-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Ivan Krstić wrote: I've fiddled a bit with Planet before; if there's no objection I'll set that up later today. If anyone wants in, let me know where to find your blog. :) - -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)

I often blog about extensions that I've written or ways to hack/bypass/modify/deal with MediaWiki. I'd be happy to make a separate feed just for these posts if it might result in my inclusion in the aggregate feed. http://jimbojw.com/wiki/index.php?title=Blog Also, you mention filtering the feed items by tag - do you mean the <category> tag in RSS (I believe this is "atom:category" in Atom)? I wouldn't mind serving in this facility - but I'm biased since I hope to have my own content included in the aggregate. Would the person in charge of approving/monitoring* feeds necessarily have to be an unbiased third-party? * I say "monitoring" since it's possible that someone might create a feed which is initially MW/WM related, then after inclusion start spamming the list. Approval is just the first step - the person filling this role would need to be vigilant about spammers. -- Jim R. Wilson (jimbojw) On 3/5/07, Erik Moeller &lt;erik(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: > > On 3/5/07, Brion Vibber &lt;brion(a)pobox.com&gt; wrote: > > I've fiddled a bit with Planet before; if there's no objection I'll set > > that up later today. If anyone wants in, let me know where to find your > > blog. :) > > > -- > Peace & Love, > Erik > > DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of > the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees. > > "An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, > free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l >

I doubt most Wikimedians even know that the inclusion of new extensions would be considered. I certainly didn't - until you just said something. Is there a sounding-board somewhere that people can make these suggestions and the community can discuss it? Sounds good to me - we'll have to see whether there are enough technical blogs to warrant a separate list. It may be a very small percentage. -- Jim On 3/5/07, Erik Moeller &lt;erik(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:

On 05/03/07, Simetrical &lt;Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: You oversimplify too greatly. A huge proportion of the extensions out there are written by, if I may be frank, amateurs. They may be quick and dirty solutions to fulfill people's needs at the time. They may not be compatible with the newest versions of MediaWiki, or may use appallingly bad and even unsafe practices to get things done, which may lead to the inclusion of security vulnerabilities; commonly XSS and SQL injection. If we're to enable an extension on the Wikimedia cluster, then we have to be reasonably sure that we can trust the code. This means we have to review it for security and for sanity, and for performance. This takes time. Time which we don't have, on the whole. Some of this can be skipped when the extension is written by an experienced and trusted developer and uses appropriate techniques to do things, although there is still a phase of review which (rightly) needs to take place, so it's still not instantaneous. Another big problem is that people request the installation of the most ridiculous and pointless little extensions. There are vast arguments over how complex wiki text should be, and internally there is a ripple of discontent over how complex it has become. A lot of the community's thirst for nonsense was slaked in an efficient and effective manner by Tim Starling with the introduction of ParserFunctions. Unfortunately, now they want more. Variables. Arrays. All sorts of nonsense which, frankly, they *do not need* to write an encyclopaedia. The community frequently bitches at the development and system administration teams to do things faster, but it is the development and system administration teams which have a responsibility to keep the sites alive, and which will take the flak - oh yes, there's a lot of flak to come from all our users - when the shit hits the fan, as it might do without the proper processes. Rob Church

On Mar 5, 2007, at 1:10 PM, Rob Church wrote: Indeed...this describes me pretty well. I believe "rank amateur" comes closer. For example, I'm pretty sure I used some appalling practices (like saving state by serializing data into the page output itself instead of to a session or cookie) in the Table Edit extension I just wrote... But then I don't think it should actually be enabled on the Wikimedia cluster. Since extensions like these are being written by us amateurs to get things done on our own wikis, it would be nice to get feedback on which of our appalling practices to look out for. Perhaps someone with more expertise than the likes of me can add some more information to the sections on mediawiki.org about writing extensions and special pages. But I'm NOT expecting the main devs to have the time to do that. Jim

Oh, I don't know; Sometimes you get some interesting stuff that's not strictly MediaWiki / Wikipedia / Wikimedia - related. For example, you might miss out on stats about the number of people that fake their identity online ( http://wikiangela.com/blog/a-sad-loss/ ) , videos of suburbs being hit by asteroids and zapped by aliens ( http://leuksman.com/log/2006/06/17/video-crap/ ), and maybe at some point a posting about the OLPC's security architecture ( http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ivan/ ). Isn't it nicer to have something organic and freeform and inclusive and alive, that flows in unpredictable directions like a good conversation, rather than something that's narrow and exclusive and walled into a small box? I say: embrace the weird and the wonderful and eclectic in all its forms, and let the chips fall where they may - the only criteria should be whether MediaWiki (core or extensions) / Wikipedia / Wikimedia / wikis-in-general are a major personal or professional interest to the author, and then wiki-related stuff will just naturally tend to form a large percentage of the planet's content (although it will include other stuff too). You see this pattern already in other planets (e.g. Planet Debian). Or at least maybe try that approach at first, and if it doesn't work then refine it from there. All the best, Nick.

