Hello, I regularly read and contribute to Wikipedia under the name Iammaxus.
Over the last few weeks, I have been mulling over an idea on how to
significantly improve the mediawiki project. I posted the following on my
user page before finding and reading this mailing list only to find out that
this idea has been discussed here
(http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-December/007185.html),
albeit not with the scale that I'm imagining Because im not sure where to
put this in the metawiki, and im not sure if anyone would care if I did,
here is an excerpt from a conversation i had with a friend of mine
knowledgeable in computer science on 12/24/03 (note that I wasn't seriously
asking him to do this, just more of bouncing an idea of off him):
I Am MAXUS (2:30:14 PM): yo
Chin Jut: hi
I Am MAXUS: code a meta data system for wikipedia
Chin Jut: what's that mean?
I Am MAXUS: i can't even begin to imagine the possibilities
I Am MAXUS: well first off
I Am MAXUS: organize topics
I Am MAXUS: in a tree system
I Am MAXUS: this would be part of the meta data system
I Am MAXUS: well wiat
I Am MAXUS: lemme start from the beginning Chin Jut: ok
I Am MAXUS: the overall point is to allow more machine generated info, stuff
that shouldnt be manually made like it is now, or even with one time use
scripts
I Am MAXUS: such as lists of articles
I Am MAXUS: tables of dates
Chin Jut: alright
Chin Jut: "List of famous bears", that sorta thing
I Am MAXUS: but much greater than taht
Chin Jut: alright
I Am MAXUS: so u could just request a list of a certain sub tree
I Am MAXUS: etc
I Am MAXUS: then it would have more specific meta data
I Am MAXUS: such as meta data about books including the author and such
I Am MAXUS: so that this would automatically be put into an article about
the book
Chin Jut: ok
I Am MAXUS: so:
I Am MAXUS: ?
I Am MAXUS: go
I Am MAXUS: ]and do it
Chin Jut: well, gee
Chin Jut: that's a large project
Chin Jut: I'm not even sure what to begin with
Chin Jut: I mean, what features need to be available?
Chin Jut: (I'm not gonna be able to do this, why am I talking?)
Chin Jut: what, concretely, needs to be done? I Am MAXUS: good question
I Am MAXUS: well first of all, learn xml and shit
I Am MAXUS: cause thats how all this junk is done
I Am MAXUS: or somethintg
I Am MAXUS: lol
Chin Jut: But Tim Sweeney speaks disparagingly of XML...
I Am MAXUS: does he? Chin Jut: yeah
I Am MAXUS: what does he say is bad about it?
Chin Jut: lemme see if I can find it
Chin Jut: "Does anyone else see XML as an overcomplicated solution the
meager problem of serializing data in and out of text files?"
Chin Jut: Philip Wadler (one of the main guys behind Haskell) also bashes
XML: "So the essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and
it does not solve the problem well."
Chin Jut: All the same, yeah, I'll learn XML
I Am MAXUS: lol
I Am MAXUS: well screw those guys
I Am MAXUS: cause everyone is using it
Chin Jut: yeah
Chin Jut: Phil Wadler goes on to say
I Am MAXUS: waht does he mean "serializing data..."?
Chin Jut: It's worth studying XML just because it became popular while
better things did not
Chin Jut: Serializing data means writing it and reading it from files
Chin Jut: you take a complicated structure, like a tree
Chin Jut: and turn it into some linear sequence of bytes
Chin Jut: hence, you've turned it into a series... you've serialized it
I Am MAXUS: right
I Am MAXUS: anyway i dont know if u can usel xml
I Am MAXUS: because of the database based nature of it
I Am MAXUS: but something similar
I Am MAXUS: anyway
I Am MAXUS: i dont know about searching, and thats the main function of this
system
I Am MAXUS: so u have to figure out how to do that
I Am MAXUS: so each article has info attached to it
I Am MAXUS: ideally, the types of info could be specified by ppl in a
realtively plain language way
I Am MAXUS: so taht ppl could specify more types of meatadata for certain
types of files
Chin Jut: what types of metadata would people specify?
Chin Jut: Like "this article is about bears"?
Chin Jut: Shouldn't that be auto-discovered by computers?
I Am MAXUS: thats beyond the scope of this
I Am MAXUS: that requires all sorts of human communication stuff
Chin Jut: ok
Chin Jut: so then what is this, exactly?
I Am MAXUS: i told you!
