Wikitech-l December 2002

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

41 participants
139 discussions

requested feature: User Contributions page include comments field?
by Jonathan Walther 16 Dec '02

16 Dec '02

On a users "User Contributions" page, can someone please modify it so that the comments a user made to accompany the articles edit shows up? Jonathan -- Geek House Productions, Ltd. Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting, QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation, General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998 Phone: 604-435-1205 Email: djw(a)reactor-core.org Webpage: http://reactor-core.org Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC V5R2W2

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How to improve Talk pages
by Erik Moeller 16 Dec '02

16 Dec '02

I think we need to have an open ended discussion about "Talk" pages and what we could do to improve them. I see primarily the following problems: - It tends to be cumbersome to search for the right place to insert a comment in a huge thread with sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly indented comments. - Many users, newbies or not, tend to quote, indent etc. in uncommon ways. It's a bit like email in that respect: Give people too many options to make mistakes, and they will do so. - Edit conflicts are very likely especially in near-realtime-talk. This is *very* distracting and one of our biggest usability issues. Here's what I think we can do: - Auto-merge after edit conflicts. Do a paragraph-wise comparison, merge when paras are the same or new, trigger conflict when paras are different. Show warning when another user has recently started editing a page. - Make better use of existing comment demarcation. When a user inserts a sig --~~~ this could be used to also render a "reply to this comment" link. This link could lead to a blank edit form, the content of which would be automatically inserted in indented form after the comment in question. - Have better context-sensitive help. Our current editing screen is nice and all, but it could use some refinements to direct users to pertinent information. The alternative would be to replace the talk page with threaded discussions a la Kuro5hin/Slashdot. Individual comments should still have all wiki capabilities, but users would not be allowed to edit other users' comments, and there would be a clear thread structure. Also, stuff like signing etc. would no longer be necessary. Issues with this idea: - editing other users' comments is sometimes desirable - archival? perhaps thread creator and sysops could have "archive this thread" link - being able to write wherever you want can be good to alert users, e.g. put important notices at the top - this requires advanced features like "sticky" posts in a discussion forum - should deletion of one's own comments be possible? - revision history? - having two different "modes" of writing can be a usability problem, too Weighing the different arguments against each other, I think we should concentrate on the edit conflict issues, and perhaps try to somewhat streamline the reply process. Having a threaded forum seems to be too different from the existing wiki process to work well, although I am still somewhat undecided here. The edit conflict issue is relevant to all pages, not just talk pages. What do you all think? Regards, Erik -- FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de

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Fan mail from [threeroses@adelphia.net: ]
by Jimmy Wales 16 Dec '02

16 Dec '02

----- Forwarded message from Dana Hunley <threeroses(a)adelphia.net> ----- From: "Dana Hunley" <threeroses(a)adelphia.net> Date: Sun, 15 Dec 2002 21:11:34 -0500 To: <wikidown(a)bomis.com> Subject: your software sucks i get on and get kicked off everyday please fix it or i will stop refering ur site ----- End forwarded message -----

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Suggestion re: DB patches
by Erik Moeller 16 Dec '02

16 Dec '02

Brion has taken the time to write the very necessary bot patch, which is great. I found this in CVS in the "maintenance" directory: bot.sql -- this is an SQL file that modifies the table structure accordingly. I would like to recommend that when we alter database structure, we create patches of the form patch-01-bots.sql patch-02-recentchanges.sql .. in a subdirectory of maintenance/ called "db-patches", and a separate file "patches.txt" describing the nature of the patch and the date when it was written. This way we can keep better track of which patches need to be applied after, say, CVS updating in a few weeks. This is the way the Scoop project does it (they also order their patches by release tag, but we don't have any releases), and it works rather well. Regards, Erik -- FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de

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InnoDB tables
by Brion Vibber 16 Dec '02

16 Dec '02

I've switched test.wikipedia.org to use InnoDB tables (the ones with row-level locking and transactions). This requires breaking the columns for the search index out to a separate table, since the fulltext index is only supported on MyISAM tables. I've set up an 'innodb' branch in the cvs which contains these changes. Please check it out; there are probably some cases remaining where consistency isn't maintained. Once that's all running smoothly, we can worry about things like commit/rollback. (There are probably all kinds of fun race conditions in the various updates that are made on separate tables during page creation, edit, and renaming, which we currently have no protection for.) -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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Please test math markup support on http://test.wikipedia.org/
by Tomasz Wegrzanowski 16 Dec '02

16 Dec '02

http://test.wikipedia.org/ contains math extension to Wikipedia. It is possible to write math markup with <math></math> and it will be converted to nice PNG. Markup is more or less LaTeX+AMS. Please test it. Some error reporting has been added. Oh, and for translators. The following messages should be translated: (preference page): "Rendering math" "Aways render PNG" "Try HTML first, fallback to PNG if too complex" "Leave it as TeX (for text browsers)" What looks like: === Rendering math === (*) Aways render PNG ( ) Try HTML first, fallback to PNG if too complex ( ) Leave it as TeX (for text browsers) (errors) "Failed to parse" "unknown error" "unknown function " "lexing error" "syntax error" What looks like: Failed to parse (syntax error): ^_^ Failed to parse (unknown function \elephant): \elephant^2 = \mouse

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Scheduled downtime tonight/this morning at 01:00 UTC
by Brion Vibber 16 Dec '02

16 Dec '02

That's 5pm PST, 8pm EST, 1am GMT, 2am CET Not long, but thought I'd give some slight warning for the Wikipediholics among us... ;) I'll be upgrading MySQL to support InnoDB tables which have row-level locking which should help with the lag problem (actual conversion of the tables will be done later, after I've double-checked it on test.wikipedia.org). Should only be down for a couple minutes. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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Re: Wikitech-l digest, Vol 1 #289 - 13 msgs
by Anthere 15 Dec '02

15 Dec '02

Message: 4 Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2002 06:14:24 -0800 (PST) From: Digital Addictions Software <digitaladdictions(a)yahoo.com> To: wikitech-l(a)wikipedia.org Subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Feature Request: Bot user accounts and/or disable 'hide minor edits' for non-logged-in users Reply-To: wikitech-l(a)wikipedia.org Oh and I could run it in the bot in middle of the night on full speed and then turn it off during the day, but alas I sleep during that time. Ram-Man Hi Except your day time is other people night time. It would annoy less some, and more others. It would also slow down the server of other people day time. Please, don't forget this. Thanks. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com

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Please test texvc instalation on http://test.wikipedia.org/
by Tomasz Wegrzanowski 15 Dec '02

15 Dec '02

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Database error
by Pierre Abbat 15 Dec '02

15 Dec '02

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Enigma.png results in the following error: A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching Wikipedia), or it may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was: SELECT cur_id,cur_namespace,cur_title FROM cur,brokenlinksWHERE bl_from=cur_id AND bl_to='Image:Enigma.png' LIMIT 10 from within function "Article::getContent". MySQL returned error "1064: You have an error in your SQL syntax near '=cur_id AND bl_to='Image:Enigma.png' LIMIT 10' at line 1". It looks like the space before "WHERE" is missing. phma

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Wikitech-l December 2002