Warning: You take full responsibility for any action you perform using JWB. You must understand Wikipedia policies and use this tool within these policies, or risk losing access to the tool or even being blocked from editing.
JavaScript Wiki Browser is a script that allows users to make semi-automated edits more easily. For general use, it works similarly to the downloadable AutoWikiBrowser, but it requires no executable installation, and can run on all major operating systems. This script heavily borrows from AWB in design and functionality, for example using its Regex Typo Fixing and User Checkpage. To use this script, you need to be listed on the wiki's AutoWikiBrowser CheckPage (Project:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPageJSON on your wiki), or have administrator rights on the wiki.
If you want to contribute to this project, you can create a pull request at GitHub: Joeytje50/JWB. This repo does require manual updates from me, so some minor changes made to the live version hosted here might not be live on GitHub immediately. If that is the case, I will try to merge any useful pull requests into the code of the live version. You can also use GitHub to contribute i18n strings.
Show feed
This div is invisible unless /feed.js is installed. That script will replace this text with a table containing the most recent edits to each page relevant to JWB, as well as a list of missing i18n messages.
Installation
Before using this script, you first need to add an import to your personal JavaScript file. Even if the wiki on which it is being used already has some infrastructure for AWB, you need to install it for yourself. It is not recommended to install this script on a wiki-wide basis.
To install this script for yourself on any wiki, paste the following code in your JavaScript file (typically this is Special:MyPage/common.js, but skin-specific JS files could also be used):
Note that, to use this script, you must be listed on the checkpage located at Project:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPageJSON (i.e. this page on this wiki), if that page exists. If no such page exists on the wiki you're using it on, all users are allowed to use the tool.
Getting started
After installing the script, simply go to this page to run the script. For users using the script on another wiki, simply go to the page Project:AutoWikiBrowser/Script on the wiki you'd like to start the script on, and have installed the above code on.
The interface of JWB may seem a bit crowded at first, but you'll eventually get used to working with it. This densely packed interface allows for fewer different tabs to be used, which allows you to do more things without having to switch tabs.
The most important part of the script of course is the page list. You can enter any number of pages in the page list in the bottom left corner of the interface. The page list, along with the edit area and the results window (the top part) are resizable, and for the text fields, will expand over the rest of the JWB interface to prevent it from moving the content aside.
While editing, all inputs will be disabled, so to modify your settings, you first need to press the stop button.
Page list
Setup options
In the first tab (Setup), you will find a set of options that allows you to perform certain actions on the list of pages. The Remove duplicates button will automatically filter out any duplicate page names, and the Sort button will sort the page list alphabetically.
Page variables
You can define page variables in the page list. This can be done by putting a | after the page name, and following it with the value of the page variable. This variable can then be accessed using $x in the Replace and With replacement boxes, in both of the Skip when ... boxes, and for sysops, the target page name box.
This can be useful when moving large numbers of pages. Simply prepare a list of original page names with the new page name put after it with a | in between, and it will automatically fill in the new page name. It can also be used when you need to replace a specific word that's different for each of the pages in your list, or if you need to replace something with a specific word. If no page variable is specified, the page title is used as a page variable.
Pre-parsing
The pre-parse mode can be used to automatically filter your pagelist to those that meet certain requirements. Simply check the Use pre-parse mode box, and define your skip requirements in the Skip tab. After having finished defining your skip requirements, press start to begin loading each page in the list, and either skipping it when it meets the skip requirements, or moving it to the bottom of the page list to be used later.
JWB will automatically insert a #PRE-PARSE-STOP flag at the bottom of the list, so that it only goes through the list of pages once. If you want to change where the pre-parsing should stop, simply insert #PRE-PARSE-STOP on a separate line in the page list below the last page you want to pre-parse (as if it were a page name).
You can press stop any time you like during the pre-parsing. The #PRE-PARSE-STOP will be left in place then, so that you can simply modify your skip rules, and continue on, or you can press the reset button next to the Use pre-parse mode checkbox to re-parse the whole page list again.
Generating page lists
To generate a page list, simply click the button Generate in the Setup tab. That will open up a window where you can specify which requirements the page list must meet. Note that generating a page list is limited to 50 consecutive requests at a time. This is to prevent overloading the server. The maximum number of pages per request depends on which generator is used. For pages in a category or links on a page, the limit is 500 (or 5000 for bots), and for the other generators it is 50 (or 500 for bots).
