Wikitech-l September 2005

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

126 participants
160 discussions

Yahoo cluster entering production
by Mark Bergsma 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

In the past few days, we have set up a few Squid servers on the newly installed Yahoo! cluster in Seoul, South Korea. They have started serving requests from several Asian countries last night, as can be seen on http://noc.wikimedia.org/stats.php (yellow = yahoo, blue = florida, green = amsterdam, purple = paris) Work is underway to experiment with using the remaining boxes in the Yahoo cluster as apache/mediawiki application servers, to offload the Florida cluster and make things more redundant. As this will create many complex problems and management overhead, we are not sure if and when that situation will be used in production. -- Mark mark(a)nedworks.org

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Citation feature (update)
by Magnus Manske 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

I would like to remind everyone that my citation feature is still sitting in extensions/Citation.php waiting to be turned on on the wiki(p|m)edia projects. I just fixed a nasty display bug and hereby declare it "production ready" (M$-grade only, of course;-) Remark: I tried to add a <note> tag using the same sytem, which seems straightforward enough, only to discover that the parsed replaces custom tags ordered by tag/position, not position/tag. So, if I were to write citation/note/citation, it gets numbered 1/3/2 instead of 1/2/3. Therefore, I did not implement <note>, everything will have to go through <citation>, prefferably via template, which allows for {{note|text}}. That will have to suffice for now :-( Magnus

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Allow one-word editing
by Edward Z. Yang 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 This was proposed at the village pump ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29#Correct… ) and I think it's a great idea. The idea is this: with a combination of Javascript and server side tools, it should be feasible to double-click any word on a page and then edit that single word. This is especially useful for correcting spelling errors that you would be too lazy to wade through an entire section to get to. Considering how to determine what a word is may be a tricky task though... is this feasible? How about enabling it for anonymous accounts? - -- Edward Z. Yang Personal: edwardzyang(a)thewritingpot.com SN:Ambush Commander Website: http://www.thewritingpot.com/ GPGKey:0x869C48DA http://www.thewritingpot.com/gpgpubkey.asc 3FA8 E9A9 7385 B691 A6FC B3CB A933 BE7D 869C 48DA -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32) iD8DBQFDJ3pkqTO+fYacSNoRAsyFAKCFM0xcIP3sGV1quhXsSllaeW/hxgCfUr4B Xsz3ltcSgp6dtVx73yAoPAo= =flK4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Differential storage
by Netocrat 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

What is/are the reason/s for storing the full text of page revisions in the database as opposed to some form of differential? Am I correct in assuming that speed has been given priority over storage space requirements, and if so, has any benchmarking been done to find out how much overhead would be added by storing revision as diffs and how much space would be saved? Also, has there been any discussion of the possibility of branching a page (as is possible in e.g. a CVS repository)? I haven't seen anything on either of these issues after a quick search through the list archives and some non-exhaustive reading of the main wiki, so pointers to anything I've missed are welcome. -- http://members.dodo.com.au/~netocrat

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RE: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikipedia API?
by Bass, Joshua L 14 Sep '05

14 Sep '05

Using 1.5, am trying to add a link to the sidebar defining a listing of All Pages from a particular namespace: http://www.350z-tech.com/zwiki?title=Special%3AAllpages&from=&namespace= 100 The link changes to: http://www.350z-tech.com/zwiki/--error:_link_target_missing-- How can I create this link in the sidebar?

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Wikipedia page protection report
by Erik Moeller 14 Sep '05

