Unfortunately, unless a lot of good coding happens in reasonably short order, Special:Validate probably won't be enabled on en: for 1.5 (to be released next weekend). Brion has serious concerns with the present code.
This is quite annoying, but oh well. Interested PHP coders needed! Or it stays in limbo!
We appear to have worked out a front end for the initial test, though - [[m:En validation topics]] has been more or less stable for the last two weeks. The [[m:Wikimedia research team]] IRC meeting last night was productive also; I'll be putting some stuff from it on the article validation pages on Meta and discussing further with Magnus (who wrote the feature).
([[m:De Validierungsthemen]] has been stable a lot longer, but is also a lot shorter and simpler. I'm somewhat surprised the de: quality initiative hasn't jumped on it with great glee ...)
I know several other Wikipedias are waiting to see how the test goes on en: (and presumably de:). I also think this feature will be vastly popular in non-Wikimedia installations of MediaWiki. If we can write it so it doesn't kill the system ;-)
- d.
----- Forwarded message from Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com -----
From: Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikitech-l] Special:Validation status Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 02:43:20 -0700
Just a note; the 'validation' feature will most likely not be turned on on en.wikipedia.org when we upgrade, since it's not currently in a usable state.
Problems include, but are not limited to:
* In various places it tries to load metadata for *every* revision of the page. This would be fatal on the actual Wikipedia, where there are pages with tens of thousands of revisions. There are likely other severe performance and scalability issues with it.
* The 'management' interface for defining survey options is not locked off properly, and is very hard to use if you do get to it.
* Lack of HTML-safety on the UI interface: as a quick hack I added htmlspecialchars() guards, but things really should be changed to use wikitext where appropriate; several of the UI messages are currently displaying raw HTML tags.
If anybody would like to work on it further that would be spiffy; otherwise it will remain in limbo indefinitely.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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