Re: [Wikitech-l] We're not quite at Google's level
On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 2:58 AM, The Cunctator wrote: > We should definitely highlight real downtime as a reason for funding, > especially in a way that discusses practical steps that would be taken to > reduce the problem and how much those steps would cost. Interesting point. Commercial organisations would never issue a press release highlighting poor performance, because they want people to think they're getting good value for money. A charity on the other hand...what does wikipedia have to lose from people thinking its servers are unreliable due to lack of funding? ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] We're not quite at Google's level
On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 12:13 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote: > The thing that prompted me to start this thread was Google, a > commercial organisation (although not one people pay for at the point > of use), issuing just such a press release. Err, yes. But people had already noticed, and been blogging rampantly about it. So it's not like they were promoting their failure so much as avoiding being silent on the issue. Whereas we would be actively promoting it. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] new extension for embedded music scores
On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 5:25 AM, River Tarnell wrote: > http://abc.sourceforge.net/ You know what would be useful? A website that lets you input ABC (or LilyPond, for that matter) text, and produces an image as output. Hence avoiding the need to download and install it. Does such a thing exist? Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] new extension for embedded music scores
On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 11:29 PM, Steve Bennett wrote: > You know what would be useful? A website that lets you input ABC (or > LilyPond, for that matter) text, and produces an image as output. > Hence avoiding the need to download and install it. Does such a thing > exist? http://www.concertina.net/tunes_convert.html does a low-res JPEG version; http://www.abc-notation.com/abcapp/list.html?phrase=&system=Online&function=all lists others. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] list archives public but not searchable
On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 8:56 AM, wrote: > Public but not searchable?! Yes. As the robots.txt pointed out, the issue wasn't trying to hide old messages from anyone. It was that Google, notably, was frequently showing a message from this list as the first search on a person's name - particularly unpleasant if you're applying for a job or something. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] new extension for embedded music > scores
On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 11:49 PM, Birgitte SB wrote: > That wouldn't be very useful for Wikisource purposes. We need something > editable. I was assuming the user would include the LilyPond source along with the image. As I did here, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chopin_theme_op_28.png Is there an "official" way to do this? I wasn't sure whether Commons or Wikisource was the right place? (I ended up at en as I wasn't sure about the copyright status...in the end I think almost all Chopin is PD). Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Call for Participants: NICE interface modification
On Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 1:36 AM, Aaron L Halfaker wrote: > As part of our continuing work within Wikipedia, my colleagues and I are > conducting an academic (non-commercial) study in which we have developed > a modification that is designed to help users work together more > effectively by changing the interface for reverting other editors. Interesting. Well, I've installed it. Some thoughts: 1) It's ugly. :) 2) There's a bit of assumed background which you're not spelling out, such as the 3RR policy, the difference between revert/undo/rollback, WP:BITE etc... 3) I knew how to install it, but would most people? 4) To be honest, most of the time that I undo, I probably don't want to alert the person to the fact. Vandalism, or various mistakes for example. 5) If you intend this to be a permanent tool, consider wording like "Undo and send a message" rather than "Be very nice". Being "nice" is not necessarily a consideration - telling a vandal to sod off and not do it again is not "nicer" than just reverting them. But I guess you know what you're doing... Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Image hovering effects
On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 12:42 PM, Remember the dot wrote: > In Håkon Wium Lie's recent analysis of Wikipedia image markup ( > http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/image/), he makes a good > point: we include image captions both below images and again in the images' > tooltips. Also, for inline images without explicitly defined tooltips, the > image name is used as the tooltip even though it is also shown in the URL > when mousing over the image. Neither of these automatic tooltips are really > useful, and they slow down page load time on image-heavy pages. > > What do you think? Should we keep the redundant tooltips, or start leaving > them out? Interesting, I never noticed them before - I generally use a script (can't remember the name) which shows something completely different when you mouseover anyway. Testing while logged out, it looks like IE7 doesn't display them. Chrome does - and they look ridiculous. A long caption displayed as a tooltip is worse than useless. So as far as I'm concerned, either make the tooltip display something useful (like the name of the file), or get rid of them. Though there might be accessibility issues - perhaps they're useful for screen readers or something. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Extending wikilinks syntax
On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 6:12 PM, Kalan wrote: > We don’t allow attributes for wikilinks. ... > That is, [[Special:Userlogout|log > out|id=logoutlink|style=color:red|title=This will log you out]] will > be a wikilink with style, title and id attributes. The current syntax > is a subset of my proposal, so nothing should break. Are there more convincing examples? Wikitext is there to serve up *content*, not to write the GUI with. It seems normal to me that a logout link would be written as an http:// style link - not a wikilink. Similarly, I'm having trouble picturing why a normal wikilink should be styled with colour or special attributes. Any better examples of why this would be a good thing? The other example provided, coord strikes me as exactly the kind of weird special case (it generally displays in the title area!) that deserves to generate weird special xhtml... Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Different apostrophe signs and MediaWiki internal search
On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 9:46 PM, Neil Harris wrote: >> Regarding dashes and hyphens, I've now found my original data set, and >> a quick inspection gives this set of various similar-looking Latin >> hyphens, dashes and minus signs: >> U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS >> U+2010 HYPHEN >> U+2011 NON-BREAKING HYPHEN >> U+2012 FIGURE DASH >> U+2013 EN DASH >> > and at this point I missed out U+2014 EM DASH , which was hiding in the > world of transitive closure mentioned below... >> U+2212 MINUS SIGN >> U+FE58 SMALL EM DASH >> U+FF0D FULLWIDTH HYPHEN-MINUS I think you have to be mindful of the original goal here: for each character a user is likely to enter from their keyboard in the search box, what possible range of characters would they expect to match? So, apostrophe (U+0027) -> curved right single quote (U+2019): yes, probably. The other way around...probably not, unless that U+2019 exists on any keyboards. Hyphen-minus (U+002D) -> em dash (U+2014): I would say no. If you search for "clock-work", you probably don't want to match a sentence like "He was building a clock—work that is never easy—at the time." (contrived, sure) Just saying you probably don't want the full range of "lookalikes" - the left side of each mapping should be a keyboard character, and the right side should be semantically equivalent, unless commonly used incorrectly. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Changes to parser - link endings.
