I am looking to create my own wikiwiki website using the MediaWiki
software, but I'm uncertain as to how I should proceed, because I do
not have access to the command line. I first attempted to have my
host's support people run the install.php script for me, but they ran
into errors and told me that they ran into errors when they ran the
script from the backend, and to look for errors in the code. (You'll
have to forgive my ignorance here -- I'm pretty good with websites, but
server management isn't something I know anything about yet!)
So, I'm looking for a way to install MediaWiki and set up my site using
nothing but FTP upload, phpMyAdmin access (full admin/dba permissions),
and a normal Web browser. Can anyone provide some assistance with
this?
Thank you,
Dan Carlson
At
http://download.wikipedia.org/DE-Wikipedia-Setup_20031022.exe
you can download Window$ installer file (~200MB) that will set up a
local copy of the German wikipedia (plus images) using my C++ parser and
the tinyweb server. It also works as an offline editor (with preview),
but there's no auto-sync mechanism yet. Also, you get a (fulltext!)
search and a random-page function.
Magnus
Brion wrote:
>Another possibility is simply to 'blacklist' known problem
>browsers by printing a notice/link to better browsers on
>the edit page warning that they may have problems, as
>we now have a warning on long pages that some browsers
>may have problems. (Though in that case we aren't checking
>specific browsers.)
Those types of messages are not at all welcoming. I get pretty pissed when I
go to a website that informs me that I need to upgrade or change my browser.
And I /really/ get annoyed when those websites make suggestions on which
browser I should use. I already have a browser that I am very comfortable
with thank-you-very-much. And yes I upgrade often. But many people don't
because they either don't know how, have a dial-up account that can't handle
more than a couple meg download or they have an outdated OS or computer
equipment.
We shouldn't be telling those people that they have to upgrade to use
Wikipedia if they can use Wikipedia just fine without UTF-8. The benefits
simply do not seem to be at all compelling enough to justify the negatives
(at least for en.wikipedia). But if you can figure out a way to have UTF-8
without the associated problems, then great.
--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Just a quick note to say I created a meta page:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installer_ideas
Our installation system needs improvement. I have written down some of
my ideas for how it could be improved. Feel free to add some of your own.
-- Tim Starling.
Well, its been nearly a month since I first asked
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-October/006546.html
so since nobody else wants to do it, I will.
Can I be given the server access needed in order to
add pages to the foundation's website
(http://wikimediafoundation.org/) and the Wikimedia
portal (http://wikimedia.org/)? I should be able to
figure out how to do Brion's 'export from meta page'
trick, me thinks.
I maintain a ~500 page website (I'll email a link
confirming this to any current developer who wants it,
but I don't want to make public where I work), using
Dreamweaver (mostly HTML stuff, though). It doesn't
explode that often, honest! :) And when it does it is
almost always not my fault (pages are served using an
ancient version of Resin and the database
functionality was hacked together by somebody else
years ago - I don't have control over that).
Eventually I would like to also start helping Brion
clear some of the more mundane items on his ToDo list.
Hm. Come to think of it, a page on meta would be a
better place to ask for developer access....
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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Hi there,
Wikipedia has a lot of Chinese history articles that would benefit
from a fast way to mark up 'pinyin'. Pinyin is basically a romanization
system for standard Chinese, in which syllables are represented as
words built through the combination of a sound in letters, such as
'zhao' and a number for tone, such as 1. Thus, zhao1 would be
first-tone.
The 'mark up' that I referred to was converting from this, uglier
system of pinyin to the more attractive unicode system, whereby
vowels are marked with various shaped lines in order to visually
communicate the tonal direction.
(Better explanation at http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin )
There's a PHP function already written to do this, which I
suppose could be modified and included as a new function in
wiki markup. You can find it here:
http://www.foolsworkshop.com/downloads/pinyintounicode.txt
And an online demo (try some input like ni3 hao3 - 'hello' in
Chinese), here:
http://www.foolsworkshop.com/ptou/
Regards,
Walter Stanish
PS: I'm going straight off the list (I'm online via GPRS and can't
afford to download heaps of messages - or the wikipedia codebase
to make the change myself), so please CC me diretly on any
response.
