Wikitech-l January 2007

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

136 participants
215 discussions

64 bit processor - 32 bit mode OS
by Travis Derouin 04 Jan '07

04 Jan '07

Hi, What mode are the Wikipedia OSs running on for the 64 bit machines? Is it 32 or 64 bit mode? We have some 64 bit processors but our hosting provider recommends we run the OS in 32-bit mode unless we require a huge amount of memory - which we don't. Are we missing out on anything by doing this? Thanks. Travis

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Migration to a new mailing list server
by Mark Bergsma 04 Jan '07

04 Jan '07

[BCC to all mailing list administrators] Dear list admins, Please read the following info carefully. Currently we are in the process of setting up a new mailing list server for all Wikimedia mailing lists. The migration of all lists to the new server is scheduled for Saturday January 6th, around 10:00 UTC. This will unfortunately cause some downtime for at least the mailing lists and possibly the rest of the mail system around that time, and will bring some (user) noticeable changes, which is why I am writing to you. We have decided to split off the mailing lists from the rest of the mail system, and put them on a separate hostname/domain, lists.wikimedia.org. This means that the Mailman web interface will be accessible through http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/... and that all mailing lists will use e.g. wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org instead of @wikimedia.org. Old addresses will continue to work however; all mail sent to the current @wikimedia.org addresses will be forwarded to the new address. Newly created mailing lists will *not* get @wikimedia.org aliases though. The old web interface at http://mail.wikimedia.org will redirect to the new server. The old static page at http://mail.wikimedia.org/index.html will disappear; instead http://lists.wikimedia.org/ will redirect to http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/overview on meta, where it can be maintained by the community instead of just us system administrators. This also means that the current practice of naming mailing lists with a "-l" suffix, e.g. foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org, is no longer strictly necessary. We will however not rename the existing mailinglists (other than the domain change), as this is likely to bring confusion. Newly created mailing lists are free to use a name with or without that suffix. One problem with the hostname/domain change is that many user's mail filters might break. The Reply-To, List-Id, etc. mail headers will be changed to reflect the new domain, which might cause them to not be recognized by user mail filters, breaking their mail sorting or other inconveniences. Therefore, if you deem it necessary for your mailing list, I hope you will notify your members of this upcoming change, which will take effect on Saturday. Even though the old addresses will continue to work, I hope you will encourage everyone to start using the new @lists.wikimedia.org addresses for better stability and faster delivery. The new setup will of course bring a few improvements. First of all, we hope it will be more stable than the current system is, as it appears that Mailman is currently the major cause for downtime of our weak, overloaded mail server. Furthermore, it will be possible to create mailing lists without system administrator intervention, by using a Mailman web interface and a mailing list creator's password. (It is yet to be determined who will get this password.) Also, no mail aliases will need to be set up for new mailing lists, the mailing list will automatically and immediately work under the @lists.wikimedia.org domain once created in the web interface. And, the new setup will utilize some spam filtering, although this will likely need some fine tuning. More details on that will follow. If you have any questions or comments, please send them to me directly. Thanks, -- Mark Bergsma <mark(a)wikimedia.org> System & Network Administrator, Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: [Wikitech-l] [Bug 8476] make it more obvious that edit failed
by Dan Jacobson 04 Jan '07

04 Jan '07

b> robchur says b> It's bright, bold red. If your users need something blinking and b> pink, then customise the system message yourself; that's what the b> MediaWiki namespace is for. Ah ha, you are probably depending on class='previewnote'. Well I'll have you know that it is not every user who download the complete set of pages and images that accompanies every article. Also depending on color violates the very basics of Accessibility 101. Therefore please test that it grabs the users attention even when seen with $ w3m -dump The warning was only 2 1/2 lines out of 232 for the page in question. Maybe toss in some lines of ASCII "****" Or maybe have each rendered line prefixed with a ! or something, all throughout the article... Something to make the whole first screen look different at least. OK, over and out.

