Wikitech-l April 2004

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

71 participants
126 discussions

rebuildall.php
by Jakob 22 Apr '04

22 Apr '04

Hi! After installing MediaWiki, downloading and importing the SQL-dump I failed rebuilding the link-tables with 'rebuildall.php'. Invoking it from command line I get the error message: > Can't use command-line utils with in-place install yet, sorry. What may this mean? Thanks a lot, Jakob

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Embedded MathML?
by Brion Vibber 22 Apr '04

22 Apr '04

texvc is able to produce MathML for some input (currently just some very simple text, not complex equations). When using XHTML output, it's possible to embed MathML directly in the text such that Mozilla and maybe Amaya can render it inline: <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">bla bla</math> Is this a useful thing we should support, is it worth the trouble? Good: * Text can be cut-n-pasted * Can scale with zoomed font sizes and for printouts * Inherits user overrides of forward and background colors * Transparency with no alpha channel tricks These would be good for users requiring large font sizes or high-contrast displays;transparent PNGs that hard-code a black foreground will be illegible for a user who forces white-on-black text. All the above points are true of hacky HTML output as well, but hacky HTML doesn't tend to look that good, particularly for fractions, radicals, etc where positioning is hard to do right. Bad: * Needs more work on texvc to be useful for non-trivial equations. * Supported by few browsers. Either a browser detect or an explicit user option must be used. We'd prefer to only have one canonical rendering to simplify caching.[1] * Mozilla complains at the user that they don't have special math fonts installed, which is rather annoying. [1] A sick and evil option may be to introduce the MathML at load time via JavaScript+DOM upon determining that browser should support it. As with all such solutions this won't function with JavaScript disabled and is thus suboptimal. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

4 7

Static Test - Empty???
by Richard Ames 22 Apr '04

22 Apr '04

I succeeded in changing the static text for [[MediaWiki:Fromwikipedia]] and [[MediaWiki:Gnunote]] but if you leave them empty the default text appears. Is this expected behavior? What do I enter for nothing to appear on the served page in the respective place? Thanks for the great product, Richard.

2 1

Transparent math rendering
by Brion Vibber 21 Apr '04

21 Apr '04

There's a lovely little program 'dvipng' which was designed to do real-time previews of LaTeX in an editor (http://sf.net/projects/preview-latex/) but is available as a stand-alone utility as well. This can replace the dvips & convert steps of our math rendering. In theory it should be faster (I haven't benchmarked it), but the neat thing is that it can produce output with a transparent background, which has been asked for for a while. I've been able to get pretty nice output with this command line: dvipng -q -D 120 -bg Transparent -T tight -o outputfile.png inputfile.dvi which produces files about the same dimensions as our current stuff. They are 8-bit indexed PNG images with solid transparency, which is compatible with Internet Explorer for Windows without any hacks, and will still look nice on most light-colored backgrounds. However, they won't look too great on a dark background, and some browsers may not be able to print them correctly. There's also a truecolor option that I haven't tried (which has potential problems of its own). Attached is a diff to render.ml which uses dvipng instead of dvips+convert. It would probably be fairly straightforward to make it a conditional option, but I don't know ocaml. ;) dvipng requires libgd to be available. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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Mapping complement to Wikipedia? (Oops, should be on wikipedia-l)
by Erik Zachte 20 Apr '04

20 Apr '04

I sent my reply to the wrong list, please don't reply here. Erik Zachte

2 1

Moving extensions (WikiHiero) to separate module in CVS
by Brion Vibber 20 Apr '04

20 Apr '04

WikiHiero is really neat, but only a small number of installations are likely to enable it, and the large number of small images is rather burdensome. Aside from the space factor, it *really* slows down CVS operations to examine them all. If there's no objection, I'd like to move the 'extensions' directory to a top-level module, next to 'phase3' instead of inside it, so it can be checked out separately. We'd package it for separate download anyway, so this is mainly a developers' convenience. The extensions folder could then just be dropped into place and the appropriate switch enabled to turn it on in an installation. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

2 1

Tokenizer reading past ends of strings
by Brion Vibber 20 Apr '04

20 Apr '04

The Tokenizer class seems to do a lot of lookahead, which can potentially fall off the edge of the string. In strict error reporting mode (E_ALL) this produces a notice-level warning about an out of range string access. I see that JeLuF has been putting in isset() checks to suppress the warnings. Since a read past end of string produces a reasonably well-defined result (ie, empty string), I wonder whether it's better just to suppress the notice with a @ on the expression. Since the bounds check happens anyway, the extra isset() doesn't _do_ anything. As a side note: isset() on a past-end-of-string read actually itself produces a notice-level error message in PHP 4.3.2, although they seem to have turned it off by 4.3.4. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

