I'm sorry a lot of these have been held up for a while; we've been
mainly working on stabilizing the wikis under the new server setup and
preparing to put out a new release of the MediaWiki software with all
the latest fixes and features -- for which of course we'll want the
latest language files included.
My old todo list page has gotten rather unwieldy and out of date, I'm
afraid, and it's hard to tell what's been done, what hasn't, etc. It
would be a big help if people could put the relevant information onto
these new wiki pages (currently empty):
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_list_of_language_names
All the suggestions for native language names that have been posted
separately recently.
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_files_to_be_updated
Please link to the exact wiki page that contains the updated file, or
attach an update and send it to this list and say which was sent.
If possible, please compare against the version of the file in CVS:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/phase3/languages/ and
ensure that anything that got updated separately in CVS is also in your
version.
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_language_bugs
Any other bugs or problems that are specific to one of the
languages/wikis: missing or corrupted messages, logo updates, sysops,
etc.
Hopefully we can get these things cleared up in the next few days...
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
I was doing a little bit of fiddling around with my site's layout this
evening, and I had an idea that someone more involved in the MediaWiki
development might be interested -- a couple of little "powered by"
badges that people can add to their site layout to show their support
for this excellent software.
I've quickly tossed together some ideas based on a couple of images I
"borrowed" from the MediaWiki SourceForge page -- they're just a rough
idea, so if anyone wants to develop the idea further, they're welcome
to it. I can pass on the original Fireworks .png files, though it
might be better to use the original source files, 'specially since I
don't have the exact font used for the word "MediaWiki" and had to
approximate to create the "Powered By" part.
Let me know what you think!
Dan Carlson
Hello, I regularly read and contribute to Wikipedia under the name Iammaxus.
Over the last few weeks, I have been mulling over an idea on how to
significantly improve the mediawiki project. I posted the following on my
user page before finding and reading this mailing list only to find out that
this idea has been discussed here
(http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-December/007185.html),
albeit not with the scale that I'm imagining Because im not sure where to
put this in the metawiki, and im not sure if anyone would care if I did,
here is an excerpt from a conversation i had with a friend of mine
knowledgeable in computer science on 12/24/03 (note that I wasn't seriously
asking him to do this, just more of bouncing an idea of off him):
I Am MAXUS (2:30:14 PM): yo
Chin Jut: hi
I Am MAXUS: code a meta data system for wikipedia
Chin Jut: what's that mean?
I Am MAXUS: i can't even begin to imagine the possibilities
I Am MAXUS: well first off
I Am MAXUS: organize topics
I Am MAXUS: in a tree system
I Am MAXUS: this would be part of the meta data system
I Am MAXUS: well wiat
I Am MAXUS: lemme start from the beginning Chin Jut: ok
I Am MAXUS: the overall point is to allow more machine generated info, stuff
that shouldnt be manually made like it is now, or even with one time use
scripts
I Am MAXUS: such as lists of articles
I Am MAXUS: tables of dates
Chin Jut: alright
Chin Jut: "List of famous bears", that sorta thing
I Am MAXUS: but much greater than taht
Chin Jut: alright
I Am MAXUS: so u could just request a list of a certain sub tree
I Am MAXUS: etc
I Am MAXUS: then it would have more specific meta data
I Am MAXUS: such as meta data about books including the author and such
I Am MAXUS: so that this would automatically be put into an article about
the book
Chin Jut: ok
I Am MAXUS: so:
I Am MAXUS: ?
I Am MAXUS: go
I Am MAXUS: ]and do it
Chin Jut: well, gee
Chin Jut: that's a large project
Chin Jut: I'm not even sure what to begin with
Chin Jut: I mean, what features need to be available?
Chin Jut: (I'm not gonna be able to do this, why am I talking?)
Chin Jut: what, concretely, needs to be done? I Am MAXUS: good question
I Am MAXUS: well first of all, learn xml and shit
I Am MAXUS: cause thats how all this junk is done
I Am MAXUS: or somethintg
I Am MAXUS: lol
Chin Jut: But Tim Sweeney speaks disparagingly of XML...
I Am MAXUS: does he? Chin Jut: yeah
I Am MAXUS: what does he say is bad about it?
Chin Jut: lemme see if I can find it
Chin Jut: "Does anyone else see XML as an overcomplicated solution the
meager problem of serializing data in and out of text files?"