Vincent Ramos wrote:
>Yes, but non utf-8 compliant browsers are not very
>common, nowadays; there should be less and less.
And people who use Linux as a desktop OS are pretty rare as well. Should we
therefore do things that ignore their basic editing needs? In other words, if
people using these older browsers edit fine as is, then why in the world we
suddenly do something that made their every edit destructive and them labled
a vandal?
I must admit I accused one user of "destroying a page" after she edited a meta
page with an old browser. I'm deeply sorry for that and therefore don't think
we should have UTF-8 were there is not an overriding and very compelling need
for it (alas meta is such a place, but en.wikipedia isn't - perhaps other
Latin wikis as well).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
I was wondering about the pros and cons of utf-8 for the French
Wikipedia:
Pros:
* improve interwiki links : any non latin-1 (ISO-8859-1 = default charset)
link would be possible without any transformation. Many non latin-1
links are copied and pasted in raw format by interwiki wanderers but
not checked afterwards; they are always miscoded, which results in loss
of time to fix them;
* improve orthography (and articles naming): French uses the famous <oe>
digraph that is not encoded by latin-1 (latin-9 does); every editor
must either type the HTML entity œ or prefer not to encode it,
resulting in misspelled words (one of our bots, Orthogaffe, when it
was used for orthography purpose, had many "oeuvre -> œuvre"
replacements to do);
* terminate transcodage problems: many editors do not use Windows
and its codepages; other do, but with Win-1252 or Unicode as default
charset. When some text is pasted from an application not using strict
latin-1 (but Win-1252, MacRoman, etc.) to some wiki editing area,
it is badly transcoded by the Wiki-soft, resulting in many raw
quotation marks and <oe> ligatures being replaced by question marks.
========
Cons:
* any text containing non ASCII characters would increase
its weight : instead of one byte for a single <c with cedilla>, it
would require two; French uses lots of non ASCII characters, as
é è ç à ù;
* I do not see other cons.
Would it be possible, thus, to make utf-8 default charset
for the French Wikipedia?
Vincent Ramos
Message: 10
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 07:02:56 +0100
From: Vincent Ramos <siva-nataraja(a)alussinan.org>
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: French Wikipedia and utf-8
To: wikitech-l(a)wikipedia.org
Message-ID: <oprytke6ylo7frcm@localhost>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed;
charset=iso-8859-15
Le Mon, 17 Nov 2003 21:35:42 -0800 (PST), Anthere
<anthere6(a)yahoo.com> a �crit:
> I understand your need as a linguist for these
> letters. I just hope I was the last editor to ever
> come to wikipedia with a browser not supporting
utf8;
> because any other one will just be excluded from the
> project.
Yes, but non utf-8 compliant browsers are not very
common, nowadays; there should be less and less.
> I fear a bit that some newbie will come one day, and
> that you will have to fix everything behind him, and
> then explain to him he is just not welcome.
Hopefully,
> it will never happen :-)
It is already the case with pages featuring raw
<oe> digraphs or quotation marks (which are not
latin-1
characters but, I do not know how, there are editors
who
can save pages with them): when someone with another
system edits them, every <oe> and quotation mark
is replaced by <?>. Some browsers do not respect raw
non breakable spaces and turn them into normal spaces,
etc.
There is always someone to correct these pages.
At least, with utf-8 these problems should be less
frequent, because <oe> and <'> could be directly
encoded in a
charset which possesses them.
Vincent
------
true Vincent
But in this case, it will not be just a few caracters
on a few pages, it will be *all* accentuated
caracters, �, �, �, �, �, �, � and so on, on *all*
pages. That makes quite a difference. The user would
be listed problematic whithin less than 20 articles.
And Safari does not work on OS 9 :-(
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