1 0

editing restrictions
by Anthere 20 Apr '04

20 Apr '04

Hello all, This is at the same time, news from another wikipedia, and somehow a feature request (or start of discussion, whatever), hence sent to wikipedia-l and wikitech. --------- NEWS SECTION Today, the french wikipedia adopted new rules with regards to sanctions and exclusion (majority of 93%) To make it simple. Before : the only action toward a problematic user was banning. It was decided by consensus, with 100% agreement. Two people were banned by this way, Mulot (in august 2002) and Papotages (in november 2003). This naturally has become unworkable. Now : a new policy was adopted. This is not a final policy, as several points have to be further discussed, but it outlines the principles. This policy is rather different from the english one. I guess the difference is due to 1) we are less numerous and 2) we never had a benevolent dictator :-) The major differences rely here * There is no arbitration committee. Decisions are taken by the full community (with requirements of number of contributions or length of presence depending on the decision). * The policy relies on two steps, clearly identified. The first step is meant to slow down edition by a problematic user, or to restrict his right of edition to some parts of the project for example. It is relying on the *agreement* of the user to respect these rules. The community issues a sort of warning to the problematic user and ask him to voluntarily respect this collective warning. For example, if a user is unable to collaborate on an article, and starts edit wars on this article all the time, he may be asked by the community not to edit this specific article for one month. The restriction in edition is automatically lifted after a month. If the user does not respect the request issued by the community, the second step is reached. Similarly, a user being issued repeated warnings and edition restrictions in first step will meet second step. The second step is restriction of edition, by technical means. In short blocking/banning temporarily or permanently. # This means that the entire community will be able to express disagreement to a user, depending on his behavior as an editor. # Decisions of restriction of edition or banning will not be unilateral but collective # Restriction in edition should not be necessarily seen as a punishment for the user, but more a warning from the collective, and request for him to behave differently # Restriction in edition should be respected by the user himself, voluntarily. That means the user actively chooses to behave within community norms or not. If he accepts, his full rights will be reinstated. If he refuses, a vote for banning will be started # Community answer to problematic behavior is gradual. It allows room for voluntary behavior improvement and general forgiveness. ------- FEATURE REQUEST SECTION You may note that the second step, restriction of edition by technical means, is limited. The only point on which we may act is time. Banning for one week, one month, forever etc�. I think it would be nice that technical means allow to block people more selectively, such as blocking on all meta space, or blocking on one article specifically. In the first case (meta space blocking), that means we recognise the right of the user to contribute to articles themselves, but we do not welcome them in the community. In the second case (article blocking), that means we could selectively prevent a user to edit on article or some set of articles which are really �hot buttons� for him. This has been mentioned a couple of time already, as well as edit throttling, which I think, holds interest as well. I would give a 100 wiki-kisses to any developer interested in working on that :-) I would also suggest raising funds for this, 'cause I am not sure I own 100 wiki-kisses. But I promise I am dedicated in making/removing people sysop and bureaucrat status to give developers more free time :-) Anthere __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25� http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/print_splash

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"Likelihood of reversion"
by David Friedland 20 Apr '04

20 Apr '04

I have written up a short, math-y description of an algorithmic method for determining whether or not a given revision constitutes reversion. There have been some previous suggestions regarding automatically determining whether something is a revision and using that information in various ways. In addition, it has recently been suggested to the arbitrators that one possible remedy in the matter of Wik would be to restrict his ability to perform reversions. Please take a look at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determining_reversion for my proposal for defining and algorithmically determining what constitutes reversion and how to calculate what I call "likelihood of reversion". I would suggest that for most purposes any edit with a likelihood of reversion over 90% could be counted as reversion. Please leave your comments if you have any suggestions, critiques, etc. - David

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Upload log causes problems while importing cur dump
by Timwi 20 Apr '04

20 Apr '04

Hi, while importing the cur dump today I received this error message: Error: MySQL server has gone away This error occurs regardless of whether I pipe the dump through mysql (the "usual" way), or use a Perl script to import it through DBI (what I usually use because it gives me a progress meter). My investigation pin-pointed this to one particular line in the cur dump which contains an INSERT statement which is for the page [[Wikipedia:Upload log]]. The one row of data for this page is 1051409 bytes. So I'm wondering: 1) Why does that cause the above error message? Am I doing something wrong? 2) Do we have to have such a huge page? Can we circumvent this by splitting the page up? Thanks, Timwi

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Wikitech-l April 2004