. Thanks to the Wayback Machine we can see what it looked like in March 2001:

Welcome to Wikipedia! We’re writing a complete encyclopedia from scratch, collaboratively. We started work in January 2001. We’ve got over 3,000 pages already. We want to make over 100,000. So, let’s get to work! Write a little (or a lot) about what you know! Read our welcome message here: Welcome, newcomers!

I wonder how many people read We’re writing a complete encyclopedia from scratch and thought that maybe they were being a little optimistic. I’m pretty sure I would have.

A classic case of yak shaving: too much work on anyway, decided to take a break by turning our local community site into a wiki. Then I thought it’d be nice to embed a Google map showing a few local landmarks. Must be possible, right? Well it probably has been done already but it seemed pretty simple (and an interesting diversion) to write a MediaWiki extension to allow maps to be embedded.

So then you need to let users add points to the map - so the map needs button that spits out a chunk of markup that can be used to add a point. So I wrote some Javascript to do that.

Of course one extension is never enough (just say no kids). I was writing a load of code that’d be useful in other extensions anyway. What about a framework for extensions? Yup, the dreaded ‘f’ word. Oh well.

Anyway, to cut a long story short: Wiki Widgets.

One of the things I wanted to do (you know, once it became a project rather than a displacement activity) was to make widgets that, from the user’s point of view, are discoverable. It’s all very well installing an extension but if users can’t find out about it they won’t use it. Wiki Widgets has a pretty simple take on discoverability: make a blank page and add the markup:

<widget />

to it. When you save or preview the page you’ll get a list of all the installed Wiki Widgets. For each Widget there’s a link that takes you directly to a (wiki) page that explains how to use it. From there you should be able to select the widget you want. Wherever possible I plan to make the individual Widgets support additional discoverability. For example if you add an empty Google Gadget Widget like this:

<widget type="googlegadget" />

you should get a user interface that makes it easy to add the gadget you want and set up its parameters.

Anyway, back to the day job now.