Wikitech-l August 2006

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

137 participants
168 discussions

by Bill Clark

Hi all, I'm involved in a debate about the pseudoscience and pseudoscientists categories, that seems to be at an impasse because of the differences between categories and lists. One side argues that these two categories are inherently problematic, and that a list would be more appropriate because it allows for annotation of entires and referencing of sources. The other side insists that a list is not acceptible and that a category is required, for reasons that don't seem particularly clear to me but which they feel strongly about. Clearly this problem isn't restricted to just those two categories. There are several guidelines that deal with controversial categories, and this debate seems to come up whenever there is a vaguely defined or otherwise "sensitive" category. A more general solution seems to be in order. Rather than continue the debate (which from the archives on the talk page for the pseudoscience category I can see has been continuing on and off for years) I thought it might be best to simply change how categories work, so that they can support the features of lists that are desired. (Yes, I'm using "simply" in an ironic manner :) I've tried looking through the mailing list archives and on meta to see if this has been discussed before, but could not find anything relevant. Since there are many other problems with the category implementation (big DB hit for category page loads, inability to cache the results, etc.) I thought I should put together a comprehensive list of features, bugs, suggestions, and so forth before I begin development work. I'd also like suggestions as to the best place to discuss this topic on either WP or meta. -Bill Clark

17 years, 10 months

Re: [Wikitech-l] Break out links-How are they done?

by David Spencer, MediaWiki User

Re: Break out links-How are they done? Thanks for all your feedback on my post about break out links. 1. I feel it is a shame that the wiki publisher does not have the option to code break out links to external web sites. It is very easy for those new to computers to head to a new link and forget what they originally were looking for on the original wiki. Then they leave our wiki. 2. When I send someone to an external link from my wiki, I am not responsible for the content of that external site. Sometimes "newbies" may think that I created the external link page too. 3. FYI... I am a Mac user using FireFox. To make a break out link, all I have to do is hover over the link, press lightly and choose "Open link in new window". 4. The wiki I am developing is here http://www.christianmedia.ca Thanks again for all of your comments and words of wisdom. This is a very helpful listserv! David Spencer Ontario, Canada --------------------- David Spencer wrote: > August 8, 2006 > > Hello: > > Break out links-How are they done? Hi David, I remember seeing this topic here a few weeks ago. The answer was that MediaWiki will never be scripted to do break out links because break out links are bad Web design. Web site visitors are supposed to control that part of their own Web surfing experience, not Web site authors. Click on a normal Web link with the *middle mouse button* and see how your browser behaves. Roger :-) ------------------- From: Simetrical They aren't. You'd have to hack the software. This is a deliberate design decision, I believe: the user's browser gives them ways to decide where to open a link, and overriding them should be unnecessary. Let the user decide whether they want a new window or not. ----- Just because I'm controversial I'll disagree. Gmail, for example, always opens *every* external link in a new window. It works extremely well - you never have to worry about "losing your gmail window". It wouldn't be a bad thing if MediaWiki did similar - you're unlikely to really want to navigate away from Wikipedia, for instance, when you follow a link - most likely you'll read it then want to come back. The user's browser can override any behaviour, but that's not to say that providing good default behaviour isn't necessary. Steve ------- On 8/9/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Since we've established that you can override the suggestion provided > > to the browser, no one's forcing anything... I missed where we established how an average user (IE or unextended Firefox, say, with default settings) is supposed to a) determine in advance that a link will open in a new window/tab and b) override the behavior and open it in the same window/tab. I can do the latter via a Firefox extension, but even that requires two clicks plus picking an option out of a context menu rather than just middle-clicking. ------ On 8/9/06, Tels <nospam-abuse(a)bloodgate.com> wrote: > > Mouse middle click opens the page in a new tab (!) for me in firefox - left > > click in the same tab. (Who wants a new browser windows, anyway?) I tend to use new windows for new "themes" (work vs personal browsing, Wikipedia vs organising a holiday). 2-3 browser windows is a good total number. > > So let _me_ decide where I open up links, and stop trying to force me. Since we've established that you can override the suggestion provided to the browser, no one's forcing anything... Steve ------------ For a highly interactive site, new-windows make sense... but I don't really see it making sense for MW. -- Ben Garney Torque Technologies Director GarageGames.Com, Inc. --------------------

17 years, 10 months

"What links here" doesn't update properly with templates

by Steve Bennett

Is this a known issue? Take a look at "what links here" for this image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Chambord_pano.jpg It claims to be "linked to" by 50 or more pages - most of them user pages that have {{POTD}} on them. However, that template no longer refers to the image. As a test, I updated one of the user pages (just adding a space) and the set of "what links here" updated, removing that entry. Steve