Wow, that sounds really quite dull. I read the words "strategic", "communication", and "tool" all in the same sentence, and I started to lose consciousness and the will to live :-( This stuff is supposed to be fun, and if it's constrained too much, it ceases to be fun. Besides, what does Wikimedia communication mean exactly? Does it include people developing extensions that aren't (at least at first) going to run on the cluster? (I'm assuming not, since that's not Wikimedia-related). What about Wikia stuff? (I'm assuming that's out too, since it's not Wikimedia-related). What about volunteer developers thinking about ideas? (I'm assuming that's out too, since there's not much related to the WMF per-se in what a volunteer dev does with their time). What about the citizendium folks? (Certainly not Wikimedia-related, although their endeavours at the very least have the potential to be interesting). It doesn't leave much, and what it does leave isn't likely to be very interesting, especially if people self-censor to fulfil some strategic business communication objective. In short, I can sort of understand why the WMF might want to _write_ something like this; I'm just a lot less clear on why normal people would want to _read_ it. Agreed: The WMF _is_ constrained in this way, but _I_ am certainly not. Furthermore I think my conception of what a planet should be (anything goes, just try and make it fun, and interesting, and semi-wiki-related if possible), and your strategic-communication-objective have irreconcilable differences. So I sincerely wish you good luck with what you're trying to do; run with it, and I hope it works out well. But me, I'm setting up a very simple planet as an experiment, that pulls in a diversity of wiki-related-blogs, but which is not restricted based on the whether or not the content is official communication approved by the WMF; In short, I'm aiming for the kind of wiki-related planet that I would actually like to sometimes read. The occasional evil cat doing tricks in New Jersey restaurants is welcome, provided the author has a major interest (social, technical, administrative, etc) in wiki-related things, especially the Wikipedia, the MediaWiki core, MediaWiki extensions, and also Wikimedia, but other wiki-related stuff (e.g. wikia, citizendium, Wikipedia on the OLPC, etc etc) is all good too (provided it doesn't drown out other stuff). An initial version is already up and running at http://WikiBlogPlanet.com/ ; (If that URL doesn't work for you, leave it 24 hours for the DNS to propagate, & then try again). To start with, it's based on Angela's blog list ( http://wikiangela.com/wiki/Blogs ), including everything in the "Wikipedia/Wikimedia/MediaWiki" category, everything in the "Wiktionary" category, everything in the "Wikia" category, and a handful of things from the "Miscellaneous" category. Anything that I couldn't get a feed in English for was omitted. Also there are tend to be a _lot_ more blogs about the social aspects of wikis, and far fewer about the technical aspects, so the I've tried to include all the technical ones, but haven't included all the social ones from the "Miscellaneous" category, to try and get some semblance of balance between technical and social. Currently it's set to automatically update once an hour, so there may be up to 60 minutes delay between when blog entries are posted, and when they appear on the planet. Also if you want to be added (especially if you have or start a technical blog, as that's the most underrepresented category) either add yourself to Angela's list or email me directly (or preferably do both). Also if you don't want to be included, please let me know and I'll remove you. And lastly, the Planet software has a concept of a "Hackergotchi" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackergotchi ) - the planet software seems by default to want a PNG image, 65 pixels in width & 85 pixels in height, so if anyone wants to have a little image of themselves against their blog postings then please either email me a suitably-sized image, or send me a web link to one. All the best, Nick.

Nick Jenkins wrote: Indeed, I'm not sure what the point of that would be. Who's supposed to be doing the strategic communicating? Amen! What may make sense is to have a couple of topic-filtered feeds (so Erik can read) and a full one (for the rest of us ;). Guess you beat me to it; planet.wikimedia.org will be up a bit later. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)

Brion Vibber wrote: http://planet.wikimedia.org/ up now; I've only stuck on a couple of people who asked in here so far. The theme's a little plain and MonoBook-ish; it wouldn't hurt to add a little flair. If someone wants to play with it and submit improvements, well I'm no graphic designer really. ;) The template (default) & CSS/logos (customized) are available on our SVN: http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/tools/planet/ Nick, I'd love it if you can keep Wiki Blog Planet around as a more "flavorful" channel, while Planet Wikimedia will remain a little more focused. At the moment administration is done via the .ini file... if there's a nice web front-end for administrating the channels that would be spiffy, though. (And if there isn't one, I don't think it would be hard to create one. It's a pretty straightforward file.) Just a note: WordPress can produce feeds for a specific category quite easily, so we can filter WordPress-based blogs by category with no problem. (I'm using category "wiki" on mine.) -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)

On 3/7/07, Nick Jenkins &lt;nickpj(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I don't think constraining it to stuff which is _actually related_ to Wikimedia projects or the software running it is some huge blow against free expression. Do you know how many Wikimedians there are? And how many of them are running blogs, and have been since long before they became Wikimedians? If the only criterion to be included is "Hey, I'm going to post on wikis here from time to time", it's going to be nothing but a glorified LiveJournal. -- Peace & Love, Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees. "An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic