A year or two ago, I made a tool that saves notes from IndieWeb meetups to MediaWiki. I made the tool because it was tedious to copy-paste the notes from our note-taking software, Etherpad, to the wiki. Archiving also involved adding a few tags so that the page would have various components useful for readers of the archived notes.
The tool, which runs in our chat, lets you say !archive <notes> <wiki-url> to archive the notes from a given document onto our wiki. The tool tries its best to fill in all of the details the page needs: an introduction, tags that connect it to other meetup notes, a link to the event page, and more.
One of the things I love about the tool is that I designed it to be forgiving. The notes link can either be the event page or the notes themselves. If the event page is supplied, more information can be identified and pre-filled on the archived notes, such as the event name and a link to the events. But you can also use the notes link itself.
I think this forgiving nature matters a lot because the action of archiving notes is infrequent. It’s something some community members do at most once or twice a week. Thus, having a simple syntax, and accepting both the links associated with an event – the event page itself, which links to the notes, or the notes themselves – goes a long way to reducing friction in using the tool.
When you archive notes, the bot responds with a link to the archived notes, and a reminder to go in and check the notes’ formatting. This is important because MediaWiki has a specific syntax and not following it can cause readability issues, like some notes to appear all on the same line when the notes were meant as a list.
Indeed, the tool is one of convenience. It doesn’t do all the work, but it does what can be automated.
The tool doesn’t archive notes if the chosen wiki URL is taken. Because all URLs follow a standard – date then event name – this rule ensures we don’t archive the same notes twice, and ensures that one person archiving notes that have already been saved doesn’t override the already-archived notes.
Every time I see people use the tool, I feel a bit excited. I love making tiny tools that make something easier, and seeing others use them.
The tool does one thing: archive notes. The community and I maybe make a change to the software once every few months. For the most part, it runs in the background. It’s ready when we need to archive notes, does what event organisers need, and does so reliably.