I Am MAXUS: for example, lets take the organism pages
Chin Jut: ok
I Am MAXUS: they all have the classification on the side
I Am MAXUS: well instead, each page would have a is a member of this higher
group
I Am MAXUS: which wikipedia would look at
Chin Jut: I see
I Am MAXUS: and see what thats a memeber of
I Am MAXUS: and dynamically figure out the whole classifcation
I Am MAXUS: this is not such a useful example because its much more static
I Am MAXUS: but take the date pages, those are useful mommas to meta-fy
Chin Jut: ah
I Am MAXUS: so if a page is an event
Chin Jut: so people would have to say in the event
I Am MAXUS: it would include date info
I Am MAXUS: and type of event info
Chin Jut: "Date info: July 4, 1776"
I Am MAXUS: right
Chin Jut: and then the date page would say "Search for all pages with date
info: July 4, 1776"
I Am MAXUS: so it coud be added to the "type of info in history" page
I Am MAXUS: that too
Chin Jut: "typo of info in history" page?
I Am MAXUS: well like the music in history page
I Am MAXUS: etxc
I Am MAXUS: etc
Chin Jut: ah
I Am MAXUS: so if u had a page that was under the music subtree
I Am MAXUS: and then under the band subtree
I Am MAXUS: and u had dates of existence of that band
I Am MAXUS: and then there could be an important concert subtree, etc
Chin Jut: well, to be technical, I don't think these are trees, I think
they're DAGs
Chin Jut: but it doesn't matter
I Am MAXUS: dag?
Chin Jut: directed acyclic graph
Chin Jut: in a tree, a node has only one parent
Chin Jut: (at most)
I Am MAXUS: yeah good point
Chin Jut: ok, it's sorta interesting. I have no idea how to do it
efficiently, though. But I think I might actually work on it
I Am MAXUS: lol
I Am MAXUS: i want to copy this conversation into the metawikipedia.org
somewhere
I Am MAXUS: maybe in the todo for vers 4 or 5
Chin Jut: I want to eat breakfast, because I have yet to do so
Chin Jut: bbl
I Am MAXUS: bye
Chin Jut signed off at 2:48:15 PM.
Those are our AOL Instant Messenger screen names. His wikipedia name is
Chinju
Thanks for reading this, I hope you consider this because I believe this
idea has the potential to revolutionize not just the wikipedia, but all
sorts of projects.
Mike, it sounds like you are trying to cram evermore information onto one page.
This is (IMHO) a wrong approach as it adds load to the server (dynamically
creating page text rather than serving an existing chunk) and does not enhance
the user experience. There is, from the use side, no difference between 'New
York City History (read more..)' and 'Read about the [[New York City
(history)|history of New York]].
D.
It would be great if somebody could make it work again. The problem is that
mails to info(a)wikipedia.de and info-de-l(a)wikipedia.org seem to drop into some
kind of black hole, without notice to the list admin (me). Normally I get
informed if spam mails are deleted, and I still get "... needs appoval"
messages for those with too many recipients (probably those which are collected
through the catch-all entry).
I have no clue were the problem lies, and I don't have much experience with
this server stuff, sorry.
Another possibility is that there is some kind of misconfiguration, but I
have no idea what it could be. I'm pretty sure I didn't change anything that
might be important, but nevertheless it would be good if someone could look
through the list options.
The info(a)wikipedia.de adress has been lost before two or three times, every
time because of server misconfiguration. This is really bad, because it's
listed on our main page and the press portal, we handle our press contacts
through it and get offers for cooperations from time to time. BTW, the sender
doesn't get any information that the mail couldn't be delivered. Did I mention
that the loss of the info-adress is really, really bad?
Kurt
--
+++ NEU bei GMX und erstmalig in Deutschland: TÜV-geprüfter Virenschutz +++
100% Virenerkennung nach Wildlist. Infos: http://www.gmx.net/virenschutz
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Dear list,
when i login and then click on Main_page it seems as i got loged out without
intention. BUT i would lik to use this loginfeature, at least to set things
with the sysop user (which can't be used right now ;P, too)
i'm using:
mediawiki 1.2.0rc4 released 2004-03-15
i configured everything as in the docs.
what i didn't set is the /etc/php.ini file
...
register_globals = Off
...
i can't edit this file because i'm on a sourceforge.net account.
(also can i use the .htaccess file to set this variable)
and if so, is it dangerous?
- --
gruss,
joachim schiele
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Hi folks.
I'm a relatively new wikipedian
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Friedo) and also a programmer, so
I'd like to get your feedback on some ideas I had for improving the
code. I'm not too familiar with PHP (I come from the Perl/C side of
things) so I haven't quite wrapped my brain around all the source files
yet. (Ergo pointers on where to start would be great.)
