MediaWiki-l February 2012

mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org

83 participants
76 discussions

Add Content to Mediawiki from Script
by Rowe, Dolores A 28 Feb '12

28 Feb '12

I would like to add content to my mediawiki from a script. For example, after a successful build, I would like to add info to mediawiki page such as "2/25/12 Build completed successfully" via the script. Any easy ways to do this via some extension, or otherwise ? thanks, Lori

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Re: [Mediawiki-l] CAPTCHA recommendation for account-creation bots?
by Sumana Harihareswara 28 Feb '12

28 Feb '12

On 02/27/2012 02:17 PM, mediawiki-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org wrote: > Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:57:14 +0000 > From: Daniel Barrett <danb(a)VistaPrint.com> > To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list > <mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> > Subject: [Mediawiki-l] CAPTCHA recommendation for account-creation > bots? > Message-ID: > <68CF225601ADF74BA1F8A2511535F85D0A9D20DB(a)WNDMAIL02.vistaprint.net> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > Spam bots are creating accounts on my music wiki (http://www.blazemonger.com/GG/Special:RecentChanges). What is the best extension to prevent this? I installed ConfirmEdit and tried the default CAPTCHA (SimpleCAPTCHA) but it didn't stop the bots. Before I experiment with the many other options, I thought I'd ask what people recommend. > > Fortunately the bots can't edit articles, just create useless accounts. > > Thanks, > DanB I'll take this opportunity to point out that Dan's not the only one. People who run MediaWiki instances come into IRC (#mediawiki) every day asking for help fighting spam and vandalism. Some emails that have come my way (reprinted with permission): Jason Vertrees wrote: > HI Sumana, > > After opening up my wiki for free registration, I immediately got > three spam accounts. One turned into real spam being injected into and > then cleaned from the wiki. None of the methods aside from preventing > self-registration seem to work against spam. Unfortunately, this also > prevents growth. > > I read the links you provided--do you have anything else more proactive? > > Thanks, > > -- Jason Sergey Chernyshev wrote: "Do you by any chance know a reliable way to combat spam? I'm tired of the hordes of spammers attacking my MW projects.... Unfortunately, I'm well aware of current anti-spam features and none of them simplify the spam combat to the level similar to WordPress, for example." (http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/) Anne Gray wrote of sfeditorwatch.com and sfartistwatch.com, which have Google Analytics, ReCaptcha and Bad Behavior installed: > > Thank you for offering to help try to figure out what's gone wrong > with sfeditorwatch.com and sfartistwatch.com. Cheryl's email reminds > me that activity on the sf editors wiki was really picking up for a > while, the year before it started getting attention from spambots. > Once I started having to protect pages to keep from losing content and > the wiki started being full of spam, participation declined sharply. > It rapidly hit the point where I as an administrator couldn't possibly > hope to keep up. Then reCaptcha broke and people *couldn't* edit > their own pages. At this point, I'm pretty sure bots are almost the > only thing active there.... [snip] > Sfartistwatch never really took off partly, I think, because it's > really non-obvious how to post images (I still have never learned). > And I'm worried that if we turn it on, it will get hit by the kind of > spammers that are posting hundreds of spam images to the Carl Brandon > society wiki... > > I don't know enough to set up bots to patrol, to set up notifications > so that I as the administrator can "watch" all the pages, or to use > scripts or whatever to nuke the massive amounts of spam pages that are > created regularly. Bots are clearly getting past recaptcha to > register users (they're doing that on the carl brandon wiki, too), and > the "Random page" button is totally useless for a visitor who is > actually interested in the topic of the wiki (is there a way to > reprogram that, so it only selects a random page that has a category, > at least? (it would be sooo nice, when you Block a user for spam or > vandalism, for the following page to list pages that user created, > with checkboxes beside them, and provide the option to select all of > them at once and delete them. Even better if it gave the option of > automatically protecting against future re-creation of those spam > pages.)... Most of these administrators are smart people who just need a little help fighting the bots. It sounds like the recommendations from this group so far are: * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:QuestyCaptcha , a plugin for the ConfirmEdit extension * http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SimpleAntiSpam so I've added those to these help pages: * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anti-spam_features * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_vandalism and welcome additional improvements to those docs, especially if recommendations that are in there right now are no longer worthy of recommendation. Also, anyone want to take a crack at cleaning out what's no longer applicable in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Spam_Filter so I can suggest it as a project for contributors? -- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation

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custom skins not working on upgrade to 1.18.1
by Graham Seaman 28 Feb '12

28 Feb '12

Hi I'm just upgrading from 1.16.2 to 1.18.1. Everything seems to be fine apart from a custom skin (the built-in skins work ok). The skin ('Resources') is a small variation on Vector. When I switch $wgDefaultSkin to my skin, the skin code gets called but no css is loaded. I've tried starting again by copying Vector.php to Resources.php, copying vector/* to resources/*, and changing all references to '[Vv]ector to '[Rr]esources' in Resources.php, but the css is still ignored. As you can tell from this description I don't know how the skin system works in any depth and am hacking away blindly. Can anyone suggest where I might be going wrong? Thanks Graham

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Infobox in the sidebar
by nakohdo 27 Feb '12

27 Feb '12

I want to provide my users with some permanent information using kind of an infobox either in the sidebar or in the footer. However, the sidebar seems to render only links. The same goes for the footer AFAIU http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Footer Any ideas or pointers how to achieve this goal are welcome! tia Frank -- View this message in context: http://wikimedia.7.n6.nabble.com/Infobox-in-the-sidebar-tp4514581p4514581.h… Sent from the WikiMedia General mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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Offline Wikipedia
by Sumana Harihareswara 27 Feb '12

27 Feb '12

On 02/27/2012 07:00 AM, mediawiki-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org wrote: > Date: Sun, 26 Feb 2012 10:35:12 -0600 > From: Jonathan Boler <galatians(a)gmail.com> > To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list > <mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> > Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] Command Line Markup Parser > Message-ID: > <CAGA6xGiUHq4jCteONDrD16qHuy7w6t5AHmuaDb8rBzkiS6oqHQ(a)mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 > > That worked. Thanks for your help. > > I now have the latest dump of the whole English Wikipedia running > locally on my laptop using this: > > http://users.softlab.ece.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/buildWikipediaOffline.html > > Searching and rendering are almost instant! > > Jonathan Thanks for the update, Jonathan. You might also be interested in http://www.kiwix.org/ (English at http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Main_Page/en ). -- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: [Mediawiki-l] [Wikitech-l] Asking for a mysql test: patch submitted: authentication on Wikipedia via user_name OR user_email
by Nicolas Brouard 27 Feb '12

27 Feb '12

Le 23 févr. 2012 à 02:01, phoebe ayers a écrit : > On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 4:24 AM, Nicolas Brouard <brouard(a)ined.fr> wrote: >> > >> >> Thank you for your support. I just submitted a complete patch entitled "Can't authenticate using my mother language username (UNICODE) when I only have (a public) access to Wikipedia with an ASCII (english) keyboard" in about 20 languages on >> https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34590 >> >> People supporting this idea, please for it. > > Cool! > > See also: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28085, a bug > I submitted ages ago based on feedback I've gotten talking to users > who only occasionally edited. The idea is that that remembering a > username can be a barrier to casual editing (a few tries to remember a > username that you don't use much and you might just give up) -- and > being able to log in with an email address might help make things > smoother Thank you for pointing me on your older bug that I didn't find on Bugzilla before I submitted this current bug. The aim was different but the solution to be found is the same. I haven't seen a proposed patch neither by yourself nor anyone else, am I wrong? Concerning the patch submitted, and in order to have an idea of the pertinence of it for other MediaWikis sites than mine and Wikipedia too, I am asking people having access to the standard user database of their wikis to process this next mysql command. The question is how many people are sharing a unique e-mail with several usernames? mysql -u wikiadmin -p wikidb mysql> select email_freq, COUNT(email_freq) FROM (select user_email, COUNT(user_email) as email_freq FROM prefix_user WHERE user_email <> "NULL" GROUP BY user_email ) AS DISTRIB GROUP BY email_freq; Here is the result on mine: +------------+-------------------+ | email_freq | COUNT(email_freq) | +------------+-------------------+ | 1 | 3047 | | 2 | 22 | | 3 | 1 | +------------+-------------------+ On the above example, 22 users have 2 usernames having the same e-mail. 1 have 3, and all the others have an e-mail link to a unique username. I suppressed the number of people having no e-mail authenticated (NULL). The benefit of this patch won't be as good on Wikipedia user table, but I would be happy if you know who I can ask in order to get the results. I was guessing 90% but I am probably pessimistic... -- Nicolas > -- phoebe > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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Command Line Markup Parser
by Jonathan Boler 26 Feb '12

