Hello,
Vaidya et al. have published a paper about the work they did to
extract content metadata from Commons description pages, using
existing and new DBpedia tools. This could be of interest to this list
as it relates to Structured data for Commons.
PDF: http://jens-lehmann.org/files/2015/iswc_dbpedia_commons.pdf
The paper is relatively short and reads easily. I've also written a
review for the Signpost's latest "Recent research" report:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-08-26/Recen…
--
Guillaume Paumier
Just a quick note -- there's been some ongoing work in preparation for
supporting WebM with the newer VP9 codec:
* fixing up our server configuration with updated ffmpeg & ffmpeg2theora
packages
* fixing up the player to support VP9 as well as VP8
* adding support for producing WebM transcodes in VP9 in addition to VP8
Big thanks to a bunch of folks over on the ops side who have been helping
with the packaging! We had to backport some packages to get VP9 working,
and ffmpeg2theora needed some patches to work correctly in newer versions.
At some point in the coming weeks, the video transcoding servers will
be re-imaged
with an updated operating system <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T104747>
(Ubuntu Trusty plus our custom packages). Once this is complete, uploaded
WebM VP9 files should start producing Ogg Theora and WebM VP8 transcodes
(currently you can upload them but they fail to work).
With TMH updates going out some time next week, playback of VP9 originals
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T62272> should also start working in
Chrome and Firefox.
These updates also improve support of Opus audio files
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T42193>, both standalone in Ogg audio
and in WebM videos.
Once we're satisfied everything works, we'll consider enabling production
of VP9 transcodes <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T63805>. These will be
about the same quality as VP8, but use only half the bandwidth. Later when
we figure out how to rig up adaptive streaming, this'll mean
bandwidth-constrained clients can bump up one resolution step in VP9 versus
VP8...
One big warning -- VP9 encoding is 2-4x slower than VP8 encoding at the
same resolution... so we'll have to investigate comparative CPU load and
whether 1080p transcodes actually complete reliably before timeouts etc
hit. This may be something we have to roll out later after more testing.
But even if it takes us time to get VP9 output working, having VP9 input
functional will fix some existing files, make it easier to import from
YouTube and other sources that are more aggressively using VP9, and
generally makes us more future-proof.
-- brion
This is the second article recently in which I've encountered unexpected
behavior when trying to align images.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-cheeked_starling
Am I missing something, or is there a bug that's resulting in images being
misplaced?
Pine
Hi! I just posted my gadget from the hackathon on VPT on enwiki [0]. Anyone
should feel free to port the gadget (and its dependencies) to other wikis,
there shouldn't be any necessary code changes, unless you port it to Commons,
in which case you don't need the fancy bending-over-backwards-for-CentralAuth
code.
I won't be maintaining this, it's just a proof of concept for our future work
on proper, extension-y dialogs in editors, but I thought I'd share it with
early adopters.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29#Upload…
Cheers all,
--
Mark Holmquist
Lead Engineer, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
mtraceur(a)member.fsf.org
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:MHolmquist