WikiEN-l January 2013

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

12 participants
8 discussions

Another WP redesign
by David Gerard 01 Feb '13

01 Feb '13

I found this one visually appealing: http://dribbble.com/wirwoluf/projects/104912-wikipedia-redesign No doubt others will now take it apart :-) - d.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Another WP redesign
by Daniel R. Tobias 30 Jan '13

30 Jan '13

On Tue, 29 Jan 2013 11:46:51 +0000, Andrew Gray wrote: > * The three-column system will look strangely constrained for pages > with very short (<<1 screen height) infoboxes or very few headings. > > * It's not clear what would happen to our usual mass of footer > navboxes, most of which assume full-width screens. Perhaps they could > be migrated to the side columns? That's the trouble with "redesigns" that are presented as static image files; you can't tell how the proposed design would adapt to variable content, or for that matter to variable screen sizes. -- == Dan == Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/ Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/ Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/

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Editor Engagement list
by David Gerard 29 Jan '13

29 Jan '13

via Steven Walling: the internal team list, now a public list. https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee - d.

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Strawpoll on new RFC on Requests For Adminship
by David Gerard 22 Jan '13

22 Jan '13

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_adminship#New_RfC - d.

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Fwd: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimania 2013 scholarship now accepting application
by Katie Chan 22 Jan '13

22 Jan '13

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimania 2013 scholarship now accepting application Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2013 13:03:47 +0800 From: Simon Shek <simon.shek(a)wikimedia.hk> Reply-To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> To: wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Hi all, Scholarship applications for Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong are being accept. The application window is one month (through 22 February). Wikimania 2013 scholarship is an award given to an individual to enable them to attend Wikimania in Hong Kong from 7-11 August, 2013. Both types of scholarships will be available this year. Partial scholarships will cover travel expenses to Wikimania, capped at 50% of the estimated air fare from your nearest international airport according to [[wm2013:Getting to Hong Kong]]. Full scholarships will cover round-trip travel, dorms accommodations as arranged by the Wikimania Team, and registration for Wikimania 2013. Applicants will be rated on the following four dimensions: 1. Activity within Wikimedia (on-wiki and off-wiki) - 50% 2. Activity outside of Wikimedia and other free knowledge/software projects - 15% 3. Interest in Wikimania and the Wikimedia movement - 25% 4. Fluency of English language - 10% To learn more about Wikimania 2013 scholarships, please visit https://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships To apply for a scholarship, you can fill out the application form here: https://scholarship.wikimedia.hk If you have any question, email us at wikimania-shcolarship(a)wikimedia.org . Good luck! Simon Shek Community coordinator - Wikimania 2013 / Wikimedia Hong Kong wikimedia.hk

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[Wikimedia Announcements] Wikimedia sites to move to primary data center in Ashburn, Virginia. Disruption expected.
by Guillaume Paumier 19 Jan '13

19 Jan '13

[Apologies for cross-posting; this concerns all Wikimedia projects] Posted today on the Wikimedia Tech Blog: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/01/19/wikimedia-sites-move-to-primary-data-… Wikimedia sites to move to primary data center in Ashburn, Virginia Next week, the Wikimedia Foundation will transition its main technical operations to a new data center in Ashburn, Virginia, USA. This is intended to improve the technical performance and reliability of all Wikimedia sites, including Wikipedia. Engineering teams have been preparing for the migration to minimize inconvenience to our users, but major service disruption is still expected during the transition. Our sites will be in read-only mode for some time, and may be intermittently inaccessible. Users are advised to be patient during those interruptions, and share information<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_maintenance_notice>in case of continued outage or loss of functionality. The current target windows for the migration are January 22nd, 23rd and 24th, 2013, from 17:00 to 01:00 UTC (see other timezones<http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Wikimedia+data+cen…>on timeanddate.com). Wikimedia sites have been hosted in our main data center in Tampa, Florida, since 2004; before that, the couple of servers powering Wikipedia were in San Diego, California. Ashburn is the third and newest primary data center to host Wikimedia sites. A major reason for choosing Tampa, Florida as the location of the primary data center in 2004 was its proximity to founder Jimmy Wales’ home, at a time when he was much more involved in the technical operations of the site. In 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Technical Operations team started to look<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/04/07/wmf-needs-additional-datacenter-space/>for other locations with better network connectivity and more clement weather. Located in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, Ashburn offers faster and more reliable connectivity than Tampa, and usually fewer hurricanes. The Operations team started to plan and prepare for the Virginia data center in Summer 2010. The actual build-out and racking of servers at the colocation facility started in February 2011, and was followed by a long period of hardware, system and software configuration. Traffic started to be served to users from the Ashburn data center in November 2011, in the form of CSS and JavaScript assets (served from “bits.wikimedia.org“). We reached a major milestone in February 2012, when caching servers were set up to handle read-only requests for Wikipedia and Wikimedia content, which represent most of the traffic to Wikipedia and its sister sites. In April 2012, the Ashburn data center also started to serve media files (from “upload.wikimedia.org“). Cacheable requests represent about 90 percent of our traffic, leaving 10 percent that requires interaction with our web (Apache) and database (MySQL) servers, which are still being hosted in Tampa. Until now, every edit made to a Wikipedia page has been handled by the servers in Tampa. This dependency on our Tampa data center was responsible for the site outage in August 2012<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/06/wikimedia-site-outage-6-august-2012/>, when a fiber cut severed the connection between our two locations. Starting next week, the new servers in Ashburn will take on that role as well, and all our sites will be able to function fully without relying on the servers in Florida. The legacy data center in Tampa will continue to be maintained, and will serve as a secondary “hot failover” data center: servers will be in standby mode to take over, should the primary site experiences an outage. Server configuration and data will be synchronized between the two locations to ensure a transition as smooth as possible in case of technical difficulties in Ashburn. Besides just installing newer hardware, setting up the data center in Ashburn has also been an opportunity for architecture overhauls, like incremental improvements of the text storage system<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/11/18/nobody-notices-when-its-not-broken-ne…>, and the move to an entirely new media storage system<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/02/09/scaling-media-storage-at-wikimedia-wi…>to keep up with the growth of the content generated and curated by our contributors. Wikimedia’s technical infrastructure aims to be as open and collaborative as the sites it powers. Most of the configuration of our servers<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/19/ever-wondered-how-the-wikimedia-serve…>is publicly accessible, and the Wikimedia Labs <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/16/introduction-to-wikimedia-labs/>initiative allows contributors to test and submit improvements to the sites’ configuration files. The Wikimedia Foundation currently operates a total of about 885 servers, and serves about 20 billion page views a month, on a non-profit budget that relies almost entirely on donations from readers. -- Guillaume Paumier

