Wikipedia-l July 2003

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

71 participants
114 discussions

Please help test new features
by Daniel Mayer 08 Jul '03

08 Jul '03

Erik wrote: > Daniel - >> It would be /real/ nice to be able to disable the TOC >> on a page by page basis. > >Please give other examples than the Main Page. Eh? The en.wiki Main Page and Main Page's of each of the other languages are the most visited and visible pages. If their formatting is broken by the automatic TOC then that is a big problem - no need to state other examples but I'm sure there will be. All I am asking for is an off switch that can be used on a case-by-case basis. And shouldn't the burden of proof be on the person wanting to make the change? Shouldn't they be the one proving that the major change they are trying to push through will do no harm and in fact be an enhancement? >Anyway, the TOC is not displayed on the Main Page. Is that from a lack of having more than three headings or a special setting? If it is a special setting then at least my major issue with the TOC has been taken care of already. But if the reason why there is no TOC on the test wiki is simply from a lack of headings then we are going to have problems with the real wikis which /do/ have many headings. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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Some upgrades...
by Brion Vibber 08 Jul '03

08 Jul '03

All the wikis on phase 3 should now be up to date with the same version running on the English wiki and for the last couple days the German wiki. Of interest: * page caching for anonymous users' page views reduces database load * to accomodate the above, IP address is no longer shown in upper corner * comma page count is being replaced with pages-with-links count; I'll be recalculating the present article counts in a bit * "go" is now default instead of "search"; this is often faster * various little fixes The new experimental features on test.wikipedia.org are _not_ installed yet. If anything's horribly broken, send a note or drop by #wikipedia on irc.freenode.net in the next couple hours. There are likely to be new interface text bits that need localizing. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Page load problems
by Kurt Jansson 08 Jul '03

08 Jul '03

[crossposted to wikipedia-l] Brion Vibber wrote: > When I stare at mysql's process list to see the slowpokes, who comes up > on top? > > Search, search, search. Some say we need to buy another server, others say the developers need to speed up the code. I think we need to to both. We're growing very fast, but we could have grown even faster if we wouldn't have speed problems since far over a year now. It's not only that our editors could write more articles in fewer time, many articles don't get writen because people leave the project out of frustration or presumably more often don't even start editing. Many edits got lost because the server didn't respond or people didn't wait long enough. So the Wikimedia Foundation needs money to buy new servers. Besides waiting for donations I suggest that we take part in as many bookshop affiliate programs as possible. It doesn't have the downsides of banners, because it's totaly unobtrusive and neutral. Many Wikipedians would visit their favourite online bookstore through our site if they knew the foundation will profit from it. I can't predict how much money we will make in the end, but it's worth trying. Kurt

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Announcing Wikimedia Foundation
by Jimmy Wales 08 Jul '03

08 Jul '03

[Could people please make unofficial translations of this for posting on *.wikipedia.org wikipedias?] I'm pleased to announce the existence of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit corporation organized under the laws of Florida, United States. I am transferring to this new corporation the assets that follow: 1. All Nupedia.com/net/org/etc. domain names 2. All Wikipedia.com/net/org/etc. domain names 3. All copyrights in software or articles that were previously owned by Bomis, Inc. and already placed under a copyleft license. (This includes work-for-hire by Jason, Tim, Larry, Toan, Liz, and myself, as well as any other Bomis employees who may have worked on these projects as a part of their job, but doesn't include any work by those parties conducted on their own time or while not an employee of Bomis.) (All that stuff was already under GNU GPL or GNU FDL, so the contribution of copyrights is basically a formality. Even so, we want to set a good example.) 4. Additionally, I am contributing all of my personal copyrights to work already released under GNU GPL or GNU FDL in Wikipedia and Nupedia to the foundation. ------- For the time being, the two machines on which Wikipedia runs will be continue to be owned by Bomis, but my intention is to donate those if the tax implications make sense. I have to consult with an accountant on that, first. I do NOT encourage you to make donations to the Wikimedia Foundation just yet! I am still working on tax exempt status with the IRS, and I have not yet set up a bank account for the foundation anyway. Those things will take a couple more weeks. On my TODO list here are: 1. Complete the IRS process for tax-exempt status 2. Create forms for the transferance of copyrights to the foundation, if anyone wants to do that. See: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html for reasons why this might a Good Thing. 3. Setup a bank account for the foundation 4. Setup a merchant account for the foundation to make credit-card donations an easy option I'll update everyone in a couple of weeks with the status. --Jimbo

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Please help test new features
by erik_moeller＠gmx.de 07 Jul '03

07 Jul '03

The following features are currently tested on http://test.wikipedia.org : * Automatic table of contents. A TOC-table is added to pages that contain more than three headings. This table links to the individual sections within the article and hopefully makes navigation easier. * Editing of individual sections. You need to be logged in to test this. Just click the "[edit]" link next to a headline to change the text of that particular section. * Linking into the Special: namespace with parameters. See Brion's separate mail for details. Please help us test these features before we put them on the live server, otherwise, things might break unexpectably. Thanks, Erik

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Wikipedia Weekly News
by sgilbert＠nbnet.nb.ca 07 Jul '03

