Wikitech-l May 2005

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

136 participants
194 discussions

RE: [Wikitech-l] dumps
by Domas Mituzas 17 May '05

17 May '05

I had to block 217.237.151.0/24 (cw?.M1.srv.t-online.de) as proxy servers from that subnet were downloading dumps at >200mbps for a quite long time. I do not know yet what was that, as there were lots and lots of threads for German articles archive. If you think the block is irrational, please note. I suspect some bug in caching software or something like that.. Domas

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Meta-template situation
by Phil Boswell 17 May '05

17 May '05

The "meta-template problem" is getting out of hand. Would it be possible for the various technical brains to hammer out a definitive statement as to the actual cost/benefit balance? I hate to bring particular names into this but [[User:Netoholic]] has been prominent in connection with this, and has been indulging in activities which AFAICT are more damaging than the problem he (?) is seeking to solve. I will set out the situation as I understand it, and the no-doubt-huge holes in my logic can be filled in by those who know better. I'm posting this here because I think the technical aspects of the problem are paramount. ---- There is a certain overhead involved with transcluding a template. If that template transcludes another in turn (a "meta-template"), this overhead increases somewhat. However if both the template and the "meta-template" remain static, this overhead is relatively small and can be absorbed without any huge fuss. If *any* template is changed, then all the pages which transclude it must be flushed from the caching system, and for a popular template this can incur significant costs. The costs might well be magnified for a "meta-template" because its "popularity" is the sum of that of all the templates which transclude it. Thus editing a meta-template most likely will incur increased costs. ---- The problem I am seeing is that the user I name above seems to be (and I phrase it like this because I might simply be failing to see any other) engaging in a one-user war upon meta-templates and reverting madly to remove them whenever possible. This is the damaging activity to which I alluded before, because several popular templates are being reverted and re-reverted seemingly incessantly, which must be causing havoc to the caching system. I was under the impression that [[User:Netoholic]] was actually under some sort of ban from editing in the Template and Wikipedia namespaces, but obviously I'm behind the times because he's at it again today (<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributions&target=Ne…>). The article [[Wikipedia:Avoid using meta-templates]] contains some very useful background provided by [[user:Jamesday]] but I wonder if the situation requires more strenuous action. -- Phil [[en:User:Phil Boswell]]

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Thoughts about a future board budget meeting (or budget board meeting ?)
by Anthere 16 May '05

16 May '05

Hi Mav et al I think the board should do a budget/financial meeting soon. The last one was done a trimester ago, so it is high time. It seems to me we probably largely differed from our first trimester budget planning (but I may be wrong :-)). If so, I presume it will be due to the various hosting offers we got... In any cases, I think it would be most informative to see where we are going... We need help from several of you to gather relevant information. Mav I have been wondering in the past few days if you could provide us an update on our financial situation ? Both general report (quick update on values) and later one of your nice quaterly report on the foundation website would be most welcome... I suppose you will answer me that you did not receive banking statements yet to do so... but I guess Terry could help there more than he could before. Question for developers : I'd like us to be informed on a non technical level of the future technical requirements to expect and possibly to be reminded how much we can expect from partners on this. Ie, how much is planned in the future to spend on servers, hosting and so on. I am sure you will answer it is tough to say, I know :-) I also know Jimbo asked some related question not a long time ago. What did it boiled down to ? Do we have an idea of how much the tech side will cost in the coming months ? Question for Danny and for those taking care of grants and prizes... I think we have no grants planned right now (except for wikimania). Am I correct that we should not expect any income in the near future from that direction ? The general idea would be to try to evaluate how long the money we have in the bank will last... and if we can envision spending some of it on more creative ways than servers :-) Opinion on this topic ? Also, depending on what is left, we must think of the time when the next fundraising will be reasonable to do. I suspect it is a bad idea to do it in summer... so, in short, do we need to plan something in june, or will we be able to last till september ? Related question : if a fundraising is done before summer, will the french association be in time to be part of it ? Is it able to technically receive funds yet or not ? Ant PS : I must mention that we are currently stuck in a rather ridiculous situation. The french squids needs some RAM... this RAM can only be purchased in a few websites... which refuse american credit cards... so we are currently trying to have it bought by the german association... which legally is not really authorized to do this... so, either the french association quickly has cash to pay for such expenses, or the foundation should have a credit card in europe to take care of such matters... opinion ? --------------------------------- Discover Yahoo! Find restaurants, movies, travel & more fun for the weekend. Check it out!