Each of these generators filters its results based on the selected namespaces in the namespace box to the right of the generator options. You can select multiple namespaces by either holding the Ctrl or Shift keys and clicking, or dragging across the namespaces. If the generated list of pages exceeds the maximum number of pages, you can use this to filter down the results to get the full list, in several steps.
Simply check the box before the field set's legend to enable the fields and include that list generator when generating the page list.
Category
Gets all category members of the entered category.
To exclude either subcategories, files, or regular pages, simply uncheck the respective checkbox to disable it.
Links to page
Gets all links to the specified page.
It can include regular wikilinks, template transclusions, or file usage. These can all be used simultaneously.
It also has the option to filter for redirects. You can choose whether to include redirects only, to exclude redirects, or to include both redirects and wikilinks.
Finally, it has the option to include links to the page's redirects. That means that if page A redirects to page B, and page C links to page A, it will still be included in the page list when this checkbox is checked.
Pages with prefix
Gets a list of all pages that start with the specified prefix. This can be useful when trying to generate a list of all subpages for a certain page for example.
If 'strict' prefix searching is enabled, all pages that start with exactly the given string are returned. If not, a fuzzy search may be executed ('engine_autoselect').
Watchlist
This generator simply fetches all pages in your watchlist.
Links on page
Gets a list of all links that are included in the specified page. This can be useful when using a more complex page list generator such as DPL.
Search
Retrieves a list of pages that get found based on a regular Wiki search. Highly recommended to restrict the results based on CirrusSearch, e.g. insource:/example/ or intitle:/example/.
Semantic MediaWiki search
On wikis that have the Semantic MediaWiki extension installed, an additional box will appear which allows users to enter a SMW query which will be used to generate a page list. If the query includes a query to a specific property, the first returned property (with other properties being ignored) will be loaded as that page's page variable, accessible through $x. For example [[Category:Materials]]|?Melting point to generate a list of materials and their "Melting point" property.
Because this SMW query is executed separately from the other pagelist queries, using a combination of SMW and other queries might generate duplicate pages, which can be filtered out using the button in the 'Setup' tab.
Note that if multiple boxes are selected, the union of matching pages will be generated. e.g. using "Category" and "Pages with prefix" will generate all pages which are in the given category or start with the given prefix.
Limits
In the Setup tab, below the page list and settings options, you can set limits to JWB. Using these limits, you may restrict the amount of time taken by JWB on any one find&replace rule, or the amount of characters added or removed by any one edit. Note that setting a diff size limit does not give any guarantees about the quality of your edit. Do not solely rely on this setting to prevent your find&replace rules from behaving unexpectedly. This is intended only as a form of 'insurance' that your edits will not add or remove unexpected amounts of text from a page.
Skip options
Skip options
Using the Skip tab, you can set several rules for which pages should be skipped automatically.
Redirects
You can either select to follow redirects and edit the page the redirect leads to (this will also follow double redirects), or edit the redirects themselves. You can also select to skip redirect pages altogether.
No changes
If you select to skip when no changes are made, the page will automatically skip when the defined find & replace rules don't apply any changes to the page.
Page existence
You can either select to skip when the page exists, skip when it doesn't exist, or edit both existing and non-existing pages.
Contents
You can skip either when the page contains a certain string, or when it doesn't contain that. If the phrase entered in When page contains results in any matches on the page, or if the phrase entered in When page doesn't contain results in no matches, the page will be skipped.
You can either enter a certain keyphrase that should or should not occur on the page, or you can select to use a regular expression. For more information on regular expressions, see #Using regex.
Regex matches will only be allocated a limited amount of time if the browser and wiki settings support this feature.[1] The time limit for each individual match rule can be set in the 'Setup' tab.
Categories
Pages that contain categories listed here (comma-separated or |-separated) will be skipped automatically.
Editing options
Editing optionsJWB on Diff modeJWB on Preview mode
In the Editing tab, you can specify the basic settings for editing. You can fill in the summary, and whether or not to mark the edit as 'minor'. The checkbox next to the summary input box toggles whether or not to append (via JWB) to your summary automatically. You can also select what to do to your watchlist. You can either select to add or remove every page you edit to or from your watchlist, not to modify your watchlist, or to watch pages based on your preference settings.