Chin Jut: Philip Wadler (one of the main guys behind Haskell) also bashes
XML: "So the essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and
it does not solve the problem well."
Chin Jut: All the same, yeah, I'll learn XML
I Am MAXUS: lol
I Am MAXUS: well screw those guys
I Am MAXUS: cause everyone is using it
Chin Jut: yeah
Chin Jut: Phil Wadler goes on to say
I Am MAXUS: waht does he mean "serializing data..."?
Chin Jut: It's worth studying XML just because it became popular while
better things did not
Chin Jut: Serializing data means writing it and reading it from files
Chin Jut: you take a complicated structure, like a tree
Chin Jut: and turn it into some linear sequence of bytes
Chin Jut: hence, you've turned it into a series... you've serialized it
I Am MAXUS: right
I Am MAXUS: anyway i dont know if u can usel xml
I Am MAXUS: because of the database based nature of it
I Am MAXUS: but something similar
I Am MAXUS: anyway
I Am MAXUS: i dont know about searching, and thats the main function of this
system
I Am MAXUS: so u have to figure out how to do that
I Am MAXUS: so each article has info attached to it
I Am MAXUS: ideally, the types of info could be specified by ppl in a
realtively plain language way
I Am MAXUS: so taht ppl could specify more types of meatadata for certain
types of files
Chin Jut: what types of metadata would people specify?
Chin Jut: Like "this article is about bears"?
Chin Jut: Shouldn't that be auto-discovered by computers?
I Am MAXUS: thats beyond the scope of this
I Am MAXUS: that requires all sorts of human communication stuff
Chin Jut: ok
Chin Jut: so then what is this, exactly?
I Am MAXUS: i told you!
I Am MAXUS: for example, lets take the organism pages
Chin Jut: ok
I Am MAXUS: they all have the classification on the side
I Am MAXUS: well instead, each page would have a is a member of this higher
group
I Am MAXUS: which wikipedia would look at
Chin Jut: I see
I Am MAXUS: and see what thats a memeber of
I Am MAXUS: and dynamically figure out the whole classifcation
I Am MAXUS: this is not such a useful example because its much more static
I Am MAXUS: but take the date pages, those are useful mommas to meta-fy
Chin Jut: ah
I Am MAXUS: so if a page is an event
Chin Jut: so people would have to say in the event
I Am MAXUS: it would include date info
I Am MAXUS: and type of event info
Chin Jut: "Date info: July 4, 1776"
I Am MAXUS: right
Chin Jut: and then the date page would say "Search for all pages with date
info: July 4, 1776"
I Am MAXUS: so it coud be added to the "type of info in history" page
I Am MAXUS: that too
Chin Jut: "typo of info in history" page?
I Am MAXUS: well like the music in history page
I Am MAXUS: etxc
I Am MAXUS: etc
Chin Jut: ah
I Am MAXUS: so if u had a page that was under the music subtree
I Am MAXUS: and then under the band subtree
I Am MAXUS: and u had dates of existence of that band
I Am MAXUS: and then there could be an important concert subtree, etc
Chin Jut: well, to be technical, I don't think these are trees, I think
they're DAGs
Chin Jut: but it doesn't matter
I Am MAXUS: dag?
Chin Jut: directed acyclic graph
Chin Jut: in a tree, a node has only one parent
Chin Jut: (at most)
I Am MAXUS: yeah good point
Chin Jut: ok, it's sorta interesting. I have no idea how to do it
efficiently, though. But I think I might actually work on it
I Am MAXUS: lol
I Am MAXUS: i want to copy this conversation into the metawikipedia.org
somewhere
I Am MAXUS: maybe in the todo for vers 4 or 5
Chin Jut: I want to eat breakfast, because I have yet to do so
Chin Jut: bbl
I Am MAXUS: bye
Chin Jut signed off at 2:48:15 PM.
Those are our AOL Instant Messenger screen names. His wikipedia name is
Chinju
Thanks for reading this, I hope you consider this because I believe this
idea has the potential to revolutionize not just the wikipedia, but all
sorts of projects.
Please, as it was discussed in length, could someone make the tool bar
feature disabled by default.
This feature is broken. It does not work on many browsers. It should not
be "on" per default for a newcomer. It is very disturbing.
Thanks
ant
I agree with Brion, and I'm sorry I replied to Timwi before reading
Brion's "I forbid" post.