On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 11:19 PM, Mark Clements (HappyDog) wrote: > I've just noticed that on English Wikipedia links such as [[Pink Floyd]]'s > no longer include the 's as part of the resulting link. Is this a parser > bug, or a deliberate change in the way links are being parsed? I don't > recall seeing an announcement about it. Since we're debating the merits of the change, IMHO the 's should not be linked. Can't think of any compelling reasons why, but aesthetically it seems better to me. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Extending wikilinks syntax
On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 2:13 AM, Aryeh Gregor wrote: > So what's your proposed alternative? It's either this or allowing raw > in wikitext, as I see it. Either one is doable. Whatever it's doing atm. If a weird ugly hack using is what's required for weird uncommon link formatting, so be it. I'd much rather be discussing solutions for common problems. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Different apostrophe signs and MediaWiki internal search
On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 4:38 AM, Brion Vibber wrote: > Unless you cut and paste a term containing a fancy character from > another window, but the page uses the plain character... Yeah, I know. But my point is made and understood: think through the reasons for each equivalence, rather than automatically grouping together all characters of similar appearance. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Changes to parser - link endings.
On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 8:43 PM, Mark Clements (HappyDog) wrote: > I noticed the problem here: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil%27s_Heavy_Concept_Album Now that you mention it, that does look marginally odd. Both options seem pretty reasonable, so unless anyone feels strongly about it, seems like there is no issue? (One slight advantage I see in not linking the "'s" is to slightly reduce the chance of two consecutive linked phrases. [[John]]'s [[bike]] is more clearly two separate links. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Extending wikilinks syntax
On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 11:59 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote: > Common this definitely is: it's relevant to the overwhelming majority > of pages on Wikipedia, at least if weighted by views. It affects all > pages with references and most with infoboxes, for instance. It's not > a *serious* problem, of course, but that doesn't mean we should ignore > it. If weird syntax is used in a template and that template is used everywhere, that's still a one-off. Still no one has given an example of weird link features required for normal internal links. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Extending wikilinks syntax
On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 12:07 PM, Aryeh
Gregor wrote:
>
> From the editor's point of view. Not from the view of the HTML
> source, which is what the original proposal was looking at.
I guess.
I'm starting to get the initial pangs of an idea that we should have
different kinds of syntax:
1) Article pages should only be allowed simplified syntax: no parser
functions, nothing funky at all. You want to use weird features, you
must wrap it in a template
2) Normal templates can use the full range of existing syntax
3) A limited number of admin-controlled special templates can use an
even wider range of features, including raw HTML.
Then, if you really specific HTML for a very specific, widely used
template, you could, without opening up any cans of worms.
[The benefit from 1) above is less unreadable wikitext in article
space, though I suspect that's fairly limited already, and unreadable
wikitext is mostly from and massive templates like {{cite}} ]
Steve
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Extending wikilinks syntax
On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 12:21 AM, Aryeh Gregor wrote: > On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 8:22 AM, Steve Bennett wrote: >> 3) A limited number of admin-controlled special templates can use an >> even wider range of features, including raw HTML. > > Admins are not going to be allowed to insert raw HTML. At least, not > ordinary admins. Yeah, bad use of word. I did assume it would be a small group of HTML-trusted editors, not the thousand-odd admins we have, who could do this. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] $300K grant for Wikimedia Commons
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 11:30 AM, Erik Moeller wrote: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f9/WMF_Ford_Multimedia_Participation_Project.pdf The objective of this project is to increase participation in and contributions to Wikimedia Commons by implementing a 13month software development, usability testing and documentation project to improve the interface for uploading multimedia files to Wikimedia Commons. The deliverables should include the following key improvements: •an integrated upload tool that can be accessed directly from the editing window; •Wikipedia integration of Wikimedia Commons as a repository to store freely licensed media; •an intelligent workflow for fair use media that are not permissible on Wikimedia Commons; •an upload form process that emphasizes common defaults above less frequent use cases; •separated instructions and tutorials for conveying key policy information and background on copyright law and licensing. And thank god for that! :) I can't wait. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] secure slower and slower
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 3:39 AM, William Allen Simpson wrote: > William Allen Simpson wrote: >> So, I've reverted to the old practice from the dog days of 2005-06, and >> mostly edit in very off hours. Yet it slowed down drastically again! >> > Here's my test log, edits queued and ready to go, demonstrating roughly how > long they take to come back and display: > > ;off hours last night > # 2009-07-01T06:54:45 > # 2009-07-01T06:55:59 1 minute 14 seconds For my own information, I tried secure, and made an edit. It wasn't much slower than a normal non-secure edit (eg, 2 seconds). Or am I missing something? What I do notice is IE spits up a "this page contains nonsecure items" dialog on every single page... Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] On templates and programming languages
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 7:38 AM, Brion Vibber wrote: > Since iteration over a set is frequently desired/needed, assume it will > exist in a sensible programming language. > > As already noted in this thread, horrible hacks for limited-depth > looping are already in use. So: 1) The chosen language will support iteration over finite sets 2) Could it support general iteration, recursion etc? 3) If so, are there any good mechanisms for limiting the destrutiveness of an infinite loop? That is, is it practical to say "you can iterate all you like, but you're only getting 10ms to do it"? Sounds like it could be an interesting property of a template, where a suitably authorised person could allow certain templates longer execution times. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] On templates and programming languages
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 12:25 PM, Marco Schuster wrote: > You can make some kind of counter, which gets incremented each > foreach/while/for loop. If it reaches 200 (or whatever), execution is > stopped. Yes, but that implies: 1) We're writing an interpreter, or getting heavily involved in the codebase of an existing one 2) Thinking ahead of every possible DoS and thwarting it. I was wondering if there was a more general solution using a black box interpreter. But without knowing the language or interpreter, that may not be a very meaningful question. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] FlaggedRevs for Mediawiki.org?
