Wikitech-l August 2005

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

103 participants
117 discussions

MediaWiki to Latex Converter
by Hugo Vincent 18 Jun '12

18 Jun '12

Hi everyone, I recently set up a MediaWiki (http://server.bluewatersys.com/w90n740/) and I need to extra the content from it and convert it into LaTeX syntax for printed documentation. I have googled for a suitable OSS solution but nothing was apparent. I would prefer a script written in Python, but any recommendations would be very welcome. Do you know of anything suitable? Kind Regards, Hugo Vincent, Bluewater Systems.

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machine translaton of the articles...
by prasad gadgil 20 Nov '05

20 Nov '05

Hi, I have just joined, I am from mumbai, india. I would like to get the articles translated in marathi, my mother tongue. Looking at the effort and no of volunteers, this will not be usable in any reasonable amount of time. That has made me think of alternatives - machine translation. A state funded institute has a software available but I don't have access to it yet. Pl. comment about this approach. Has this been tried for any other language earlier. Thanks & regards, Prasad Gadgil ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your life partner online Go to: http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony

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Edit conflict
by Philipp 19 Sep '05

19 Sep '05

Hello, in the past few days the following problem occurred in a local mediawiki installation: When opening an article for edit, everything seems in order. Showing the preview also works and the change applied to the article is shown. But when trying to submit, one gets the other-user-edits-conflict-warning and in the preview field there is the old unchanged version. This happens with every article (as far as tested) independently whether that respective article being edited by someone else or not. Writing a new article works, trying to edit it just afterwards leads to the described problem. Already did a rebuildall which took all night (2500 articles), but the problem remains the same. Is that something known and what am I missing here? Greetings Philipp

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Improvement request: redirect, synonyms, fuzzy system (ENG/ITA)
by Valentina Faussone 05 Sep '05

05 Sep '05

Dear WikiTech ML, I'd like to ask wiki programmers a wiki-software improvment. Since now if we have two words that means the same we have to write the article for one of them and redirect to that article the other: ex. States or US or USA redirect to United States of America That force wiki writers to create tons of boring redirects (one by one) both for: 1) real redirects (diffrent way to say the same thing) ex. Soia cheese redirect to Tofu 2) synonyms (different word to means the same thing) ex. Gauffres and Waffles 3) most likely errors (wrong words whose meaning is guessable) ex. State for States. That means that "equivalent expressions", synonyms, errors have to be handled in the same way. I suggest it would be easy and more effective to have: A) REDIRECT tag B) SYNONYMS list to be writed at the very end of the article C) a (I suppose it's the right name) Fuzzy System that grab the correct meaning from your typing errors - like Google "Maybe you're looking for..." That will help those who write, those who search and those who write again using correct synonyms. The lasts can link to an existing article the most easy way ex. If I write an article "Waffle" with an active Synonyms list with "Gauffre", you can write your article using [[Gauffre]] insted of writing [[Gauffre]] in your article Opening it writing #REDIRECT [[Waffle]] and doing the same for plural form. Plus, in most language you have to handle singular and plural form of feminin, neutrum or masculin genus of words... ex. I'm writing an Italian article for Beignets. I have to write redirect for: Bigné Bignè Bignole Choux (al correct forms for the same thing). Plus singular forms Beignet Bignola That is to say 7 redirect... that can be a simple active list at the end of the main article. A fuzzy system wiil help to work out bigne e bigne' for those who shearch and don't know what accented e is to be used or if the wiki system will accept accents. Hoping it will be possible, Best regards, Valentina Faussone -------------------------- Gent. WikiTech ML, Vorrei chiedere ai programmatori del software wiki una miglioria. Ora come ora se abbiamo due parole che significano la stessa cosa dobbiamo scrivere il nostro articolo per una delle due e fare un redirect dalla seconda verso la prima: ex. States o US o USA reindirizzano verso Stati Uniti d'America Questo obbliga a creare tonnellate di noiosissimi redirect (uno per uno) per: 1) reindirizzamenti reali, cioè espressioni lignuistiche diverse che significano la medesima cosa ex. Formaggio di Soia reindirizza su Tofu 2) Sinonimi, cioè parole diverse, ugualmente corrette, che indicano lo stesso oggetto ex. Gauffres e Waffles 3) Errori comuni, cioè parole errate il cui significato è comunque intuibile ex. State al posto di States per indicare gli USA Ciò significa che espressioni equivalenti, sinonimi e errori comuni di battitura vanno trattati nello stesso modo. Suggerisco che sarebbe più facile e produttivo avere: A) il tag REDIRECT B) i SINONIMI gestiti come lista da inserire alla fine di ogni articolo C) un sistema Fuzzy (spero che il nome sia giusto) che intuisca il significato inteso anche dagli errori, sul tipo di quello di Google "Forse stavi cercando..." Questo aiuterebbe chi scrive, chi effettua una ricerca e chi scrive dopo il "primo" articolo di un dato argomento a scrivere e linkare con maggior facilità sinonimi corretti. ex. se scrivo un articolo "Waffle" (è un tipo di dolce) e posso inserire un sinonimo attivo alla fine dell'articolo come "Gauffres", tu puoi scrivere il tuo articolo linkando tanto [[Waffle]] quanto [[Gauffre]] ed arrivare all'articolo principale, invece di: scrivere [[Gauffre]] nel tuo articolo Aprirlo Scrivere #REDIRECT [[Waffle]] Fare lo stesso per eventuali altri sinonimi e per tutti i plurali Inoltre in molte lingue si deve tenere conto non solo delle forme singolari e plurali, ma anche dei generi femminile, maschile e neutro... ex. Sto scrivendo un articolo sui Beignets. Dovrei scrivere un redirect per: Bignè Bigné Bignole Choux (tutte forme ugualmente accreditate della medesima cosa) Inoltre dovrei inserire anche le forme singolari, ovvero Beignet Bignola 7 redirect che potrebbero benissimo essere una lista alla fine dello stesso articolo principale. Un sistema Fuzzy aiuterebbe a gestire le voci bigne e bigne' per quelli che, cercando, non sapessero se il sistema accetta gli accenti, o quale e accentata usare. Sperando che questo sia possibile, I migliori saluti, Valentina Faussone ___________________________________ Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi e allegati da 10MB http://mail.yahoo.it