14 Sep '05

Today I decided to analyze in more detail to what extent articles across Wikipedias remain protected for long periods of time. The report is at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Longest_page_protections%2C_September_2005 (To developers: The script I used is 'logprot.pl' in my home directory. It may be desirable to make this available as a special page, if someone can figure out a way to make the query scale.) It shows all pages in all language Wikipedias that have been protected for more than 14 days. Note that, by the time you look at it, some of the pages in it may have been unprotected already. The Wikipedias with the most such protected pages are (article rank in parentheses): German - 253 (2) Japanese - 165 (4) English - 138 (1) Italian - 19 (5) French - 15 (3) Spanish - 13 (10) This confirms my intuition that long term page protection is used excessively on the German Wikipedia. It is quite striking that many, many controversial articles have been protected for months. For example, articles about veganism, sex, democracy, abortion, astrology, Karlheinz Deschner (famous atheist writer), Silvio Gesell (controversial economist) and his Freiwirtschaft theory, Gorleben (controversial nuclear waste disposal site), and Egon Krenz (East German politician) have been protected since July. Articles about child sexual abuse and pedophilia have been protected since April 2005 and March 2005, respectively. Notably, in the child sexual abuse case, the article was also cut down from 54,000 characters to 2,000 before being protected, making it effectively useless -- a rather drastic measure to deal with ongoing controversies. The longest protected articles appear to be related to German student corporations. The record holder is [[de:Schmiss]], which has been protected since January after a neutrality dispute. Perhaps ironically, even the article about Wikipedia itself has been protected since August 25. Note that the local policy on protection, at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Seitensperrung and http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administratoren , is not unusal and recommends only short protections except for very high exposure pages like the Main Page, or unimportant pages like redirects which are frequently vandalized. This raises the question why no bold admin has unprotected these articles yet. I cannot say anything about the protection patterns on the Japanese Wikipedia, which is the only one which stands out besides English and German. The long term protections on the English Wikipedia appear to be mostly accidental. When someone notices that a page has been protected for very long, it is generally quickly unprotected. Across languages, possibly with the exception of Japanese, the German Wikipedia is alone in the pattern of locking down controversial articles for months. Protected articles also seem to not be tagged as such, so that visitors do not see a reason for the protection on the page (a visible marker might also encourage sysops to unprotect the page). One immediate effect, besides stagnation, is that sysops become far more relevant in the power structure, as they are the only ones who can add information to articles after protection. Instead of being janitors, they become editors. This, I believe, must have social repercussions beyond the articles concerned. I can see three immediate ways to address the issue, by increasing complexity: * limit protections by policy * add an automated or template-based visible marker to protections in the article namespace * add an "expiry" feature for page protection similar to blocks I am merely reporting this issue and will leave it to others to deal with. Best, Erik

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia API?
by Edward Z. Yang 14 Sep '05

14 Sep '05

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 > I see I'm not the only crazy guy who uses PHP for a bot. Good to know > that. I'm currently developing a PHP bot for Wikipedia too (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ambush_Commander/LinkFix_dump ). > Anyway, try the Advanced HTTP Client > (http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/576.html). I use SimpleTest's simple browser for web browsing ( http://www.lastcraft.com/ ). No point in reinventing the Web retrieval wheel. - -- Edward Z. Yang Personal: edwardzyang(a)thewritingpot.com SN:Ambush Commander Website: http://www.thewritingpot.com/ GPGKey:0x869C48DA http://www.thewritingpot.com/gpgpubkey.asc 3FA8 E9A9 7385 B691 A6FC B3CB A933 BE7D 869C 48DA -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32) iD8DBQFDKKx7qTO+fYacSNoRAtUsAJ97vZK3X4+Q0Tv08+86i5Dlz79S1ACfTcov OHJ0oKYmiJTcdaDgyBW+dbc= =ldFu -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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create new articles from the search form
by Mulambo 14 Sep '05

14 Sep '05

Quick (or not so) question; I want to add a link to create a new article from the search page when there are no matches returned for the search, i've gone over and echoed what is stated in http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/Help:Searching#Create_new_articles_from_the_… but I get nothing on the search page after, anybody have any ideas? thanks!

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Request for the creation of a Neapolitan Wikipedia
by Arbeo M 14 Sep '05

14 Sep '05

Hi everybody! As most of you probably know there are quite a few requests for Wikipedias in new languages to be created. Many of them are still discussed controversially. Others are not but are unequivocally welcomed. Nevertheless, no new Wikipedias have been set up for about three months now and we might lose potential new contributors if we leave them on stand-by for too long. The most clear-cut case seems to be the Neapolitan Wikipedia. Matter of fact, a large number of Wikipedians are supporting the idea, noboby opposes it and several native speakers are willing to contribute and waiting to get under way. I know you guys are extremely busy. Could someone please find the time to take of this and install a new wiki for Neapolitan? I'd love to do this myself but unfortunatly can't. Details are here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Approved_requests_for_new_languages Regards, Arbeo ___________________________________________________________ Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - Jetzt mit 1GB Speicher kostenlos - Hier anmelden: http://mail.yahoo.de

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Differencing Engine
by Jakob Voss 14 Sep '05

14 Sep '05

Hi! Can anybody tell my what differencing algorithm MediaWiki uses? DifferenceEngine.php starts with "see diff.doc" - a file I cannot find. As far as I know it has been taken from phpwiki but is it still the same algorithm and what algorithm does phpwiki exactely use? I have not found any better references on differencing algorithms but the papers listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff#References. There seems to be some new research in differencing XML-files. Is MedaWiki's differencing algorithm based on E. Myers's algorithm (1986)? Thanks and greetings, Jakob

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Wikitech-l September 2005