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 11:07 AM, Chad wrote: > A lot of the docs have been written by people other than developers, Ever met a developer who likes writing doc? :) > and a lot of the docs have never been read by a developer. That being > said, using FlaggedRevs we might be able to deliver more solid docs > on MW.org by flagging docs at like two levels. One could be like a basic > "has been looked over for glaring errors and basic readability" and > a second could be "has been thoroughly reviewed and is considered > the doc on the given subject." Perhaps we could start by getting developers to thoroughly review documentation? You're proposing a technical solution to a people problem. The problem is not that the site can't display the fact that a developer vouches for the quality of documentation. The problem is that there are no processes for getting developers to review documentation and vouch for it. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] secure slower and slower
On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 3:13 AM, William Allen Simpson wrote: > I really think this is a superb idea, but Really? Personally, security is of no concern to my use of Wikipedia, but I guess I can imagine contexts where it might be. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Regular expressions searching
On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 9:05 PM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote: > 2. The info won't be up-to-date. Would it be too much to ask to search > the database directly using regexes? What's your use case? Obviously all the points below are valid and rule out directly regex searching on the entire Wikipedia database, for instance, but I wonder if you could have hybrid cases like "return pages that contain X and regex Y". Since X can be indexed, you're immediately working on a (much) smaller subset. (Then again, AWB already supports this I think) Not sure what cases you need full regex for though. Obviously regexes like "foo(.*)bar" have wide applicability...but the more esoteric forms? Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] secure slower and slower
On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 11:47 AM, Remember the dot wrote: > Theoretically, a man-in-the-middle attack could allow a malicious > person to hijack your session cookies and take over your account. > HTTPS makes this practically impossible. Yeah, and so what? OMG THEY MADE EDITS UNDER MY ACCOUNT. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] secure slower and slower
On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 11:35 PM, William Allen Simpson wrote: > Some may not think that this site is critical, or valuable, or whatever. That's a horrible strawman argument. "Some" simply think that the amount of damage that can be caused by hijacking a non-admin account is fairly low. Maybe for admins the risk is higher. Pretty much all damage is reversible though. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Proposal: switch to HTML 5
On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 4:43 PM, Marco Schuster wrote: > We should not recommend Chrome - as good as it is, but it has serious > privacy problems. Out of curiosity, why do we need to "recommend" a browser at all, and why do we think anyone will listen to our "recommendation"? People use the browser they use. If the site they want to go to doesn't work in their browser, they'll either not go there, or possibly try another one. They're certainly not going to change browsers just because the site told them to. Personally, I use Chrome, FF and IE. And the main reason for switching is just to have different sets of cookies. Occasionally a site doesn't like Chrome, so I switch. But it's not like I'm going to take a "your experience would be better in " statement seriously. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Proposal/RFC: Checksum of revision text
On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 7:31 AM, David Gerard wrote: > Careful - think what happens when a single revision is deleted, > oversighted or suppressed. Isn't this an argument in favour of storing the text once and linking to it? If the text contains some personal information deemed worthy of suppressing, surely you'd want to suppress all copies of it. Well, most of the time, anyway. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [WikiEN-l] MediaWiki is getting a new programming language
On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 6:13 PM, Gerard Meijssen wrote: >You forget that there are loads of MediaWiki installations > outside the WMF as well. REALLY, the inability of people to do this geek > thing is detrimental to the adoption of MediaWiki. You think? What's another wiki that even has user-programmable templates? The MediaWiki templating system is actually a real strength. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Corrupt images
I understand there was some issue with image generation, but I'm still seeing a corrupt image in the main box here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echuca,_Victoria The actual image itself is ok: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Echuca_docks_Stevage.jpg Is there a hack to get the image regenerated? Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Corrupt images
On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 12:11 PM, K. Peachey wrote: > The image thumbnailing systems are currently offline during a server > move, that is why the image isn't being displayed. So thumbnails that were already generated survive, but no new ones are generated? Cool. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Gallery weirdness in Chrome
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tronador&oldid=305058032 In Chrome, the four images in the gallery all appear at different heights. Is this known? Can it be fixed? Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Wiki Home Extension
On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 12:16 AM, Tisza Gergő wrote: > Gregory Maxwell gmail.com> writes: > >> I don't know how to figure out how much it would 'cost' to have human >> contributors spot embedded penises snuck into transcodes and then >> figure out which of several contributing transcoders are doing it and >> blocking them, only to have the bad user switch IPs and begin again. >> ... but it seems impossibly expensive even though it's not an actual >> dollar cost. > > Standard solution to that is to perform each operation multiple times on > different machines and then compare results. Of course, that raises bandwidth > costs even further. Why are we suddenly concerned about someone sneaking obscenity onto a wiki? As if no one has ever snuck a rude picture onto a main page... Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Usability initiative
On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 7:01 PM, Magnus Manske wrote: > Any plans of separating these on edit, then re-attach them to the text > on saving? It's low-hanging fruit IMHO. Good question. IMHO, all position independent stuff (ie, metadata) would be better off saved separately, and edited separately. As a legacy solution, users could still type [[Category:Blah]] in the main edit box, but at save time, it would be moved to the metadata area. References are another example of location-independent metadata that should be dealt with like that. But honestly, the Usability people seem to be doing a pretty good and know what they're doing. Do they need more ideas from us? Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Usability initiative
