IT IS the biggest encyclopedia in history and the most successful example of “user-generated content†on the internet, with over 9m articles in 250 languages contributed by volunteers collaborating online.

As the article further mentions, last year my legal writing students collaboratively authored a Legal Brief Writing Checklist. It isn't all that bad; it contains a lot of useful information and advice, and links to a lot of useful online resources. More importantly, the students learned a hell of a lot. And you know what? You -- whoever you are -- can revise, edit, and add to it. Hell, import it into Wikipedia if you want. In legal writing, we're all waiting for the definitive legal writing text. Maybe instead of waiting for some contemporary Aristotle to write a modern Rhetoric, we should all, together, be writing it instead.

A while ago Chris added a login method to the CAS module in CaseClasses. It returns a mechanize Browser object so that you can programmatically surf the web as if you had logged into CAS in a real web browser.

CaseClasses also has a Codes module that has the abbreviated codes for majors, departments, and buildings. I combined these two features to tackle the Building codes project on the Case Wiki.

P.S.: There is a MediaWiki API that would normally be used to do this kind of stuff, but according to Greg, editing is not fully functional yet.

Think you could add a lot to the wiki with some automated task? Here's how it was done.

First, you'll need mechanize and CaseClasses:

$ sudo easy_install mechanize
$ sudo easy_install http://opensource.case.edu/svn/CaseClasses/python/trunk

Now log into CAS with mechanize:

import Case
from getpass import getpass

username = 'bmb12'
password = getpass() # Enter a password without echoing

cas = Case.CAS()
browser = cas.login(username, password)

You can open any page with browser and interact with it as a logged in Case user. So let's go to the Case Wiki and log in:

browser.set_handle_robots(False)
browser.open("http://wiki.case.edu")
browser.follow_link(text_regex='Log In')

Editing can be done like so:

browser.open("http://wiki.case.edu/User:Brian.Beck")

browser.follow_link(text='Edit this page')
browser.select_form(name='editform')
browser['wpTextbox1'] += " Also, this guy sucks!"
browser.submit()

Automating the building code edits was done like so:

for code, name in Case.Codes.buildings.iteritems():
    url = "http://wiki.case.edu/%s" % name.replace(' ', '_')
    try:
        browser.open(url)
    except:
        print "Didn't find %r." % name
    else:
        browser.follow_link(text='Edit this page')
        browser.select_form(name='editform')
        source = browser['wpTextbox1']
        add_text = "The building code for %s is [[building code:=%s]].\r\n"
        add_text %= (name, code)
        if 'code:=' not in source:
            insert_at = source.find('{{Building')
            if insert_at != -1:
                new_source = source[:insert_at] + add_text + source[insert_at:]
            else:
                new_source = source + add_text
            browser['wpTextbox1'] = new_source
            browser.submit()
            print "Added building code for %r." % name

Happy automating!