17 years, 10 months

Re: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia Suggest

by Nick Jenkins

Hi Julien, > You can view results on http://suggest.speedblue.org (with redirections) I like it! E.g. "formula we" shows the results as "Formula Weight → Atomic mass", so straight away you can see it's a redirect, plus what it's a redirect to. That's very good indeed. Handling of articles with different capitalization still concerns me a little; For example, in the English Wikipedia there is both "Adfa" (a town in Wales), and "ADFA" (a redirect to an Australian military training institute), but only the town in Wales is listed in the suggest search. Ideally, could it maybe list both, with the town first (since it has one incoming link, and the institute has none), perhaps unless the user types "ADFA" in all-caps, in which case maybe "ADFA" could come first because it would be a better match for what the user has typed? In other words, I still think the searching could be case-insensitive, just that maybe the ordering of the results could be altered by capitalization. > You can download the source from > http://suggest.speedblue.org/tgz/wikipedia-suggest-0.2.tar.gz > You can download compiled resources (for little endian only because my > serialization is endianess dependant) : Cool, I got it do stuff with the precompiled files: ========================================= root@bling:~/tmp/wikipedia-suggest/wikipedia-suggest-0.2/cmd# ./Query ../../EN/fsa.bin ../../EN/pages.bin Loaded position of 2171116 articles test Title : [Test cricket] Freq : 5776 Title : [Testament, New → New Testament] Freq : 2017 Title : [Testament, Old → Old Testament] Freq : 1700 Title : [Testudines → Turtle] Freq : 527 Title : [Testosterone] Freq : 355 Title : [Test Pilot] Freq : 309 Title : [Test Messaging → Short message service] Freq : 289 Title : [Testicle] Freq : 276 Title : [Testprog → Development stage] Freq : 268 Title : [Testudinidae → Tortoise] Freq : 252 ========================================= > Which kind of database is used for wikipedia, mysql ? Yes, MySQL. There is a port for Postgres in progress (try saying that fast 10 times), but you probably want to target MySQL first because it's the database that's being used at the moment in most environments. > * MemoryQuery load automaton and articles in memory, it is > multi-threaded safe and you can use it to perform a lot of query per seconds. Ok, then MemoryQuery is the one I want, as I am generally happy to trade RAM for speed. How do I tell it to MemoryQuery mode instead of DiskQuery mode? E.g. Do I need to compile cmd/query and cmd/TcpQuery with a special flag? Or is there a way to pass a command line argument to cmd/query and cmd/TcpQuery to tell it to start in MemoryQuery, rather than DiskQuery mode ? (This would have the advantage of letting the user choose the most suitable mode at runtime, and it could default to the disk-based-querying so that the default behaviour was the same as it is at the moment). > - I added all php/html/js pages in the tgz (in the extra directory) ; Thank you! One small thing I've noticed is that it won't find articles/redirects that start with a quote - for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22A%22_Device One reason for this may be that the cmd/tcpQuery JavaScript response is not currently escaping quotes. For example, when I ask it for strings starting with " then tcpQuery returns this: sendRes(""", new Array(), new Array(), new Array()); Whereas it probably wants to return this: sendRes("\"", new Array(), new Array(), new Array()); ---- Also, I tried testing TcpQuery with random binary input, and it seemed sometimes to be much slower on some single-character input. For example, here is a log of it running : Query of 2 chars : got 55 chars back : Time = 0.00678396224976 Query of 9 chars : got 62 chars back : Time = 0.00735902786255 Query of 1 chars : got 0 chars back : Time = 1.01217985153 ^^^^^ slow line ^^^^ Query of 9 chars : got 62 chars back : Time = 0.00748610496521 Query of 10 chars : got 63 chars back : Time = 0.00757598876953 Query of 8 chars : got 61 chars back : Time = 0.00975489616394 Then a simple loop to track down the slow 1-character tests: ======================================= <?php error_reporting (E_ALL | E_STRICT); // function internals taken from extra/query.php function getResults($content) { /* Create a TCP/IP socket. */ $socket = socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, SOL_TCP); if ($socket < 0) { echo "socket_create() failed: reason: " . socket_strerror($socket) . "\n"; } $result = socket_connect($socket, "127.0.0.1", 666); if ($result < 0) { echo "socket_connect() failed.\nReason: ($result) " . socket_strerror($result) . "\n"; } $in = "$content\r\n\r\n"; socket_write($socket, $in, strlen($in)); $res = ""; while ($out = socket_read($socket, 2048)) { $res .= $out; } socket_close($socket); return $res; } for ($i=0; $i<=255; $i++) { $query = chr($i); print "i=$i "; $before = microtime(true); $results = getResults($query); $after = microtime(true); print "got " . strlen($results) . " chars back : Time = " . ($after - $before) . "\n"; } ?> ======================================= The slow ones to respond (with 0 chars back) were: ======================================= i=0 got 0 chars back : Time = 1.01103210449 ^^^^ i=1 got 54 chars back : Time = 0.00667715072632 i=2 got 54 chars back : Time = 0.00674390792847 i=3 got 54 chars back : Time = 0.00663805007935 i=4 got 54 chars back : Time = 0.00671792030334 i=5 got 54 chars back : Time = 0.00660610198975 i=6 got 54 chars back : Time = 0.00669598579407 i=7 got 54 chars back : Time = 0.00663185119629 i=8 got 54 chars back : Time = 0.00668096542358 i=9 got 54 chars back : Time = 0.0066249370575 i=10 got 0 chars back : Time = 1.01135993004 ^^^^ i=11 got 54 chars back : Time = 0.00664806365967 i=12 got 54 chars back : Time = 0.00664210319519 .... ======================================= I.e. the NULL character, and the LF / linefeed character. No idea if that is something that could or should be fixed or not. All the best, Nick.