On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 6:16 AM, Platonides wrote: > And if it were changed, templates *should* be able to continue being a > source of metadata. > So I think that requirement blocks changing the way categories are stored. You're right, I completely overlooked that. So, milder proposal: how do people feel about moving all (non-templated) metadata to the bottom of the page at save time? It's not a huge benefit by itself, but it allows that metadata to be edited separately without having to guess where it came from. And dear god do we need to get references separated out from the main text... Somehow I suspect the most controversial thing about doing that would be the massive war that would erupt between those who want interwiki links first and those who want categories first... Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Usability initiative
On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 8:44 AM, Chad wrote: > I could be wrong here, but wasn't Cite recently changed to allow for > putting s inside ? If so, I think we could start > encouraging people to put all of their refs down in the > block and just using inline. /That/ would > be a vast improvement, if nothing else. Good question, it's certainly been raised quite a few times. I was astonished how much opposition there was, the most recent time. Ah yes, here it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Citing_sources/Archive_26#Result So, apparently the code has been written but not implemented on en yet. It will allow this: Some text. ... Moo Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Article metadata separation from main wikitext
On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 8:46 AM, Andrew Garrett wrote: > A fix for this went live today. You can now put your > tags into the tag, and then reference them by name. Oh, so it did. And it works! http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gippsland_Lakes_Discovery_Trail&diff=314622174&oldid=314098185 What's great about this kind of improvement is that it lets you see where the next possible improvements could be: - Separate out infoboxes - Separate out images *shrug* Anyway, I look forward to a new era of editing without massive cite templates in my face! (And yes, a bot should go through and move them all...or at least ones where the definition > X characters) Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [Toolserver-l] Archive of visitor stats
2009/9/18 Robert Rohde : > Careful, a recent analysis I did suggested that 15% of all page > requests for articles on Wikipedia are for topics requested less than > once per hour. There are a very large number of pages that rarely see > hits, but collectively the traffic to such topics is important. You > could end up biasing certain kinds of analysis if you always exclude > the rarely visited pages. Is there a link to that analysis? It would be interesting to see which are the least requested articles, for example. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [Toolserver-l] Archive of visitor stats
On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Robert Rohde wrote: > That particular result is unpublished. I could make you a list of > infrequently viewed articles, but it would be quite long. Could you make a list of the 100 least viewed? Or are there are large number which are essentially equal? Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Article metadata separation from main wikitext
On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 12:41 PM, Robert Rohde wrote: > In practice it is very rare to have a ref be placed inside the content > of another ref, so the problem of nested refs will almost never come > up, but it is something to be aware of if one is considering any mass > effort to relocate refs inside the references block. Hmm, doesn't seem completely unbelievable...I won't contrive an example now, but I can imagine one. But anyway can a bot detect these cases and just ignore them? Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [Toolserver-l] Archive of visitor stats
On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 1:28 PM, Brian wrote: > There is a strong correlation between start/stub quality articles and the > number of times they are viewed. Ah, ok. What about a list of exceptions to that: articles over 1000 characters, that have been around more than a year, and still receive less than a hit a day or something. I'm asking because perhaps something like this could help inform WP:NOT, WP:N etc. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [Toolserver-l] Archive of visitor stats
Great, thank you. Even that is enough to begin to draw some conclusions. > 129342_Ependes Lol, the stereotypical asteroid article. Well, that's one more hit than I would expect it to get. > 1421_in_literature My eye was drawn to [[1421 in literature]], but that has always been a redirect, so perhaps the one hit was the person creating it. :) > Antiprotonic_helium Looks like a decent article! But it was orphaned...so I linked to it from Antiproton. > Antonella_Mularoni Excellent article - pity no traffic. > Madhusoodhanan_Nair Redirect to borderline vanity > Blue_Murder_(play) A redirect > Ozonotherapy Redirect to fringe science > Veronika_Krausas Ok article, but pretty obscure subject. > Verret,_New_Brunswick Substub. > Bare_Truth_(Nat_album) A crappy article about what sounds like an even crappier album. With offensive album art to boot. Hmm, what conclusion to draw from all this? Most of those articles were redirects or crappy articles - Antonella_Mularoni was the only real exception. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Article metadata separation from main wikitext
On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 2:12 PM, Robert Rohde wrote: > Of course, you'd also have to build consensus for any project to mass move > refs. Yeah, the strange this is theoretically we should have consensus about how to do things. But without a bot enforcing style rules, the issue never comes to a head, so different communities within the encyclopaedia can each do things their own way, and pretend that everything's fine. Then a bot comes along and everyone gets upset...with the bot. :) Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Article metadata separation from main wikitext
On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 11:40 PM, Tim Landscheidt wrote: > Does this mean that we can switch off section editing soon > as it becomes useless? What you're saying is there's no point editing just a section, if it relies on references defined elsewhere. But that's not true. It's useful in the following circumstances: * You're not creating or editing any references * You're only creating new, locally-defined, references * You're only editing locally-defined references Section editing is unhelpful in this case: * You're editing existing, remotely-defined references The right solution is for a second edit window just for remotely defined references to be used. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Proposal for editing template calls within pages
On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 9:54 AM, Robert Rohde wrote: > Wikis are supposed to be easy to edit. Maybe I am misunderstanding > your intent, but XML-ize everything sounds like an approach that would > make it much harder for novice editors to figure out what they are > doing. XML tends to be verbose and complicated when edited by hand, > and rather opaque for people who have no experience with it. I think the intention is that newbies will never even see the XML, let alone be expected to edit it. The XML defines the template, and tells MediaWiki how to construct the form that the user edits with. You would only need to edit the XML if you were modifying the template itself - hardly likely for a newbie. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Proposal for editing template calls within pages
On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 4:44 PM, Nikola Smolenski wrote: > Having said that, I don't see why would XML be necessary. Table and > template markup are well structured and could be used by any editor just > as XML would. Additionally, it is easier to observe diffs with wiki markup. Is it possible, currently, to define the types of parameters to functions? Can you include hints in them about what the parameter is for? Can you specify maximum lengths, or choose from a small number of choices? Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Proposal for editing template calls within pages
