I turned on the Lucene search for all our wikis a few hours ago.
Currently everything except German, Russian, and Esperanto is running
with the English stemmer. This may not produce totally correct results
on some languages, but seems to be "good enough" to return at least some
useful results in general.
The index updater still needs a little work to fully automate; currently
I'm just running a mass update of changed pages manually every couple of
days.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Cormac:
> Hi,
> I think the focus (or focii) of the group is yet to be decided. As it
> says on the page, there will probably be various focus groups working
> on their points of interest and then coming together at some point in
> time.
That's right. Research is too large and diverse a field to be united in
a single focus group. On the other hand, all members of the Team should
have at least a rough idea of the ongoing activities, and it should be
possible to focus as many interested people as possible on a single high
priority project that we choose. ("Let's get that single login
specification ready by July.")
In the first meeting, we can try to meet both goals by
1. having a general discussion about focus, priorities, etc.
2. splitting into breakaway groups for different topics (could be just
two broad ones for now, e.g. "tech" and "sociology")
3. rejoining for synthesis and definition of deliverables.
It goes without saying that nobody will have to sit through all three
stages if they're not interested in a particular one.
If this works, we can adopt it as a general principle. I'd like this
effort to be as large and as open as possible: a massive, collaborative
and well-coordinated research community. The very positive reaction to
my initial invitations is a good sign that this could work.
The topics for which we can form groups will depend on the interests of
the people participating in any given meeting, so if you want a specific
topic to be on the agenda, I suggest you take it upon yourself to make
sure that the right people will be present. Invite them to the team. :-)
Someone asked on Meta whether we have a mailing list. I suggest using
wikitech-l for now, perhaps with "Research:" in the subject line. If
that turns out to cause too much traffic, we'll create our own list.
Again, anyone who is interested in joining this effort or who wants to
know more about it should take a look at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research_Team
We're also trying to sort out the date for the first meeting, so if you
haven't already, please make an X in the date matrix for your preferred
meeting times. (I'll send out direct emails to all members about this as
well.)
Best,
Erik
Many wiki engines have the ability to put the last few changes from RC
on the main page, or in the sidebar. MediaWiki will have this in 1.5,
with special page inclusion. There will be a whitelist of supported
special pages, currently Recentchanges, Allpages and (thanks to Erik)
Newpages. The syntax is e.g. {{Special:Recentchanges/10}} for the last
10 changes.
It's not currently known how many special pages will be supported by the
time 1.5 is released, or what their subpage-like parameters will be.
My main motivation for doing this was to allow the creation of a better
alphabetical index, similar to [[Wikipedia:Quick index]], for use in a
static HTML dump.
It would be nice to address the problem of internationalisation of
special page names and subpage parameters at some stage.
-- Tim Starling
i've started running an image dump for en.wp using a version of trickle with
large-file support (the last one died after 2GB). if this works i'll set
up regular image dumps again along with the db backups.
the copy is running slowly so as not to overload the fileserver, so dumps
may not be entirely up to date when done.
kate.
Hi all
We do not propose a thumbnailer feature with videos.
Might be a good feature for commons...
Why ?
I took a look on totem-video-thumbnailer which can do that.
Example:
$ totem-video-thumbnailer -s 95 video.mpg thumb.jpg
Opinion about adding this feature ?
Best regards
Kelson
I've whipped up a fairly basic rate limiter which can be used to provide
a brake to mass-floods of edits or page moves.
It's experimental and probably still needs some work. Since it's
relatively self-contained and I think some people would like to have it
yesterday ;) I've gone ahead and checked it into the REL1_4 branch as
well as HEAD.
This is not a comprehensive antispam or antivandalism solution; it's
part of a soft security system to keep things from getting too far out
of human control: for instance you can specify that a new user account
can only perform up to 2 pages in 90 seconds (or 1 page in 3600 seconds
;) so a malicious script would not be able to as easily flood things at
a rate of say one move per second.
Currently it requires using memcached, though that's not really
necessary and will be fixed soon.
Over the next few days I'll also be working on improvements to the open
proxy blacklist checking and the shared spam URL blacklist system.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Why does MW 1.5 still use HistoryBlobStubs? Wouldn't it be better
to add another id (or hash) column to the revision table that
references a specific text in a HistoryBlob, and move the flags column
there, too? This way one would also get rid of the $mDefaultHash
variable.
--
Weitersagen: GMX DSL-Flatrates mit Tempo-Garantie!
Ab 4,99 Euro/Monat: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl
Hi,
I would like us to slowly and experimentally (!) begin a systematic
effort to contact computer science educators who might be interested in
assigning MediaWiki-related work to their students. Professors I've
talked to so far were cautiously interested, and my intuition is that a
global outreach effort could lead to some real outside participation.
So, my question is, are any of you aware of lists of professors and
teachers in the field of computer science, particularly software? It can
be country-specific or limited in other ways, but any list as a starting
point would be very useful. Even a proprietary database might be
interesting.
All best,
Erik
Hello everybody.
I've successfully imported both cur and old tables.
However, I am realizing that the text parts in the "old" table seem to be in
a compressed format.
I do not know how Mediawiki is able to uncompress it and display it
properly.
but I'd like to have access the the column "old_text" through SQL queries,
how could I do that?
Indeed, I need to know the real length of each edit or comment.
Thank you.
Kevin Carillo