[Wikipedia-l] Article validation probably won't be switched on for 1.5

[David Gerard]

Unfortunately, unless a lot of good coding happens in reasonably short
order, Special:Validate probably won't be enabled on en: for 1.5 (to be
released next weekend). Brion has serious concerns with the present code.

This is quite annoying, but oh well. Interested PHP coders needed!
Or it stays in limbo!

We appear to have worked out a front end for the initial test, though -
[[m:En validation topics]] has been more or less stable for the last two
weeks. The [[m:Wikimedia research team]] IRC meeting last night was
productive also; I'll be putting some stuff from it on the article
validation pages on Meta and discussing further with Magnus (who wrote the
feature).

([[m:De Validierungsthemen]] has been stable a lot longer, but is also a
lot shorter and simpler. I'm somewhat surprised the de: quality initiative
hasn't jumped on it with great glee ...)

I know several other Wikipedias are waiting to see how the test goes on en:
(and presumably de:). I also think this feature will be vastly popular in
non-Wikimedia installations of MediaWiki. If we can write it so it doesn't
kill the system ;-)


- d.



----- Forwarded message from Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> -----

From: Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Special:Validation status
Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 02:43:20 -0700

Just a note; the 'validation' feature will most likely not be turned on
on en.wikipedia.org when we upgrade, since it's not currently in a
usable state.

Problems include, but are not limited to:

* In various places it tries to load metadata for *every* revision of
the page. This would be fatal on the actual Wikipedia, where there are
pages with tens of thousands of revisions. There are likely other severe
performance and scalability issues with it.

* The 'management' interface for defining survey options is not locked
off properly, and is very hard to use if you do get to it.

* Lack of HTML-safety on the UI interface: as a quick hack I added
htmlspecialchars() guards, but things really should be changed to use
wikitext where appropriate; several of the UI messages are currently
displaying raw HTML tags.

If anybody would like to work on it further that would be spiffy;
otherwise it will remain in limbo indefinitely.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)



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