On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 5:31 PM, Dmitriy Sintsov wrote: > So it would be menu and icon-driven editing, where the hands should move > from keyboard to mouse and vice versa, like MS Word. Not very handy for > programmers and people who prefer to do most of tasks in command line. I think you're making a large number of unjustified assumptions here. If you look at the proposal (and remember - it's a proposal), it says "it would be enabled by default for every user". Reading between the lines, that means you can disable it. Relax. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Wikitext vs. WYSIWYG (was: Proposal for editing template calls within pages)
On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 10:44 PM, Peter Gervai wrote: > Adding a gui layer to wikitext is always okay, as long as it's > possible to get rid of, since majority of edits not coming from "new > users", and losing flexibility for power users to get more newbies > doesn't sound like a good deal to me. There does seem to be a common presumption that "us old-timers" would switch off the WYSIWYG and get straight into the wikitext. Speaking for myself though, I'd love a good interface where I didn't feel compelled to do that. I hate the amount of time it takes just to find the point I want to edit. I'd love to be able to hide all the wikitext that I'm not right in the process of editing. I can't really picture such a beast yet, but hopefully someone else can. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Unicode characters in Chrome
I'm using Chrome 3.0.195.21, and have long found that some characters in Wikipedia render as boxes. One example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_with_stroke renders as " (minuscule: )..." Now, I looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Special_characters and the advice is not very useful or specific: it says that "Special symbols should display properly without further configuration with ... Safari and most other recent browsers." I tried installing Gnu Unifont and setting it as the default browser font, but that seems to be overridden by MediaWiki anyway? So anyway, I'm asking two questions: 1) What can I do to get more special characters to render correctly in Chrome? 2) Could/would anyone improve [[Help:Special characters]] to make it clearer, more specific and correct? Thanks, Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Proposal for editing template calls within pages
On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 8:05 AM, Platonides wrote: > Getting a formal definition of ~90% of the wikitext syntax is easy. The > other 10% drived nuts everyone trying to do it hard enough, so far. I wouldn't put it quite like that. Yes, the problem gets harder as you get nearer the end - but it also doesn't matter, because you're dealing with rare examples. There are also parts of the language best not dealt with this way. For example, there's not much point attempting to parse template transclusions like this, because there will always have to be a pre-processor that handles them. What actually really drove me mad was ANTLR - it wasn't stable, and the effort in turning a language file into a working Java program that I could play with was a lot greater than I expected. And I discovered the usual problem with declarative languages - that small changes in one place can have huge impacts in others. I would definitely like to take up the challenge again sometime. I've sort of been waiting for ANTLR to become more stable. And we'd need some kind of plan of what to do with the language spec file, like whether to actually build a parser off it or whatever. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Proposal for editing template calls within pages
On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 4:00 PM, Dmitriy Sintsov wrote: > What's complex in '''bold''' and ==headings== ? Here when we've It *looks* complex. That's pretty much most of the problem. Here's our desired use case: 1) User views a page that is deficient in some way. 2) User decides to edit. 3) User edits. 4) User has improved the world. Here's our actual use case. 1) User views a page that is deficient in some way. 2) User has no idea they can edit. Ok, moving on... 2) User decides to edit. 3) User sees wikitext. 4) User runs screaming. >The Ms or PhD in History cannot be that much stupid. We're not in a position to offer training to our potential end users. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Unicode characters in Chrome
On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 3:18 AM, Aryeh Gregor
wrote:
> No, it's not. We're talking about a specific article on the English
> Wikipedia about a single obscure character, and related cases where
> isolated characters don't display properly.
Well, actually I was just using that character as a (fairly
unimportant) example.
Anyway, is there really no general solution to me coming across
various articles with characters that render as boxes? You seem to be
saying ("there's no font out there that really supports
*all* of Unicode") that the only solution is to download and install
the particular font that has the glyphs used by one particular
article...but that will then leave other articles uncovered.
I'm amazed there isn't even a reference unicode font that has all the glyphs?
Steve
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Template editing
On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 3:11 AM, Roan Kattouw wrote: > We (the usability team) do intend to get 'content folding' (folding > template calls and tables into stubs that can be expanded at will) > done in the Citron (third) release. *falls to the ground and starts kissing your feet* Awesome. Timeframe? Screenshots? (Also, you're not actually calling them "stubs" are you? Confusing...) Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Witext syntax (was: Re: Proposal for editing template calls within pages)
On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 8:38 AM, Happy-melon wrote:
> The 10% drove people off cliffs because it is, pretty much by definition,
> the horrible unexpected behaviour that is a *consequence* of not having a
> formal definition. Writing a formal definition is not impossible if you
> require that it be sensible at the final reading. The parser is, in many
> places, *not* sensible, and naturally those quirks are difficult to
> describe, but they're also undesirable overall. A true move to a formal
> language definition involves action from both ends: writing a formal
> definition that follows the current parser in general, *and* being prepared
> to alter the parser to remove some of the more egregious deviations from
> expected behaviour.
I just wanted to state for the record that when we were talking about
this last time, the developers (Brion included) were actually quite
open to the idea of the semantics of wikitext changing if they weren't
widely used. In other words, it was ok to build a new parser which was
incompatible with the old parser, as long as that didn't break too
much existing wikitext ("too much" being in the order of 1 or 2% of
articles).
Another comment:
>The problem is the ambiguity with italics, (''italics''). So the
>current parser doesn't really make its final decision on what should
>be bold or what should be italic until it hits a newline. If there are
>an even number of both bold and italics then it assumes it interpreted
>the line correctly.
...
>I think this is part of what makes wikitext undescribable in a formal
>grammar.
Yeah, but from memory, using ANTLR's formal-grammar-breaking features,
this wasn't a massive problem. A small, annoying one, to be sure, but
not a killer. It does tend to mean potentially a lot of back-tracking
though, which is slow...
Steve
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Proposal for editing template calls within pages
On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 5:55 AM, Daniel Friesen wrote: > I had a user who copied an article from the html of Wikipedia (no edit > button) into Wikia's RTE. Theoretically that use case could be supported, right? If there were enough id's in the HTML source, then we could map back onto the underlying wikitext and paste that in instead. Difficult though... OTOH, it might be easier to detect when this is happening and warn the user. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Disambiguation while editing
On 10/1/09, Lars Aronsson wrote: > What it would do: From where the cursor stands in the edit box, > search backwards for a "[[" and then forwards to the following "|" > or "]]" which ever comes first (this covers the case that the > cursor is inside the link brackets). Look up that article, show > the first paragraph or 150 characters in a pop-up. If I click a > link in the pop-up (a top link, or a disambig page), replace the > link in the edit box so it points to that article. Sounds very well described. Would be useful to a lot of people, so if it gets developed, maybe it should be deployed in the sitewide javascript? Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Disambiguation while editing
On 10/1/09, Brion Vibber wrote: > I'm pretty sure the usability kids have something to this effect up > their sleeves, hiding somewhere. Heh, I was wondering if this would start to become the new meme. "We don't need to fix that gui, the usability team will take care of it!" You're probably right, of course. I wonder what the best way to double check these assumptions is. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Disambiguation while editing
On 10/1/09, Magnus Manske wrote: > Meanwhile, I wrote a simple JS that tells you when the cursor (in edit > mode) is within a "red link", or if it's a disambiguation page, it > offers "replace-links" to click on. That should answer the problem of > the OP. Could do redirects as well, but didn't want to overload it... IMHO, you should "overload" it. You write lots of brilliant little tools that do distinct jobs. You should combine them into big chunks of really useful functionality, the "Magnus toolbelt" or something. Then more people would come across more of these features and demand that they be integrated into MediaWiki... Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia Google Earth layer
On 10/2/09, Strainu wrote: > I was wondering if anyone here knows how often does Google update > their Wikipedia layer for Google Earth and how do they get the data? I > mean, they use the geo templates in the articles, but do they parse a > wikipedia dump or they use a crawler or some other method. I'd be very surprised if they did anything other than crawl. They're good at crawling and don't like making exceptions*. And en dumps are pretty unreliable - they could be months out of date. Steve * I base this generalisation on this: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/retiring-support-for-oai-pmh-in.html ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia Google Earth layer
On 10/3/09, Platonides wrote: > They use the dumps, and they reported some time ago to do so about once > a month. That'll teach me to speculate. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Webzzle
On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 4:16 AM, Andrew Garrett wrote: > I don't know why they bothered using a demo to explain their > technology, clear explanations like "organize the real-time knowledge > web" and "explore the knowledge web in 1-click" just speak for > themselves. To be fair, it's clear the guy's English isn't too good. Thing is though, I just don't see the value in this kind of vague mash up. Wikipedia is great. Google is great. Trying to mash them together in some vague "knowledge web"...what problem is this solving? Seems like it would require some huge critical mass to be useful, but the concept (whatever it is) is so nebulous it will struggle to attract contributors. This is intriguing though: >The Webzzle technology is protected by international patents. General Internet >Company, the startup behind Webzzle, gives free access to the patents and free >use of the technology Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] strategy discussion
On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 1:57 AM, Eugene Eric Kim wrote: > Sorry about the confusion. I believe Australia uses the EDT > convention, but I may be mistaken. U.S. is actually on Eastern > Standard Time (EST) right now. Yeah, it's confusing. The term AEST or AEDT is less ambiguous: http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/au/est.html Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Browser stats - OS as well?
On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 2:21 AM, Mark Clements (HappyDog) wrote: > Do you mean > http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm? Cool. What is the "mediawiki" browser? Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] memento: time warp for mediawiki
On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 2:43 AM, Nikola Smolenski wrote: >> * the timestamp isn't a unique identifier, multiple revisions *might* have >> the >> same timestamp. We need a tiebreak (rev_id would be the obvious choice). > > I'd say it is, if sufficiently precise :) If not, either use the > lowest/highest rev_id, or the user could be asked to choose a version. Seems like a non-issue. User requests the page as it was on the 18th of december 2006, at 16:45:12 UTC. Which of two (or more versions of the page) stored within that second is returned is academic, isn't it? If they know there are two versions and want to refer to a specific one, they should use a rev_id, not a time. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Labs site down?
On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 12:46 PM, Jake Wartenberg wrote: > As a side note, what exactly is holding up implementation of this on enwiki? I believe Brion mentioned that his leaving was likely to delay its implementation. My personal feeling, from playing around on that site, is that this feature is nowhere near ready to inflict upon the innocent masses. The naming is very confusing, the icons are confusing, the mental model is confusing, and it's really hard to work out what's going on. And that's coming from a pretty competent MediaWiki user. I'm not bagging flagged revs...it just needs a lot more usability work. The name "flagged revs" for a start... Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Labs site down?
On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 11:51 PM, K. Peachey wrote: > As per the discussions on en.wiki, I believe we [en.wikipedia] will be > calling Flagged Protection since that is how it is meant to be > implemented for us based on community consensus and that is what it > has been formally called during the numerous voting processes. Hmm, maybe it's time big complicated intrusive features like this were designed by BA*, rather than by committee. I have to admit, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection does an admirable job of explaining it (skip the text, just read the tables), but it's still complex. Four levels of protection (including unprotected)...wow. The fascinating thing will be to see what happens when fully protected articles become edit-warrable again. Steve * Business analyst ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Labs site down?
On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 3:35 AM, William Pietri wrote: > Most software is either internal business software, where users are > obliged to put up with almost anything, or consumer-oriented, where > users are mostly uninvolved and fickle. The product management methods > in either of those spaces probably wouldn't work well here: Wikipedians, > as volunteers, can't be ordered around. They also aren't just consumers; > they're a community, one that wants to engage deeply. But I think we can > take tools from both and figure out something that works here. I was hoping that there might be some paid developers working on it, now that it's become such a high profile featuer. And you *can* order them around. But in any case, I don't think that developers would object to someone telling them which terms to use, how to lay out the GUI etc. (Most developers I've known are more than happy to abdicate responsibility for such things.) > Are there historical examples of WMF development projects that have gone > particularly well? I'd love to look at them in detail. The Usability stuff is proceeding very nicely! Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Flagged revs on en:wp?