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Search activation
by Brion Vibber 16 May '05

16 May '05

I've activated the Lucene search now on the following wikis: enwiki enwiktionary enwikiquote enwikibooks enwikinews dewiki dewiktionary dewikiquote dewikibooks dewikinews dewikiversity eowiki eowiktionary eowikiquote eowikibooks ruwiki ruwiktionary ruwikibooks ruwikiquote sourceswiki metawiki sep11wiki foundationwiki commonswiki specieswiki grantswiki Will add the rest shortly, though probably with non-ideal configurations. I've added Image: and Category: namespaces to the default search set on Commons. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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More thorough history?
by Ben Brockert 16 May '05

16 May '05

I see on the 1.5 test wiki that page moves are recorded in the history of both the old title and the new title, which is a good step forward from 1.4. Does it also record when a page was deleted and undeleted and by whom? This would make the deletion and undeletion process more transparent. The deletion log doesn't show any undeleted pages, so I couldn't check. Will the permalink be at the top of every page as it is now, or could it be moved to the link bar at the bottom, or the toolbox at left, or as a new tab at the top? Ideal would be a short tab at the top with the full text as it is now on the History page. Have you noticed that the link on the history page is to revision 0, rather than the correct rcid? On that topic, is there a way to find the current revision number of a page in 1.4? It is needed to make a permanent link for the diff between the current revision and an old revision. Ben

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Crazy idea (was:Longterm software strategy)
by Magnus Manske 15 May '05

15 May '05

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I didn't have a chance to look at my mail all week (work and technical problems with my mail service), and just waded throught that long thread. I would like to share a rather insane idea I had some time ago concerning MediaWiki rewrite/different languages. Setting database/filesystem/etc. storage issues aside, we basically want * a nice fast parser, maybe in C++ * a MediaWiki that runs on most platforms, which likely would mean PHP * keep the work we put in the current version These points are somehow excluding each other :-) But, we could have *some* of it if we had a way to automatically convert PHP to, say, C++. As far as I know, there is no such thing, and even if it were, it would either break on PHP things like "$a=$$b", or become slow again. But, what about some "Über-language"? A rather abstract code that can be automatically converted to C++, PHP, Python, Java and-what-not. That would * solve the speed problem * give a PHP version to the poor souls who need it * give everyone else nice C++ and Java classes, Python modules, etc. * keep them all in sync with each new version The slight problem is, I'm not sure such a language exists :-( Also, it it would exists, I am aware that it would not generate the most efficient code around. But, the generated code doesn't need to be human-readable, and I believe a PHP version would do for small sites (internal wikis, for example), while the larger sites surely can find a way to get the C++ version running. Does anyone have information about such a really-high-level language? Magnus -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFChdm4CZKBJbEFcz0RAmFvAJ9+GRtuQ/tXmQQ8ETUe0ZIuBMak0ACfSu+Q p54nQmwbugI1iqKiYPgpx8I= =Iefi -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Irate impersonating me on IRC
by David Gerard 15 May '05

15 May '05

If you see someone on IRC coming from 217.44.0.0/16 with a nick that's a variation on my name, it's not me, it's Irate. User:The Number comes from the same range (it's btcentralplus.com, so that's giving away approximately nothing) and may or may not be the same person. Although The Number doesn't use trademark Irate typos. - d.

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Browne network freakiness & tidy
by Brion Vibber 15 May '05

15 May '05

Browne doesn't want to talk to the srv* boxen anymore, which was rather bad as it was holding a bunch of memcached space. Domas has moved its memcached instances to isidore, and things seem to be working ok for now. I tried resetting the interfaces real quick (ifup/ifdown on eth0 and eth1) but to no avail. Browne is known to be a bit flakey I think, so perhaps someone should poke at it some more or Chad can dismantle it... Separately, I noticed the new srv* boxen didn't have the tidy PECL extension installed, so they were calling tidy via the external executable which is slower. I went ahead and installed it. For reference the procedure is to install the libtidy-devel package (rpm for fc3 is in /home/wikipedia/src conveniently) and then 'pear install tidy-1.1x.tgz' where tidy-1.1x.tgz is my patched copy of the tidy extension package. The PEAR installer will configure, compile, and install. I left a copy in my home directory... this should probably get added to the more or less automated server setup script. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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articles showing up
by Anthere 15 May '05

15 May '05

The board received a request today from a person complaining there was an article about him on wikipedia and it was showing up in google. He asked that all references to him be removed. I informed him the article had been recently deleted. However, I wonder if the vote for deletion/nameOfTheGuy will not go up showing in google as well ? Are the pages vote for delection/foo visible to Google or not ? If they are, should they not be deleted after a while or in certain situations ? Anthere

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Proposal for deprecation of syntax features for 1.5
by Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15 May '05

15 May '05

Here are a few syntax features that I propose we deprecate for 1.5, the reasons are mainly to simplify the the wikitext to make parsing simpler. 1. The only reason one would want to use is to avoid the effect two newlines have of spawning a new paragraph, that is, to be able to write something like: This Is all one Paragraph This feature is seldom (if ever) used. 2. and We have a syntax for these two, namely ''' and '' for and respectively. 3. {{msg:}} Leftover stuff from the 1.2 days, let's kill it;)

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Wikitech-l May 2005