Who Wrote That? for Wikipedia

Explore authorship and revision information visually and directly in Wikipedia articles. Powered by WikiWho.

WhoWroteThat is available as a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome.

• Homepage
• Project page
• User interface translation

Table of Contents:

• Who Wrote That? for Wikipedia
  • Supported Wikipedias
  • Installation for users
  • Installation for developers
  • Releasing the browser extension
    • Firefox store localization
  • Debugging
  • WikiWho API
  • Changelog

Supported Wikipedias

The tool works on Wikipedias supported by the WhoColor API: English, German, Basque, Turkish, and Spanish.

Installation for users

1. Navigate to the extension's page for your browser:
   • Firefox
   • Chrome
2. Click 'Add to Firefox' or 'Add to Chrome'.
3. You will be prompted to grant permission to install the extension. Do so.
4. After installation, when you go to any applicable Wikipedia article, there will be a new 'Who Wrote That?' link in the sidebar.

Installation for developers

1. Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/wikimedia/whowrotethat.git
2. Go into its directory: cd whowrotethat
3. Make sure you're using the Node version specified by the .nvmrc file.
4. Run npm install
5. • Firefox:
     1. Run grunt run
     2. This will open Firefox to a random page on English Wikipedia, and you should have the 'Who Wrote That?' link in the sidebar. See the web-ext 'run' docs for details of how to customize this command with environment variables.
     3. If you want to load the extension manually, go to about:debugging and select the manifest file in dist/extension/.
   • Chrome:
     1. Run grunt build
     2. Go to chrome://extensions/ in Chrome
     3. Click on 'Load unpacked', and choose the WhoWroteThat/dist/extension directory
     4. Enable the extension, and go to any article on a supported Wikipedia.

Releasing the browser extension

First create your release branch, update the version number in package.json and ensure the changelog is up to date, then tag the release branch in Git with the new version. Run grunt (the default task only) to create six zip files such as dist/extension_firefox/whowrotethat_for_wikipedia-0.2.0.0.zip (three for beta and three for production; two for Chrome and four for Firefox).

The *_source.zip files contain the source code, for submission to the Firefox add-ons store (but not for Chrome).

Steps when uploading a new extension:

• Firefox has a multistep process. The who_wrote_that_-*-*-*-*.zip needs to be uploaded first, the next step will ask for the *_source.zip file, followed by the change log.
• Chrome will only ask for the new who_wrote_that_-*-*-*-*.zip file.

Note: the web extensions use four-digit version numbers, but WWT only uses the first three (the last is always zero; it's added by the Grunt task).

Maintainers (i.e. any members of the wmf-commtech Google Group) can upload releases via:

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/addon/whowrotethat/edit
• https://chrome.google.com/webstore/developer/edit/ekkbnedhfelfaidbpaedaecjiokkionn

Firefox store localization

In addition to uploading the two zip files for a new release, it's also necessary to check that the Firefox store (or AMO) has the correct translations.

This is done with the grunt checkListings and grunt checkListings:beta commands. These will report any discrepancies with the published names or descriptions of the extension, which will need to be resolved manually (because there's no editing API for the browser store).

To manually update the locales, go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/addon/whowrotethat/edit, select the locale that needs to be updated from the Localize for: dropdown, and update the corresponding fields mentioned in the grunt checkListings report.

There might be locales in the grunt report that are supported by the extension but not availabe in the locales list at the Firefox add-ons store.

Localization is not required for Chrome, because it reads all names and descriptions from the _locales/ files.

Debugging

The extension exposes a debugging namespace for testing purposes in wwtDebug. These commands can be run in the console and will work on valid articles where the script loads.

Available commands are:

• wwtDebug.resetWelcomePopup(): Resets the value of the stored 'shown' state of the popup. This is useful in case the popup was dismissed (which means it will never appear again) and for testing purposes, we want to display it again. After confirmation in the console, the popup will be displayed on subsequent refresh of the page.

WikiWho API

The API used by this tool is available for public use at wikiwho.wmflabs.org. The algorithm and server code was originally written and hosted by Gesis and KIT. See their original homepage for more information. In February 2022 it was officially moved to Wikimedia's own infrastructure.

Changelog

Please see CHANGELOG.md for an updated status and changes between releases.