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MURCIAN WIKIPEDIA: Wich is the next step.
by Miquel Turra 04 Sep '05

04 Sep '05

User Assarbe (Ain_xaitan(a)yahoo.es) says: I have left a proposal for a new wikipedia in murcian (a language spoken by more than 300.000 persons) in the south-east of Spain, between the castilian and catalan) two weeks ago.I have already got the support of more than 6 persons. I am sure more people will be interested. Well, now I want to know wich is the next step to do. Can I do thing something more at the moment? Please, help me :) Thanks --------------------------------- Correo Yahoo! Comprueba qué es nuevo, aquí http://correo.yahoo.es

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Dump progress
by Brion Vibber 03 Sep '05

03 Sep '05

There's been some questions recently about public backup dumps (or the lack thereof). I've been working for the last few days on getting the dump generation infrastructure up and running in a more consistent, effective fashion. Here's what's currently on my plate and the status thereof: * Title corrections: some of the databases contain invalid page titles left over from old bugs. This can sometimes break the import or export process, so I'm writing a fixup script to find and rename them. STATUS: Finding done, fixing to come. Should be done with this later today. * Dump filtering/processing: currently the dump has to run twice to produce the current-only and all-revisions dump files. I'm working on a postprocessing tool which will be able to split these two from a single runthrough, as well as produce a filtered dump with the talk and user pages removed. Producing the split versions from one run should also mean that the dump can run without having replication stopped the whole time. It can also produce SQL for importing a dump directly into a database in either 1.4 or 1.5 schema, for those using software based on the old database layout. (We probably won't be hosting such files on our server but you can run the program locally to filter XML-to-MySQL.) STATUS: Mostly done. Some more testing and actually hooking up multiple simultaneous outputs remains. Should be done tonight or tomorrow. * Progress and error reporting: The old backup script was a hacky shell script with no error detection or recovery, requireing manually stopping replication on a database server and reconfiguring the wiki cluster for the duration. If something went awry, maybe nobody noticed... the hackiness of this is a large part of why we've never just let it run automatically on a cronjob. I want to rework this for better automation and to provide useful indications of what it's doing, where it's up to, and if something went wrong. STATUS: Not yet started. Hope to have done tomorrow or Friday. * Clean up download.wikimedia.org further, make use of status files left by the updated backup runner script. STATUS: Not yet started. (Doesn't have to be up before the backup starts.) -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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Spell checking in MediaWiki
by Jeffrey McGee 03 Sep '05