While editing, you can also directly add or remove pages to or from your watchlist by pressing the button next to the watchlist dropdown. The button will be labelled with what action it will trigger (either adding or removing).
Every page will automatically display the difference between the stored content, and the content after the find & replace rules are applied. You can also press the Preview button to see the generated output. Some styles may not be loaded in this view though, since JWB uses a page structure different from the normal page contents. This may cause styles that depend on the position in the document not to function anymore.
Users with the bot usergroup, that are also listed on the wiki's AutoWikiBrowser checklist under the 'bot' category, will also be able to automatically save their edits. This can be done with a throttle to prevent overloading the server. The number entered in the "every [] sec" field is the number of seconds between edits. This number can also contain decimals (using a . as decimal mark).
Prepending and appending
Unlike WP:AWB, there is no separate prepend or append option. However, the functionality still exists; to prepend, simply create a replacement rule to replace ^ with the text you wish to prepend, and check the 'Regular Expression' checkbox. Keep the flags field empty. To append, simply do the same, but instead replace $ with the text you wish to append. Also select to treat it as a Regular Expression, without any flags enabled.
Replacements
Perhaps the most important feature of JWB is automated replacements. You can define the rules for replacing in the Editing tab. By default, all replacements are performed globally. That means that specifying that a should be replaced with b, then every single letter a in the document will be replaced with b. When using regular expressions, this can be disabled by removing the g flag.
Newlines can be inserted in both Regex and regular mode, by putting \n in the place where you'd like to insert a newline character. You can also insert a backslash by putting \\ in the text box.
Regex replacements will only be allocated a limited amount of time if the browser and wiki settings support this feature.[1] The time limit for each individual regex replacement rule can be set in the 'Setup' tab. This feature prevents freezing up the entire tool when a regex takes too long to execute.
^ abTechnical details: Requires browser support for Web Workers and website Content Security Policy allowing script-src: blob:; or worker-src: blob:;
You can use the AWB typo list to automatically fix any typos that exist on the page. Keep in mind that you must always check if the automatic fixes are correct. These automatic fixes will not be applied to image names, template names and parameters,[1] quotes,[2] and any text following a colon or asterisk, as well as skipping any rule that also matches a wikilink target. Any lines of text that contain a ((sic)) indicator will also be ignored by this typo fixer.[3] These rules are taken from the rules listing for AWB.
Note: Due to some browsers not supporting Regex lookbehinds, it is recommended to run this feature of JWB from one of the supporting browsers. At the time of writing, this includes Google Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. Note that even for browsers that support it, older versions may not have, and users should check if they are using an up-to-date version or else not be able to perform as many typo fixes as other browsers.
Do note that this uses the typo list on the wiki the script is executed from. If you are using this script on a wiki which has no Project:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos page, typo fixing will not work.
^Because of the non-regular nature of wikitext, this script will recognise any closing )) as the end of the outermost template. This means that if a template is nested inside another, and a typo occurs after that nested template, it will not be ignored.
^Quotes that are not surrounded by a quotation template (ie. quotes surrounded by plain "") can only span a single line to be recognised. If an opening quote is on one line and the quote isn't ended until the next line, it will not be regarded as a quote, and will not be ignored. Please watch for quotes that do not get recognised manually.
^A line where a transcribed typo has already been manually marked will likely have been spell-checked manually before. Chances are that any typo occurring anywhere on the same line of text will also be an intentional or transcribed typo, and therefore should not be fixed.
If you wish to disable RETF for a single page, you can use the button below the RETF checkbox to reload the page contents without RETF applied to it. This can be useful when editing pages with intentional misspellings or old language, for example. To re-apply RETF again after having disabled it, simply stop and restart JWB to re-apply automatic replacements as usual, including RETF.
Using regex
Aside from simple text find & replace rules, you can also define regular expression replacements. Here you have more control over what gets matched, and what doesn't. You can specify the flags you'd like to use in the box next to the Regular Expression checkmark. Note that, while non-regex replacements are by default global replacements, you will need to include the g flag to perform global replacements.
In this JWB script, you can also specify the _ (underscore) flag. That will make the expression treat all spaces and underscores equally. That can be useful when dealing with wikilinks, template transclusions, etc.