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<math> results in "wfMkdirParents: failed to mkdir"
by bpabbott 09 Jan '13

09 Jan '13

I'm attempting my first MediaWiki (1.17) install on MacOS X using Macports for PHP, MySQL and Apache. https://trac.macports.org/wiki/howto/MAMP My intent is to use a wiki documenting personal projects, and placed it in ~/Sites/mediawiki. My LocalSettings.php file contains the definition below. $wgScriptPath = "/~bpabbott/mediawiki"; The absolute path is /Users/bpabbott/Sites/mediawiki Everything appeared to be ok, until I tried to enable LaTeX to be used to render equations. I made the changes below to my LocalSettings.php. $wgEnableUploads = true; ## Upload paths. May want other Directories for additional wikis $wgUploadPath = "$wgScriptPath/images"; $wgUploadDirectory = "$wgScriptPath/images"; ## If you have the appropriate support software installed ## you can enable inline LaTeX equations: $wgUseTeX = true; ## Setup the Math directories $wgMathPath = "{$wgUploadPath}/math"; $wgMathDirectory = "{$wgUploadDirectory}/math"; $wgTmpDirectory = "{$wgUploadDirectory}/tmp"; To help with debugging, I also did the unwise thing below. mkdir ~/Sites/mediawiki/images/math mkdir ~/Sites/mediawiki/images/tmp $ chmod 777 ~/Sites/mediawiki/images/math $ chmod 777 ~/Sites/mediawiki/images/tmp Even with no security, when I attempt to include an equation on a page, I encounter the error below (while in preview) WARNING: wfMkdirParents: failed to mkdir "/~bpabbott/mediawiki/images/tmp" modes 511 in /Users/bpabbott/Sites/mediawiki/includes/GlobalFunctions.php on line 2324. The wfMakeParents function in my GlobalFunctions.php, is below. 2292 /** 2293 * Make directory, and make all parent directories if they don't exist 2294 * 2295 * @param $dir String: full path to directory to create 2296 * @param $mode Integer: chmod value to use, default is $wgDirectoryMode 2297 * @param $caller String: optional caller param for debugging. 2298 * @return bool 2299 */ 2300 function wfMkdirParents( $dir, $mode = null, $caller = null ) { 2301 global $wgDirectoryMode; 2302 2303 if ( !is_null( $caller ) ) { 2304 wfDebug( "$caller: called wfMkdirParents($dir)" ); 2305 } 2306 2307 if( strval( $dir ) === || file_exists( $dir ) ) { 2308 return true; 2309 } 2310 2311 $dir = str_replace( array( '\\', '/' ), DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $dir ); 2312 2313 if ( is_null( $mode ) ) { 2314 $mode = $wgDirectoryMode; 2315 } 2316 2317 // Turn off the normal warning, we're doing our own below 2318 wfSuppressWarnings(); 2319 $ok = mkdir( $dir, $mode, true ); // PHP5 <3 2320 wfRestoreWarnings(); 2321 2322 if( !$ok ) { 2323 // PHP doesn't report the path in its warning message, so add our own to aid in diagnosis. 2324 trigger_error( __FUNCTION__ . ": failed to mkdir \"$dir\" mode $mode", E_USER_WARNING ); 2325 } 2326 return $ok; 2327 } It appears that PHP is not able to make sense of "/~bpabbott" ... which Mediawiki interprets as "/Users/bpabbott/Sites" (?) ... I tried using an absolute path for $wgScriptPath, but that breaks the wiki. Any ideas? -- View this message in context: http://wikimedia.7.n6.nabble.com/math-results-in-wfMkdirParents-failed-to-m… Sent from the English Wikipedia mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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Reference-handling tools?
by David Gerard 01 Jan '13

01 Jan '13

So I dived in with the editorial axe to fix up the horrible [[OpenOffice]]. It's almost not awful now, so that's nice. Like many such articles, it has a couple of hundred references. A lot of these are bare URLs (mostly because I didn't fill out the entire {{cite}} template) and there may or may not be duplicates. Now, we have computers to handle this sort of thing. Is there a list of useful tools for cleaning up references other than by hand? - d.

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WikiEN-l January 2013