On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 2:18 PM, William Pietri wrote: > Because the > next version should address a lot of the labs feedback, I'd like to do > at least one more labs release. Yes, please! I had some pretty big concerns about the last version... Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Flagged revs on en:wp?
On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 2:41 PM, William Pietri wrote: > Great! We did too. To make sure that they're covered, have you posted > them anywhere? E.g., here: > > http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page Or here: http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia:FlaggedRevs_issues&action=edit§ion=11 Where they um, rotted on a shelf. > If it looks like the upcoming work will be reasonably quick, then > hopefully one push to labs will be enough. If it will take a while, then > I'd like to release to labs at least monthly, so that progress is more > transparent. And either way, although I'd like to ship to en:wp as soon > as possible, I'd rather discover and resolve as many problems as > possible in the labs context. No sense having millions of people tell us > something dozens can. Yep. But of course, since you can enable it page by page, you can get that experience live on en.wp too. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Visualization of Wikipedia content
On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 8:28 AM, Lars Aronsson wrote: > The various (humorous) Size-of-Wikipedia pictures > come to mind, > > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Size_of_English_Wikipedia_broken_down.png > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Size_of_Wikipedia_broken_down.svg > Boring I am, but I would like to see updated versions of the non-satirical version. A year-on-year diagram would be interesting. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Visualization of Wikipedia content
On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 2:08 AM, Lars Aronsson wrote: > We now have enough data to draw a [[population pyramid]] for > biographies in the Swedish Wikipedia. One such diagram is > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LA2-gender-age.png > > Cool stuff. By "year on year" I only meant a comparison of Wikipedia now compared to 1, 2,3 years ago...but this is more interesting :) Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Bugzilla Vs other trackers.
On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 10:25 AM, Priyanka Dhanda wrote: > > Guillaume and Naoko have expressed a need for a Project Management Tool > and I though it would be good to try use a tracker with some project > management functionality or integrates easily with some project > management tool. > > Anyone tried FogBugz, Joel Spolsky's baby? I'm so curious... although it's commercial software, who knows, you might get a discount or even a freebie. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] "Google phases out support for IE6"
On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 1:59 AM, David Gerard wrote: > http://danielrw.tumblr.com/post/266672251/hilarious-ie6-splash-screens Yeah, but something more subtle might actually be appropriate. Presumably IE6 lingers so long because it doesn't cause *users* any problems. All the headache is on the side of web developers. If you make it a problem for users (eg, youtube doesn't work anymore, iirc), then they eventually make enough noise to bug their corporate masters to switch. Question is, where to draw the line? A simple "You're using a crappy browser, please upgrade" banner will be efficiently ignored. Refusal to serve the page at all is obnoxious. You need something a little sneaky like "You're using IE6. Retrieving IE6 support from software archive...loadingloading...<5 seconds>...done" Ok, that's obnoxious too, but it's the kind of thing users eventually go "Can I please have another browser, wikipedia is so slow". Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Git, Gerrit and the coming migration
On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 6:20 AM, Diederik van Liere wrote: > 1) The Git / Gerrit combination means that you will have to understand > git rebase, git commit --amend, git bisect and git cherry-pick. This > is advanced Git usage and that will make the learning curve steeper. I > think we need to spend more time on training, I have been looking for > good tutorials about Git&Gerrit in practise and I haven't been able to > find it but maybe other people have better Google Fu skills (I think > we are looking for advanced tutorials, not just cloning and pulling, > but also merging, bisect and cherrypick). I can second that. I recently had to pick up Git (and what I guess is the gated-trunk model) for a couple of projects, and I found it quite hard to adapt to. The most jarring thing, coming from subversion, was getting into the habit of considering each piece of work as entirely independent of any other, so, instead of: checkout code add a feature update - nothing new commit add a feature update - merge commit ... You do: checkout code create branch (or however you will do it here) add a feature commit/push checkout master again... In other words, you don't think of adding new layers of code to a single monolithic code base, you think of sending individual, independent packets of code to be combined in some order. And if you mess up the branching, it can be incredibly confusing with Git's crappy command line interface to know how to recover. (Hint: you can achieve a lot with cherrypick and reflog) I had such a bad time of it, I wrote a big anti-Git rant: http://steveko.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-about-git/ At the very bottom is a conceptual model of Git compared to Subversion that may actually be helpful. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Desktop upload tool
On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 1:47 AM, Platonides wrote: > b) Suggest new functionalities/requisites > Either on http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Platonides/GSOC_proposal or > in this thread. * Would be nice if the tool maintains a relationship between the file on disk, the metadata the user specified, and the file in Commons (or wherever). So: 1) you always know which files have been uploaded, which haven't etc 2) you can use the tool to edit metadata for files that have already been uploaded 3) (maybe) you can use the tool to edit metadata for files that weren't actually uploaded through the tool (but are under your user account, for example) * "The user can change / add categories." - using appropriate drop-down choices from the target site. * Can (configurably) use information such as directory name or accompanying text file to determine file name, description, etc. I generally like the Commonist, so it should have most of that functionality. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] How to mount a local copy of the English Wikipedia for researchers?
Hi all, I've been tasked with setting up a local copy of the English Wikipedia for researchers - sort of like another Toolserver. I'm not having much luck, and wondered if anyone has done this recently, and what approach they used? We only really need the current article text - history and meta pages aren't needed. Things I have tried: 1) Downloading and mounting the SQL dumps No good because they don't contain article text 2) Downloading and mounting other SQL "research dumps" (eg ftp://ftp.rediris.es/mirror/WKP_research) No good because they're years out of date 3) Using WikiXRay on the enwiki-latest-pages-meta-history?.xml-.xml files No good because they decompress to astronomically large. I got about halfway through decompressing them and was over 7Tb. Also, WikiXRay appears to be old and out of date (although interestingly its author Felipe Ortega has just committed to the gitorious repository[1] on Monday for the first time in over a year) 4) Using MWDumper (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:MWDumper) No good because it's old and out of date: it only supports export version 0.3, and the current dumps are 0.6 5) Using importDump.php on a latest-pages-articles.xml dump [2] No good because it just spews out 7.6Gb of this output: PHP Warning: xml_parse(): Unable to call handler in_() in /usr/share/mediawiki/includes/Import.php on line 437 PHP Warning: xml_parse(): Unable to call handler out_() in /usr/share/mediawiki/includes/Import.php on line 437 PHP Warning: xml_parse(): Unable to call handler in_() in /usr/share/mediawiki/includes/Import.php on line 437 PHP Warning: xml_parse(): Unable to call handler in_() in /usr/share/mediawiki/includes/Import.php on line 437 ... So, any suggestions for approaches that might work? Or suggestions for fixing the errors in step 5? Steve [1] http://gitorious.org/wikixray [2] http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2 ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How to mount a local copy of the English Wikipedia for researchers?