26 Feb '12

I'm trying to write a command line mediawiki markup parser that doesn't require a full Mediawiki setup/installation with database etc. So far I have this below which works pretty good but requires that my Mediawiki installation be set up with a database. How can I remove the database dependency from this script? Also, the article links generated are in the format /index?title=Article_Title&action=edit&redlink=1 how can I change the formatting of these parameters so that it's just /Article_Title Thanks, Jonathan <?php require_once dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/maintenance/commandLine.inc'; $text = "* [[foo]]\n* [[Example|bar]]\n* [http://example.com/ an outside link]"; $titleObj = Title::newFromText( 'Example' ); $parserOptions = new ParserOptions(); $parserOptions->setTidy( true ); $parserOptions->setEditSection( false ); $parserOutput = $wgParser->parse( $text, $titleObj, $parserOptions ); $parsedText = $parserOutput->getText(); echo $parsedText; ?>

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switchtablink parser function doesn't seem to be working in mediawiki 1.18.1
by twinsenw 25 Feb '12

25 Feb '12

Hello, My name is Chris and I'm new to the mailing list. I noticed the switchtablink parser function wasn't working properly in Mediawiki 1.18.1. Clicking the link doesn't go anywhere. You can see the problem here when you try to click on "Add Media" and then try to click on "Back to Basic Information" at the bottom: http://thisishowyouplay.com/wiki/Form:Add_an_activity Any help on solving the problem would be much appreciated! Thank you, Chris

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Error in upload image in mediawiki with IIS7
by Rahul Sharma 23 Feb '12

23 Feb '12

Dear All currently I am using wiki application in IIS7.everything running fine but when i tried to upload an image it gives error " The file you uploaded seems to be empty. This might be due to a typo in the file name. Please check whether you really want to upload this file."what can be the reason behind it. thanks in advance.... Rahul s

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Installation
by Phill Whiteside 23 Feb '12

23 Feb '12

Hi, a little bit convoluted, I installed memcached onto our server, and yes, it was already linked to local host only. [root@ks389199 ~]# ps -ef | grep mem nobody 1558 1 0 01:07 ? 00:00:00 memcached -m 64 -l 127.0.0.1 -p 11211 -d -u nobody Which ties in with what wiki needs when told me. I then added the section into LocalSettings.php the lines $wgMainCacheType = CACHE_MEMCACHED; $wgParserCacheType = CACHE_MEMCACHED; # optional $wgMessageCacheType = CACHE_MEMCACHED; # optional $wgMemCachedServers = array( "127.0.0.1:11211" ); $wgSessionsInMemcached = true; # optional Of this I have no issues, as everything is tied to local host. But, as Apollo 13 stated... Hueston, we have a problem. Deep sigh, new install at http://wiki.thesii.org/index.php/Main_Page gives me Error 324 (net::ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE): The server closed the connection without sending any data. Any suggestions? Regards, Phill.

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MediaWiki-l February 2012