To perform multiple replacements on the same page, you can use the More replace fields button, which will open up a window where you can add more rules in the same format as the format in the Editing tab. When you press Tab while having your cursor on the last replacement rule, another set of inputs will be added. Alternatively, you can press the Add more fields button.
To test regular expressions (albeit without the _ flag), you can use online IDEs such as http://regex101.com/, http://debuggex.com/, or http://regexr.com/. Please ensure the regex engine (or flavor) is set to JavaScript (or ECMAScript), to reproduce behaviour in JWB.
Ignoring unparsed content
Checking this box will cause the replacement rule to be performed only on content outside the following:
Comments: <!-- This will be ignored -->
Code tags: contents of <nowiki>, <code>, <source>, <syntaxhighlight> and <pre> will be ignored
Formatting tags: <math>, <gallery> and <timeline>
The content within those tags will be left untouched. This option will also work when not using regular expressions.
Note that these exception rules are not the same as the rules for Regex Typo fixing; elements such as quotes and links will not be ignored with this mode.
Settings
JWB allows you to store your current settings either on the wiki, or on your own computer. You can also temporarily store them during this session by clicking Store setup. That allows you to go back to the temporarily stored settings during this browser session, so that you can for example re-run JWB on a certain page list. To access them in a later session, you have to save them to the wiki, or download them.
Saving to the wiki stores your settings on Special:MyPage/JWB-settings.json. Settings from this page are also automatically loaded to JWB when it loads, and the settings named "default" will automatically be applied when it loads. If you've modified your JWB settings on your /JWB-settings.json subpage, you can also refresh them in JWB by clicking the Update button.
You can also download the settings as a JSON file. When saving this file, be sure to specify the file extension .json, otherwise you won't be able to select it via the Import button. You can import files by either clicking Import and selecting the JSON file, or by dragging a JSON file over the JWB window and releasing it (drag & drop). If the file extension is JSON, it will automatically load the settings from the file.
You can also delete a setup from your list by selecting the setup via the dropdown menu, and pressing Delete. If you accidentally clicked this button, you can easily revert the deletion by pressing Undo in the status bar.
As of February 14, 2021, the settings page has moved from "JWB-settings.js" to "JWB-settings.json". If you had a settings page in this old location, this page will automatically be moved to the new location.
Other actions
Administrators can also perform other actions on the page. These actions cannot be automated, not even on accounts with both bot and sysop rights.
Moving
When moving pages, the move summary used is taken from the Editing tab. You can select to suppress redirect, which prevents the move from leaving a redirect in the place of the old page's title. You can also select to move all subpages and/or the talk page.
Deleting
Deleting, like moving, uses the summary box for its delete reason. If a page does not exist, the same button will allow for undeleting of the target page (if a previous revision existed). Deleting and undeleting both also allow for (un)deleting the accompanying talk page, by checking the checkbox to do so.
Protecting
For protection, you can specify the protection levels for Editing, Moving and Uploading separately. When the page doesn't exist, the level defined in the Edit protection is instead applied to the Create protection. The Upload protection is only applied to pages where this is applicable (i.e. File pages). The expiry field allows input in the same way as normal time input does. Inputs like "1 hour", "5 January 2000", etc. are allowed here.
Logs
Log
The Log tab stores a history of all actions made in chronological order. The bottom stats bar also keeps track of these actions. The logs also contain links to the edits made, so you can review your edit after making it.
If you would like to contribute code to JWB, please see the GitHub repository. You can create a pull request there to submit code or bug fixes to the script.
If you would like to contribute internationalisation (i18n) messages to the script, please either submit a pull request on said GitHub repository, or post a message on User talk:Joeytje50/JWB.js/i18n.js with your of messages to be added. See also the message at the top of that talk page for more information.
If you would like to contribute missing messages in a language that already has some or most messages translated, please leave them on the existing message talk page (User talk:Joeytje50/JWB.js/i18n-<LANGUAGE>.js), and leave a link to my userpage to notify me. To obtain a full list of missing messages for existing language files, please install the following script in Special:MyPage/common.js (and ignore the error when saving):
((subst:lusc|User:Joeytje50/JWB/feed.js))
This will show a full list of missing messages in a collapsed box at the top of this page, just above the table of contents. Just click the button to "Show feed" to see the full list.