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Move page showing double redirects
by Steve Bennett 04 Jan '07

04 Jan '07

Hi, Would it be possible to improve the post-move page text to actually show the double redirects, rather than just asking the mover to check for them? In particular, could it show *just* the double redirects, and not all the other links? It's not very obvious, particularly to the novice, which of the following links are "bad": Rank of hands (poker) (redirect page) * Draw poker * Poker * Poker/Hands (redirect page) o Talk:Poker * Bug (poker) * Ace-to-six low (redirect page) o Draw poker o Stud poker o Five-card stud * Deuce-to-seven low (redirect page) o Draw poker o Kansas City o List of poker terms o Deuce o Jennifer Harman o Dewey Tomko o Billy Baxter (poker player) A trimmed-down display like the following would be much more helpful: * Poker/Hands (linked 1 time) * Ace-to-six low (linked 3 times) * Deuce-to-seven low (linked 7 times) Or if we really want to go the whole hog, could the move page just fix the double redirects automatically? Or maybe at least add them to some list that a bot is constantly monitoring? Steve

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What are the strategies to defense DDOS or crazy robots for wikipedia?
by howard chen 03 Jan '07

03 Jan '07

Hello, Can share something abt in these area? Thanks.

7 9

Category Intersections Again
by Aerik Sylvan 03 Jan '07

03 Jan '07

I'm still working on this. I've got a test index running on a shared hosting server, and the performance seems to be noticeably different than on my local machine that had nothing better to do, but some other factors changed as well, so that may not be a totally fair assessment. I've got two versions, in one, I'm storing the categories in a text field, and in the other a varchar(255) - obviously some get chopped off in the varchar field. There are noticeable difference in some queries but not others. I'm hypothesizing that this is due to smaller datasets, but my tests so far aren't confirming it. I also seem to be experiencing a lot of noise in my result times from it being on a shared hosting server. Anyway, the scripts are at http://aerik.com/wikintersections.php (text field) and http://aerik.com/wikintersections2.php (varchar field, truncated category list) It takes the text in the input box and drops it in a boolean fulltext search of the categories. I know it's an ugly/nonexistent UI and so forth, but I wanted to invite any interested parties to test and brainstorm with me. Thanks, Aerik

1 0

Parsing top 10 "wanted pages" onto front page.
by Emanuel Nordrum 03 Jan '07

03 Jan '07

I'm just getting aquainted with MediaWiki, so I appologize if I'm making a silly question, but: How can I automate posting the top 10 entries from Special:Wantedpages in a table on my main page? You can have a look at http://www.hackwurld.com/gwwiki to see what I have in place right now. I'd like the same thing, but with the (12 links) entry and automated so that I don't have to update the front page to keep it up to date. Thanks, Emanuel -- "The best journalism is the first draft of history." - John Pilger http://www.xanga.com/legba

3 2

Ladin (lld) wikipedia; addendum
by Claudi Meneghin 03 Jan '07

03 Jan '07

Hi all, happy new year to everybody! I asked a bit ago the creation of Ladin wikipedia, with domain lld.wikipedia.org; I would like to add to this request (if I don't ask too much) the issue of enabling the 'special:import' feature from the very beginning. This would help so much this small (and endangered) language. Thank you! Best regards, Claudi __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? En finir avec le spam? Yahoo! Mail vous offre la meilleure protection possible contre les messages non sollicités http://mail.yahoo.fr Yahoo! Mail

1 0

Linking Internally to Categories
by Joe Sparks 02 Jan '07

02 Jan '07

Hello, Quick question. I have searched many pages for this answer but have not found a working solution. How do I link to a section of the Category list? I have tried: [[Category:Testing]] [[{{localurl:Category:Testing}}]] [[Category:Testing?year=2007]] [[Special:Categories:Testing]] [[Categories:Testing]] I am trying to add a link from one page to a section of the Category list. Is that possible? I noticed on the main MediaWiki page there is a link to the extensions category, but that is an external link. I could do an external link, but would prefer all internal ones. Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks! Joe

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Re: [Wikitech-l] [WikiEN-l] Not so broken after all, perhaps
by David Gerard 02 Jan '07

02 Jan '07

On 01/01/07, Luna <lunasantin(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I suppose we could use {{CURRENTSECOND}} to transclude 1 of 60 > sub-templates, which in turn contain something around 200 #ifexist: > statements to transclude the various AfD sub-pages. It'd be a lot of work to > set up, but it's simpler than it sounds. AfD logs would look something like > this... Run it past the devs so they don't want to kill anyone for trying this. (AFD has been problematic in the past. The old VFD, which included seven days' deletion discussions in one huge multi-megabyte HTML page, was not only a major pain in the backside for the users, it caused server performance problems all by itself. Leading to the present situation where it's broken up by days.) I wonder if it's possible to implement the Towers of Hanoi in template code. Or Emacs. Or a wiki bot. - d.

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Wikitech-l January 2007