Toggle menu
Toggle personal menu
Not logged in
Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits.

Comrade:CriticalResist/sandbox

More languages

Stuff useful for library work

Some useful regex functions

You can use search and replace with regex in the visual editor, just tap Ctrl+f on your keyboard, then click on the icon representing (.*) — that's the regex (regular expression) function, which will interpret your search string as regex.

Unfortunately you can't use regex in the replace function but anyway, here are some cool regex functions you can use to help you on pages. Just copy the "regex code" row into the search bar (yes it looks like nothing, that's normal)

Regex code What it does Use for
\[(\d+)\] Detects references like [12] Transform plain text references into formatted MediaWiki references (ctrl+shift+k to add a reference). Will probably leave behind extra spaces so run the next function.
\s{2,} Detect two spaces or more Search for this code, add a space in the replace field, then press replace all and it will correct all possible extra spaces to just one.
\s(?=[.,;:!?)%]) Remove space before punctuation Removes a space before punctuation, like . or ? or ;

be careful before replacing all, you should look through instances one by one.

\s-{1,2}|\s\u2013 Detects a hyphen or two OR an en dash after a space This can indicate incorrect use of an em dash —

Will detect either - or --, which are sometimes incorrectly used. Replace all with em dash (with a space before but not after)

Will also detect the en dash (–), which should also be replaced.

(?<!\s)\d+\s*[.\-\)] Detects improperly formatted ordered lists (e.g. 1), 2), etc) We should use mediawiki lists instead of plain text. This detects such a case. Use only to find it, then apply the list format manually.
page \d+ detects "page X" where X is any number Sometimes in text imported documents online, there will remain a "page X" (page 5, page 12...) in the text; these come from the original PDF. You can quickly remove them with this code.
(?<![.!?])\n Detects superfluous line breaks When importing from PDF, you will usually have extra line breaks that shouldn't be here. This code detects them (new lines preceded by period, exclamation mark or question mark). Replace with an empty space.

Note: detecting line breaks doesn't work in MediaWiki. Import your text to say Google Docs, use their search function, then import result to ProleWiki. You still have to go through the text manually but it saves a lot of time and cramps.

Other online libraries from marxists.org

Marxists.org is ran by trots and they've been known to edit stuff to fit their bias -- notably in Mastering Bolshevism from Stalin, whole sections are missing and they give the work a completely different name.

As much as possible, we shouldn't use them. You simply cannot know if their edition of a book will be truthful or not. They also rely on old translations for many texts, while I've found that newer translations tend to flow better.

Here are libraries we can use other than marxists.org:

Make sure that the work you want to copy from these doesn't come from the MIA though, obviously.

Other sandbox stuff for my own use