17 years, 10 months

Synchronize mediawiki articles with wikipedia feature

by Raffi Kojian

Hi - I am running a reasonably large wikimedia site (a few thousand pages) and have thought for a while about a certain desired feature I have, which I suspect a number of other wikimedia sites might find quite helpful. Background: Armeniapedia.org is for articles on anything and everything to do with Armenians. So, for example, it can have articles on anything from Yerevan to George Bush. Now the Yerevan article, in theory, should not need to be any different than the one on Wikipedia, while the George Bush article, should have only Armenia(n) specific information that would not be fitting on Wikipedia. Armeniapedia is also a good home for say online cookbooks, texts, etc, etc. The idea: For articles like Yerevan, it would be nice to somehow synch my site with Wikipedia. If I could somehow specify that a certain article on my site is a sister article to Wikipedia, then allow the article on my site to automatically update itself on a timely basis (weekly or so), plus whenever someone wants to edit they get automatically taken to the wikipedia article's edit page, it would allow both sites to benefit. I'm sure other ways of implementing this would be possible, but the basic idea I think (and hope you agree) is a good one. Thanks for reading this...

17 years, 10 months

MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-08-10

by brion＠pobox.com

An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures: Running test TODO: Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED! Running test TODO: Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED! Running test TODO: Template with thumb image (with link in description)... FAILED! Running test TODO: message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED! Running test TODO: message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED! Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED! Running test TODO: HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED! Running test TODO: HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED! Running test TODO: HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED! Running test TODO: HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED! Running test TODO: Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED! Running test TODO: Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED! Running test TODO: Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED! Running test TODO: 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line... FAILED! Running test TODO: HTML Hex character encoding.... FAILED! Running test TODO: dt/dd/dl test... FAILED! Passed 413 of 429 tests (96.27%) FAILED!

17 years, 10 months

Re: [Wikitech-l] Comprehensive template expansion size limit

by Ligulem

I do have some related (possibly silly) questions/thoughts: What is (was?) the main intention of the *subst* feature of MediaWiki templates? Is subst meant to help reduce parse time or is subst intended as an editorial tool? Currently, the user input containing the subst keyword is lost when the user saves a page. Are there any plans/intentions/ideas to store this input somewhere? Would it be feasible to have a compilation like model for some templates (something like an expanded subst mechanism)? Could/should we store pages (revisions?) at the "templates expanded" level? As an observation, the current template system in some aspects violates the revertability paradigm of MediaWiki, as all article revisions (not only the newest) are affected by changes in an included template. --Ligulem

17 years, 10 months

Re: [Wikitech-l] Interesting behaviour of "ISBN" magic word

by Any File

Steve Bennett wrote: > > Heh, ok - didn't notice that. Presume that they had actually meant to > give two slightly different ISBN's, such as for two different editions > of the same book. two diferent editions of the same book always have a different ISBN number. the ISBN number is meant to distinguish among different book in commerce. Since commercially two different editions of the same book are a different thing, they have a different ISBN. The hypens are use to separate the different parts of the number (language, editor, book_id, checksum). The fild dimensions are not fixed. By the way since the last digit may also be an X (the checksum is done module 11), it is not strictly a number. Any File

17 years, 10 months

Request for tweak to checkuser

by Fred Bauder

I have been doing range blocks to identify the new accounts that the vandal General Tojo is creating. He makes about 20 new accounts a day including sleepers. The trouble is that doing a checkuser on the range of a popular provider not only takes a lot of time, but is also doing a lot of grinding as it goes back 30 days. Could an option for checkuser be coded to permit checkuser for the last 24 hours? That would suffice for an ongoing problem like a persistent vandal. Fred

17 years, 10 months

Fwd: HOWTO MediaZilla: MediaWiki extensions - New component

by Cyril DANGERVILLE

Hello, I'd like to register a new extension (DynamicPageList2) on the MediaZilla for bug reports. So my question is: how do I add a new "Component" under Product "MediaWiki extensions"? Thanks for your help. -- Cyril Dangerville

17 years, 10 months

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Wikitech-l August 2006