I think there needs to be a method for creating sub-articles which
share content with their parent in a permanent way. I think this would
be extremely beneficial in creating content where there is a need for
hierarchical organization. In particular, what I envision is a special
tag which could be placed in a sub-heading, which would collapse
everything from that point to the next heading behind a link that says
"Read more..." (or similar.)
So, for example, in an article on programming syntax, you could have
something like:
==Foo==
Foo is a [[metasyntactic variable]]. Blah blah blah.
{{sub:Foo}}
===Uses for foo===
...
===Origin of foo===
...
==Bar==
Everything between {{sub:Foo}} and ==Bar== would then be replaced by a
"Read More.." link. Since the actual content is all in the master
article, sub-articles can be edited as sections and a user could set a
preference to automatically expand all sub-articles. And of course they
should be nestable. Ideally sub-articles would be browse-able
independently of their parents (but with a link to the parent) and have
their own TOC. (However, this raises the conundrum of how to do the
markup -- you'd probably end up with really low-level headings which
would need to be rendered as top-level when displayed on the sub-page.)
So, thoughts? Is this practical or doable? I'd be happy to write the
code just as soon as I learn some more PHP.
Erik wrote:
>So it seems to me that for reasons of internationalization,
>the handbook should be written and maintained on the
>different language Wikipedias. That also makes it easier
>to use interlanguage links, and to move existing help page
>histories to the help namespace. The downside is that it is
>illogical - the handbook is not specifically related to Wikipedia.
What about the other Wikimedia projects (not to mention all the other
non-Wikimedia projects that use MediaWiki)? That is why I started the handbook
on Meta in the first place!
Would it be possible to have development on the handbook occur on Meta
MediaWiki pages (at least for English) and have those versions exported (via an
interwiki msg or something like it) to the various wikis' corresponding
help:namespace pages? Otherwise each project (Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks,
Wikisource, Wikiquote, ...) will have a fork in the same language of the
handbook - not good. However, until Meta's interface gets internationalized,
non-English handbook development should happen on the non-English wikis, IMO.
That would mean that the English help:namespace pages would be protected with
an interwiki msg (or something similiar) on them pointing to the Meta versions
of those pages. The help namespace on the non-English wikis, however, would not
be protected and would have their content on those wikis' actual help:namespace
pages (and when Meta's interface gets internationalized, that content could be
moved to Meta).
We already export some Meta pages to the foundation's website and already have
the MediaWiki->{{msg}} export utility. So...
� Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Erik wrote:
>So it seems to me that for reasons of internationalization,
>the handbook should be written and maintained on the
>different language Wikipedias. That also makes it easier
>to use interlanguage links, and to move existing help page
>histories to the help namespace. The downside is that it is
>illogical - the handbook is not specifically related to Wikipedia.
What about the other Wikimedia projects (not to mention all the other
non-Wikimedia projects that use MediaWiki)? That is why I started the handbook
on Meta in the first place!
Would it be possible to have development on the handbook occur on Meta
MediaWiki pages (at least for English) and have those versions exported (via an
interwiki msg or something like it) to the various wikis' corresponding
help:namespace pages? Otherwise each project (Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks,
Wikisource, Wikiquote, ...) will have a fork in the same language of the
handbook - not good. However, until Meta's interface gets internationalized,
non-English handbook development should happen on the non-English wikis, IMO.
That would mean that the English help:namespace pages would be protected with
an interwiki msg (or something similiar) on them pointing to the Meta versions
of those pages. The help namespace on the non-English wikis, however, would not
be protected and would have their content on those wikis' actual help:namespace
pages (and when Meta's interface gets internationalized, that content could be
moved to Meta).
We already export some Meta pages to the foundation's website and already have
the MediaWiki->{{msg}} export utility. So...
� Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
I checked a Help: namespace for en: into CVS.
As some of you may know, there is currently a user guide under development
on Meta. This user guide really belongs in its own namespace, which allows
us to easily export it and bundle it together with MediaWiki. It will also
be quite neat to have links like [[Help:Editing]], [[Help:Redirects]],
[[Help:Preferences]] etc.
However, I'm not sure where we should write the handbook. The problem is
internationalization. Meta is nominally multilingual, but it is a single
site. A single help: namespace on meta will only allow us to write one
language version.
Given the way the wikis are currently set up, without changing the
namespace system itself, I see no easy way to give Meta additional help:
namespaces in other languages without forking it from the common codebase.
So it seems to me that for reasons of internationalization, the handbook
should be written and maintained on the different language Wikipedias.
That also makes it easier to use interlanguage links, and to move existing
help page histories to the help namespace. The downside is that it is
illogical - the handbook is not specifically related to Wikipedia.
Are there any better ways to handle this within the current namespace
system?
Regards,
Erik