Help:AutoWikiaBrowser

Overview
press the "hide" button to see a screen shot Show example screen shot

What does it do?: AWB automates edits of wikia articles. It can be run in fully automated mode, but is designed for assisted editing- to remove the drudgery of routine tasks such as spell check, and or standard modifications related to formatting and categorization conventions. After the edits are made, the user may make additional corrections before saving

What's the basic concept: In AWB, you make a "list" of articles you want to edit. Even if you only want to edit just one, you still make a list. You can make lists from articles in text files, categories, lots of places. Then you tell it to start, and it will load each article, perform the requested operations then will wait for you to save the article before proceeding. Alternatively, you may request that the saves be done automatically. Operation will continue until all articles in the list have been processed.

Setup and first run
Download awb from sourceforge
 * There is no installation program. Just unzip the files to a convenient location c:\program files\AWB
 * To start, click on the AutoWikiBrowser.exe file.

Configure for wikia
 * Menu File.Profile... press Add button and enter just your username for now. Click add to save.
 * Menu Options.Preferences… Click site, enter wikia in pulldown, then type genealogy prefix in next box. Hit ok.
 * Menu item File.Log in. The upper window should take you to the genealogy login window.  Type your username and password to log in.

First run, try this- only one article will be affected, and only if you press the save button. Follow the following steps:
 * In the lower left corner, there is a box entitled “make a list”. This is called the "list box" (see illustration above).  Enter the name of an article in the box just to the left of the + button.  Hit the plus button.
 * Just to the right of the make a list box is a set of tabs. Click the options tab. Uncheck all the items.  Under Find and replace, click the checkbox enabled.  Click normal settings.
 * A find and replace dialog will appear. In the find column type some word or phrase to search for.  In the replaces with column type the text to replace with.  Click Done.
 * Click the start tab. Click start.  What will happen is the article wikitext will appear in the upper screen.  If your find expression is found, then the upper left hand pane will show the original text, and the right will show the same passage with the replacement text highlighted.  If you don't like one of the highlighted changes, click it and it will not be accepted.   In the lower right corner, there is an edit box.  This wikitext has the replacement, and you make further edits if you wish.  Otherwise, click the green Save button in under the start tab to keep the change, or Ignore to discard the change.  There may be a substantial wait while the article is saved.

Manual: See http://www.green.org/index.php?option=com_awiki&view=mediawiki&article=Wikipedia:AWB/UM

Getting help: There is a substantial help community at green.org- see bulletin board. Please exhaust other ways of figuring out your problem before contacting Phlox. This is still in the experimental stage, so there are liable to be lots of serious deficiencies.

Gotchas

 * You will lose all your search and replace strings as well as any of your other hard work configuring an assisted edit run if you forget to "save settings". If you save as default, it will automagically reload.  Whatever loaded list you have is also saved, so this is a handy way of saving a session so that it may be resumed later.