07 Jul '03

Keeping up with everything at Wikipedia is a daunting task. In English, there are two medium to high traffic mailing lists (four for those interested in multi-lingual and technical issues), the announcements page, Meta-Wikipedia, and the uncounted issues being debated on Talk pages scattered about. And that's assuming you don't speak any other languages. Of course, if you're interested in what's happening on, say, the Spanish Wikipedia but *don't* speak Spanish, things become even more difficult. How can we make it easier to stay informed, especially for causal Wikipedians and interested observers? I propose we take a cue from the Debian Project (http://www.debian.org/). It's a very complex project, with a myriad of mailing lists. For people who don't have time to eat, drink and breathe Debian, there's the Debian Weekly News, a weekly email newsletter that summarizes the major threads on the lists, announces new subprojects and software, and provides security update notices. Debian Weekly News is run by one person, with occassional submissions from others. We can do better, using wiki collaboration. We could set up a page using a template on the meta. When people notice something of interest happening, they post a summary on the Wikipedia Weekly News page, along with links to where the action is (wiki page, mailing list thread, etc). On a given day and time, someone puts the text into an email, and sends it out over the new WWN-L mailing list. Then, the wiki page is archived, wiped, and the template is reposted, ready for next week's issue. Eventually, we could work up a script to automate the sending and archiving. Ideally, we would have correspondents from each language with an active wiki. These correspondents could translate news from their wikis into English, and then translate the whole newsletter into their own languages. This would be a bit of work, but if there's enough interest, we could have several Wikipedia Weekly News lists, allowing people to keep up with project-wide news in their own languages. Also, representitives from wikitech-l would be good; they could summerize the tech discussions going on in layman's terms. I've put up a page for working on this at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Weekly_News , as well a sample newsletter at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWN_sample (obviously I need a lot of help coming up with a workable template). If there's enough interest in getting this going, I think it would do much to improve communication through the project. - Stephen G. ------- Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia http://www.wikipedia.org

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Re: [Wikipedia-l] Please help test new features
by David Levinson 07 Jul '03

07 Jul '03

I think the Table of Contents feature will be very helpful, and will become more so as articles grow in length. I commend the developers. It makes the wikipedia look more professional and authoritative, and will help immensely with the writing of organized articles. It will also encourage the proper use of headings. Text before the TOC is also a in general good thing, but that probably should be user configurable. The introduction of anchors also helps. A simple <notoc> tag to allow authors to have articles avoid displaying the table (for whatever reason, like the Main Page, or others) should suffice. Similarly, a preference for logged in users would take care of the rest who really hate it. Since it is a good idea, requiring a positive affirmation of a toc, that is a <toc> tag for every article, will require significant editing and touching of 130000+ entries that would be better spent on content. == Comments on features == === Numbering === The numbering is awkward since the headings aren't numbered, maybe the TOC should be bulleted, or maybe headings should be numbered, I prefer bulleting the TOC to numbering the headings. === Size of text box === The area taken by the shaded box probably ought to extend across the screen, rather than be in a fixed size box, see http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be for a really ugly outcome of the current implementation (especially when the screen is narrow), which I am sure can be fixed. === Repeat article title === The Table of contents probably should repeat the article title, e.g. "Table of contents - Philosophy" === List of tables === A list of tables and list of figures would also help. == Signature == David Levinson dlevinson AT mn DOT rr DOT com

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German Wikipedia announcing 20.000 article
by Ulrich Fuchs 06 Jul '03

06 Jul '03

The German Wikipedia has reached it's 20.000 article. We will send out a press info soon. So I'd like to ask all the admins to not use heavy database queries and not to do system updates the next few days - A heavy loaded server is not the best thing to have when journalists are coming to look at the project! Thanks a lot Uli

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Please help test new features
by Daniel Mayer 04 Jul '03

04 Jul '03

brion vibber >Mav, if you'd _read_ Erik's message you'd >have noted he said that the TOC is *not* >displayed when showing the main page, >which is why you need to give other examples. Brion, if you'd _read_ the rest of my message you'd have noted that I did read that part of Erik's message and asked if the lack of a TOC was due to a lack of headings or a hidden software switch. ;-) I could have checked this out myself but test.wiki is down. >Me, I'm all in favor of being able to manually >suppress automatic functions that aren't always >appropriate for particular tasks. So am I. Alternatively we could turn this around and /only/ have TOCs displayed when something like [[special:TOC]] is inserted into an article. But my main concern was with the Main Page and I won't grumble much so long as the TOC is off for all Main Pages. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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Re: Please help test new features
by Mirko Thiessen 03 Jul '03

03 Jul '03

Erik Moeller wrote: > This is a bit of a philosophical question. IMHO sections should not be as > short as they are in the Donau-Ries article. The text is only 6400 bytes, > yet there are 11 sections, that's 580 bytes per section. You are of course right. I created these sections for testing purposes only. The original article has less sections. > With longer sections, you don't want the [edit] link to > load all the text within that section and subsections, because you'll have > the same problem as before: too large blocks of text. You are probably right. Mirko (Cordyph)

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Wikipedia-l July 2003