Multilinugal error messages have now been implemented on the Wikimedia squids. I would like to thank everyone who helped to make this a reality over the past couple of weeks. I was keeping a running list of everyone who had helped, but I lost track of everyone :)
Here is an incomplete list of those in IRC who helped me with translations: taw, Mackowaty, WarX, SuiSui, aoineko, Submarine, Rama, Frieda, Quistnix, galwaygirl, Fenix, mnemo and avatar. Everyone's help has been greatly appreciated. :)
Particular thanks must go to fuddlemark for extensive Javascript help, and to Jeronim for implementing the new message across the squids.
Note that I have removed the link to OpenFacts.berlios.de, which was getting overloaded as soon as Wikipedia went down. I have also removed the link to the "offsite donation page" at Angela's request. The French, German and Japanese messages direct those people to that language's IRC channel.
I hope the community likes the new error page. Well, they'll probably hate seeing it, but I hope they feel comfort in the fact that it's now a much prettier error message.
~Mark Ryan
"Mark Ryan" ultrablue@gmail.com wrote in message news:a4a7077050928092077f9e5b3@mail.gmail.com...
Multilinugal error messages have now been implemented on the Wikimedia squids. I would like to thank everyone who helped to make this a reality over the past couple of weeks. I was keeping a running list of everyone who had helped, but I lost track of everyone :)
Kudos to you and your helpers!
Can you remind us of where we can see these messages *without* requiring a WP failure?
On 28/09/05, Phil Boswell wrote:
"Mark Ryan" wrote:
Multilinugal error messages have now been implemented on the Wikimedia squids. I would like to thank everyone who helped to make this a reality over the past couple of weeks. I was keeping a running list of everyone who had helped, but I lost track of everyone :)
Kudos to you and your helpers!
Can you remind us of where we can see these messages *without* requiring a WP failure?
Well, as I just discovered looking for something else, you can always "use the source, look": http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/tools/downtime/language-supp...
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]
On 9/29/05, Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote:
Well, as I just discovered looking for something else, you can always "use the source, look": http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/tools/downtime/language-supp...
Nope, that's not it at all. I had no idea that existed! Except that one's for site maintenance rather than for unexpected errors.
When Squid encounters an error (which makes up a substantial proportion of downtime errors) it is configured to spit out a bland HTML page. It can't serve images or PHP scripts or anything of that nature: all we can have is a plain old HTML file :) The problem there is that we cannot use a server-side script to detect a user's language preferences. The only way to detect languages on the client-side is through Javascript, and that only reports the language used by the user's browser. Internet Explorer users have a better deal here, because IE can also return the language setting set by the user in the Control Panel (which is more likely to reflect the language the user is most comfortable with using).
For a preview, use the following URL: http://www.mindspillage.net/braindump/friends/error-utf8.htm
I don't expect it to remain up on Mindspillage's webspace for long. She has been very generous in allowing me the use of that webspace for testing and really does deserve a cookie.
~Mark Ryan
On 9/29/05, Mark Ryan ultrablue@gmail.com wrote:
For a preview, use the following URL: http://www.mindspillage.net/braindump/friends/error-utf8.htm
Damnit, that looks real damn snazzy. *shakes Mark's hand* Just wondering why the languages are in the order that they are in? Im not saying its bad, i think thier current order looks really good.
-- Show me the way to go 127.0.0.1, i'm tired and i want to go to bed...
Hit me: <robin.shannon.id.au> Jab me: robin.shannon@jabber.org.au Upgrade to ubuntu linux: http://www.spreadubuntu.org/
I was originally only going to include about 5 languages, and have the very outer languages a lot more faded out than they are now. So the languages were to be in decreasing order of article count as they went out from the centre (English), and would be decorated accordingly (i.e. a paler font). The centre languages have the most articles, the outer languages have the least. I did make one concession to the fact that article count isn't everything: I included Chinese, which does not rank in our top 10 wikis by article count but is responsible for up to 3% of Wikipedia's traffic according to Alexa, which is more than the French Wikipedia.
~Mark Ryan
On 9/29/05, Robin Shannon robin.shannon@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/29/05, Mark Ryan ultrablue@gmail.com wrote:
For a preview, use the following URL: http://www.mindspillage.net/braindump/friends/error-utf8.htm
Damnit, that looks real damn snazzy. *shakes Mark's hand* Just wondering why the languages are in the order that they are in? Im not saying its bad, i think thier current order looks really good.
-- Show me the way to go 127.0.0.1, i'm tired and i want to go to bed...
Hit me: <robin.shannon.id.au> Jab me: robin.shannon@jabber.org.au Upgrade to ubuntu linux: http://www.spreadubuntu.org/
Can you make the Polish one direct to #pl.wikipedia instead of #wikipedia?
On 9/28/05, Mark Ryan ultrablue@gmail.com wrote:
I have also removed the link to the "offsite donation page" at Angela's request.
Just to clarify - this is because the hosting for my site where the "offsite donation page" was ran out a couple of days ago and I wasn't sure if I was going to renew it, and I'm also likely to move it a new URL at some point. Either way, it wasn't an ideal place for the offsite page to be since it was on a fairly limited bandwidth per month, which was previously exceeded when the error message was up for too long, so ended up being a link to a dead site. If someone has an alternative offsite donation page, then it would be good to link to that, along with an alternative wiki page to replace the OpenFacts one (I would suggest Wikicities, but since that's based in the same colo, any colo-related problems that cause Wikipedia to go down would also affect Wikicities).
Angela.
Mark Ryan wrote:
Multilinugal error messages have now been implemented on the Wikimedia squids. I would like to thank everyone who helped to make this a reality over the past couple of weeks. I was keeping a running list of everyone who had helped, but I lost track of everyone :)
Here is an incomplete list of those in IRC who helped me with translations: taw, Mackowaty, WarX, SuiSui, aoineko, Submarine, Rama, Frieda, Quistnix, galwaygirl, Fenix, mnemo and avatar. Everyone's help has been greatly appreciated. :)
Particular thanks must go to fuddlemark for extensive Javascript help, and to Jeronim for implementing the new message across the squids.
Note that I have removed the link to OpenFacts.berlios.de, which was getting overloaded as soon as Wikipedia went down. I have also removed the link to the "offsite donation page" at Angela's request. The French, German and Japanese messages direct those people to that language's IRC channel.
I hope the community likes the new error page. Well, they'll probably hate seeing it, but I hope they feel comfort in the fact that it's now a much prettier error message.
~Mark Ryan
Very coooool.
I hope I never see it, but I fear I will see the page one day or another... so great to have it multilingual.
Thanks to all
Ant
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