Thanks, I'm trying this. It consumes phenomenal amounts of memory though - I keep getting a "Killed" message from Ubuntu, even with a 20Gb swap file. Will keep trying with an even bigger one. I'll also give mwdumper another go. Steve On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 3:03 PM, Adam Wight wrote: > I ran into this problem recently. A python script is available at > https://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/Offline/mwimport.py, > that will convert .xml.bz2 dumps into flat fast-import files which can be > loaded into most databases. Sorry this tool is still alpha quality. > > Feel free to contact with problems. > > -Adam Wight > > j...@sahnwaldt.de: >> mwdumper seems to work for recent dumps: >> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2012-May/039347.html >> >> On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 11:19 PM, Steve Bennett wrote: >> > Hi all, >> > I've been tasked with setting up a local copy of the English >> > Wikipedia for researchers - sort of like another Toolserver. I'm not >> > having much luck, and wondered if anyone has done this recently, and >> > what approach they used? We only really need the current article text >> > - history and meta pages aren't needed. >> > >> > Things I have tried: >> > 1) Downloading and mounting the SQL dumps >> > >> > No good because they don't contain article text >> > >> > 2) Downloading and mounting other SQL "research dumps" (eg >> > ftp://ftp.rediris.es/mirror/WKP_research) >> > >> > No good because they're years out of date >> > >> > 3) Using WikiXRay on the enwiki-latest-pages-meta-history?.xml-.xml >> > files >> > >> > No good because they decompress to astronomically large. I got about >> > halfway through decompressing them and was over 7Tb. >> > >> > Also, WikiXRay appears to be old and out of date (although >> > interestingly its author Felipe Ortega has just committed to the >> > gitorious repository[1] on Monday for the first time in over a year) >> > >> > 4) Using MWDumper (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:MWDumper) >> > >> > No good because it's old and out of date: it only supports export >> > version 0.3, and the current dumps are 0.6 >> > >> > 5) Using importDump.php on a latest-pages-articles.xml dump [2] >> > >> > No good because it just spews out 7.6Gb of this output: >> > >> > PHP Warning: xml_parse(): Unable to call handler in_() in >> > /usr/share/mediawiki/includes/Import.php on line 437 >> > PHP Warning: xml_parse(): Unable to call handler out_() in >> > /usr/share/mediawiki/includes/Import.php on line 437 >> > PHP Warning: xml_parse(): Unable to call handler in_() in >> > /usr/share/mediawiki/includes/Import.php on line 437 >> > PHP Warning: xml_parse(): Unable to call handler in_() in >> > /usr/share/mediawiki/includes/Import.php on line 437 >> > ... >> > >> > >> > So, any suggestions for approaches that might work? Or suggestions for >> > fixing the errors in step 5? >> > >> > Steve >> > >> > >> > [1] http://gitorious.org/wikixray >> > [2] >> > http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2 >> > >> > ___ >> > Wikitech-l mailing list >> > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org >> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l >> >> ___ >> Wikitech-l mailing list >> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > > ___ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] list of halfway implemented CSS
Btw, I haven't been following this discussion, but does everyone here know about the browser extension stylish, and userstyles.org? It's a very easy way for anyone to use whatever CSS they like. My favourite: http://userstyles.org/styles/22809 Apologies if this wasn't helpful. Steve ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] A call for skins
On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Daniel Friesen wrote: > If you have a MediaWiki skin you've built, feel free to bring out it's > source code. Currently most of the few custom skins that exist are > floating around the Internet, and they are various degrees of out of > date. Bring up the source code, and I'll look into committing the skin > into svn and cleaning it up stripping away the boilerplate. Have a look at userstyles.org[1]. I'm not sure what the licences are, but perhaps we can contact some of the authors? I'm a big fan of Wikipedia Grey Lady III. Btw would you mind explaining the difference between a skin and a CSS file, assuming there is one? Steve [1] For those unfamiliar with it, it's a repository of site-specific CSS files for use with the browser extension Stylish. You pick a style that someone has defined for a given site, and everytime you visit that site, you'll get that CSS layered over the top. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Git migration - instructions for Sysops
Hi,
I'm not involved in media wiki development but I've been through the got
thing a couple of times. There's an alternative command line interface
called easygit which you can download and install. It makes the learning
curve shallower with more intuitive commands, more helpful output and much
better man pages.
Steve
On Feb 16, 2012 12:10 PM, wrote:
> Folks, the switchover documentation is all aimed at savvy read-write
> developers. We drones who just use SVN as a simple yet risky way to keep
> our live version of MediaWiki fresh need instructions on how to:
>
> * install git (OK, apt-get install git etc.)
>
> * convert our maintenance scripts to use git commands instead of svn
> commands. In particular for me
>
>svn update
>
>svn status
>
>for i in RELEASE-NOTES-*
>do
>echo $i diff:
>svn diff -r ${BASE-BASE}:HEAD $i|wdiff -d -3|tee
> /tmp/mediawikiDiff$$
>done
>
>
> Add notes also on how we first cd(1) to the right directory, run some
> command that zaps all the hidden .svn files and another command that
> adds all the equivalent hidden .git files or whatever.
>
> ___
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
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