03 Sep '05

Howdy, I'd like to add a spell checker to MediaWiki using the pspell library. (Pspell is part of php and it uses libaspell.) It doesn't help that I'm new to the MediaWiki code base and PHP isn't exactly my favorite language. (I wouldn't even call it my _third_ favorite.) Anyway, I'd like to get a little feedback and advice on where to go from here. I know a few people have proposed working on spell check before: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-March/021358.html But, as best I can tell no one has gone anywhere. Does anyone know what happened to User:Archivist's spellchecker? Right now I have a proof-of-concept running on my computer. You can see it at http://66.205.125.240/spell/index.php/Special:Spellcheck/Main_Page It is a SpecialPage that reads the article from the database, spell checks it, lets the user choose the words from the drop-down box, and then sends a FauxRequest to EditPage. Eventually I'd like to add it to EditPage, but I started out with a special page so that I did not have to deal with the complexity of EditPage. Here's how I'd like the final version to work: # There's a button at the bottom of an EditPage beside 'Show Perview' and 'Show Changes' labeled 'Spell Check'. # When the user clicks 'Spell Check', they get a preview of their edit where misspelled words are replaced with drop-down boxes. # The user changes the words they think are mispelled to one of the suggestions or leaves it as is. When they click 'Show Preview', they go back to the preview page. A few questions: Do I not need to deal with multi-byte character functions like mb_substr since all the languages use utf-8? Should the user spell check a preview or the wikitext? If a word is misspelled in several places, should the user be asked once for the word or should the user be asked everytime the word appears? Thanks, Jeff McGee

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Inserting a user from an outside script
by Henno van Arkel 02 Sep '05

02 Sep '05

Hi, I've searched on the meta-wiki and googled for the last two days, but I can't seem to manage to be able to create a wiki-user from an outside script. My questions are: 1) I'm using the following code to generate the wiki password (as far as I can tell it's identical as in the wiki source [1.5]). $wiki_password = md5($wiki_user_id . "-" . md5($_POST['password1']) ); 2) the table user_rights. Setting the correspondent id to 'user' or 'sysop' doesn't solve the problem either. The right value for this is just "user" is it not? 3) Right now, in the user table, I'm setting user_id, user_name, user_real_name, user_password, and user_email. Do I need to set user_options as well? Any others? Any help much appreciated, Henno

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Mediawiki software localisation -- Pootle
by Mark Williamson 02 Sep '05

02 Sep '05

Hi all, I received an e-mail from Dwayne Bailey, coordinator of translate.org.za (free software localisation group for South African languages), in which he showed interest in the idea of assisting with MediaWiki localisation in South African languages. He also suggested using Pootle, about which you can find more at http://translate.sourceforge.net/ . There have been a couple of mails on this list I believe about encouraging localisation somewhat independently of projects, so that for example a Ladino interface translation could be completed without the existance of a Ladino Wikipedia or other Wikimedia project. Of course, this is already possible, but it's unlikely to happen. Within that framework, it could become a prelaunch condition for requests for new language versions of Wikimedia projects, and would also allow for more collaborative translation rather than the current system where most system messages are translated by one or two sysops in the MediaWiki namespace, while regular users look on without the ability to make corrections. While the current preferred method of localisation appears to be to use the MediaWiki namespace, this doesn't work well with the recently-introduced ability to choose ones' own interface language in preferences: if I choose on en.wiki to view the interface in, say, Navajo, or Amharic, or Bengali, nothing shows up because most or all of the translations for these languages were made in the MediaWiki namespace. While this may not seem like a major concern, I think that there are more than a few editors on the major language versions who speak that language as their second language and might prefer to view the user interface in their native language. This may still not seem like a major concern because, after all, don't all of the "major languages" of the world have full translations of language.php? Unfortunately, this is not the case, and is limited almost completely to the languages of Europe, with few exceptions. Languages such as Bengali, Amharic, Telugu, Fulfulde, Armenian, are all major world languages with millions of speakers (Bengali, for example, is the national language of Bangladesh, and a regional language of India, two of the most populous nations on Earth, for both of which English is a relatively common second language), each of them has a widely-translated interface in the MediaWiki namespace, but none of them has a LanguageXX.php file, or if they do, it has few or no system messages. Mark ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dwayne Bailey <______(a)______.___> Date: 23-Aug-2005 03:06 Subject: Re: Mediawiki software localisation To: Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com> ... This is a great idea, I will investigate how we can translate this. Do you think you guys would be interested in using Pootle (http://pootle.wordforge.org) so that other languages can easily translate? ...

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mediawiki database structure
by Rajesh Olafson 02 Sep '05

02 Sep '05

Hello, Do all teh various wikimedia projects really use the identical software - with the same database structuer? - wikipedia, wikiquote, wiktionary etc? Thanks you in advance. Rajesh.

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Wikitech-l August 2005