I've done profiling on Visual Basic 4.0 & 5.0, MS SQL Server 6.5, and
Java; and let me tell you I'm frequently amazed at the kinds of things
that cause slow spots. "But that can't be true!" is the usual response
of my colleagues. Then, you show them the profiling data, and they're
like, "Well, I'll be durned. Who would have known?"
Anyone know how to profile MySQL code?
Ed Poor
It has just been brought to my attention (well, rather: I found out)
that on the German Wikipedia, if someone submits a text that constitutes
a copyright violation, the sysops there immediately delete the complete
page history and reinstate the most recent version before the copyvio.
This is a pretty serious issue; I'm pretty sure that this is not
GFDL-legal (while, obviously, keeping the copyvio in the page history
isn't either); it removes legitimate contributions from legitimate
users; and less seriously, it messes up statistics.
I am therefore strongly suggesting that someone add a feature whereby a
sysop can delete a single previous revision, rather than the entire
history of a page.
It would probably suffice to delete just from the 'old' table; if you
want to delete the most current revision, you should probably revert to
an older version first anyway, thereby moving the one you want to delete
to the 'old' table.
Timwi
Based on the unstable branch, the article "MediaWiki:All_messages", used
for maintaining msg values is an interesting idea, but I believe this
would be better built as a dynamically built page, i.e. as
"special:all_messages", rather than as a static page in the database.
This would get around the use of external links to edit the variables
instead of internal links. Is this done to avoid the slow operation of
resolving [[...]] at run time? The problem is that this makes the database
non-portable between wiki sites.
This causes a problem at our site because we update the database on a
development server and then move it to our working server. It means I have
to manually edit this page to change all the external links marked up on
that page.
It may also cause problems because WikiMedia distributes the wikipedia
database. That database also will not be portable.
I notice that on the wikipedia site, the similarly sized article
"Wikipedia:MediaWiki custom messages" does use internal links and seems to
resolve in about the same amount of time.
We plan to actually change the variable '$wgServer' at run time. We want
to present the server address differently if the user links to our site
via our VPN intranet versus coming in through an external URL via the
Internet. So, we rather not have the server domain defined in the
database, but always dynamically determined.
By making All_messages a special page, you can hide it to all but sysops,
developers and/or bureaucrats, who are probably the ones who should see
and maintain these variables. It also will mean that, that as a developer,
if you add variables to "$wgAllMessagesEn" this page will be up to date
without having to run an install procedure.
I also notice this page is built from the variable '$wgAllMessagesEn'. If
this were built as a 'special' page, it could build using the language the
site actually represents.
Nick Pisarro
On the identification page on the french wikipedia, I have a <loginend>
that is added at the end of the page, just below the "send me a new email".
it is not the case on en:
Is it a software issue, or a bug from our translation ?
Thanks
ant
MediaWiki 1.2.0rc1 is now available for download at:
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=34373
This is a release candidate, and may contain a few rough edges still.
Those feeling adventurous, please try it out -- on a safe server after
backing up all your data -- and please report any exciting new
problems. If we don't hear about your problems, they'll never get
fixed!
A few notes:
* Things should again work out of the box with MySQL 3.x (though 4.x is
preferred).
* We are now compatible with short_open_tag = Off
* wiki.phtml and redirect.phtml have now become index.php and
redirect.php to improve compatibility. The old names are still
available for compatibility, so you don't have to change your
configuration for existing installs. If you're mixing other stuff in
with the wiki's install directory, please be sure this doesn't conflict
with other existing files!
* Installation now prompts you to ask if you want to create a sysop or
developer account and lets you pick the name and password instead of
using the AdminSettings.php defaults.
* A new page, Special:Version lists the MediaWiki, PHP, and MySQL
version numbers. Please don't forget to note these when reporting bugs!
We tend to track current production releases of PHP and MySQL, and
sometimes things break on older or experimental versions of these that
we don't always see.
Database messages are now on by default, you can turn this off if the
performance hit is too great. We hope to improve the speed of this
soon.
A couple things we don't have in yet:
* We don't yet have an installer that's friendly to those without shell
access, sorry. Hopefully we'll have something for 1.2.0 final.
* We still require register_globals = On.
* No PHP5 compatibility. I know there are a few keyword conflicts which
should be easy to fix, but we haven't tested this yet.
See the file RELEASE-NOTES for a bit on the new features and bug fixes.
You can report problems at SourceForge at:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=34373&atid=411192
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)