Wikitech-l November 2009

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

64 participants
47 discussions

Database dumps
by Byrial Jensen 17 Apr '25

17 Apr '25

Until some weeks ago http://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html used to show 4 dumps in progress at the same time. That meant that new database dumps normally was available within about 3 weeks for all databases except for enwiki and maybe dewiki where the dump process due to size took longer time. However the 4 dumps processes at one time become 3 some weeks ago. And after massive failures at June 4, only one dump has been in progress at the same time. So at the current speed it will take several months to come thru all dumps. Is it possible to speed up the process again using several dump processes at the same time? Thank you, Byrial

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EBNF grammar project status?
by Steve Bennett 01 Apr '25

01 Apr '25

What's the status of the project to create a grammar for Wikitext in EBNF? There are two pages: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikitext_Metasyntax http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec Nothing seems to have happened since January this year. Also the comments on the latter page seem to indicate a lack of clear goal: is this just a fun project, is it to improve the existing parser, or is it to facilititate a new parser? It's obviously a lot of work, so it needs to be of clear benefit. Brion requested the grammar IIRC (and there's a comment to that effect at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7 ), so I'm wondering what became of it. Is there still a goal of replacing the parser? Or is there some alternative plan? Steve

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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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Backups
by Eugene 07 Nov '10

07 Nov '10

Hi everyone, Are there any updates regarding Wikipedia's backup systems? I've created a bug to track this at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18255. Cheers, Eugene

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implementing the Interlanguage extension
by Amir E. Aharoni 06 Aug '10

06 Aug '10

Sorry about bugging the list about it, but can anyone please explain the reason for not enabling the Interlanguage extension? See bug 15607 - https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15607 I believe that enabling it will be very beneficial for many projects and many people expressed their support of it. I am not saying that there are no reasons to not enable it; maybe there is a good reason, but i don't understand it. I also understand that there are many other unsolved bugs, but this one seems to have a ready and rather simple solution. I am only sending it to raise the problem. If you know the answer, you may comment at the bug page. Thanks in advance. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni heb: http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng: http://aharoni.wordpress.com cat: http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus: http://amire80.livejournal.com "We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

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New SVN committer
by Brion Vibber 05 Feb '10

05 Feb '10

Added Jan Gerber ('j'). Jan is the developer of Firefogg, and will be helping out with some of the open video player & sequencer work with Michael Dale that Kaltura's sponsoring. -- brion

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Re: [Wikitech-l] FW: [FOSDEM] News : Call For Developer Rooms
by Brion Vibber 15 Jan '10

15 Jan '10

On 10/26/09 10:05 AM, Siebrand Mazeland wrote: > P: I would like to try and make a proposal with other CMS projects (like > Joomla, Drupal, Typo3, Wordpress, etc.) for a dev room. Reason for not > applying for a "MediaWiki dev room' is that I expect that this will not be > honored because it has too tight a scope. I spoke to one of the people of the > program committee last year, and I was advised to find a broader scope. > Alternatively we could request a dev room with other wiki engines (tikiwiki, > docuwiki, etc.). Personally I have no preference on which projects we would > cooperate with, just as long as we will make a proposal that will get us the > best chance to have a presence at FOSDEM 2010. Open to suggestions... There's been some talk on trying to pair with OpenStreetMaps as well; has anybody attempted to contact any partner yet? -- brion

4 3

Production machine config
by William Pietri 10 Dec '09

10 Dec '09

Hi, all. The FlaggedRevs lab site mysteriously got better, which makes me nervous. To counteract that, I'd like to put together some basic smoke and load tests. My plan is to do that on Amazon's cloud infrastructure. A few questions: 1. Does anybody have an AMI (basically, a virtual machine config) that's already like WMF production servers? 2. If not, is there something like a Puppet config that I can use to help build the AMI? 3. What's the best way for me to find out details on production server configs? I see the info in Special:Version, but I'm wondering a) where to find those packages, and b) if there are other requirements (e.g., particular kernel versions, supporting software, etc)? Once I get the AMI working, I'll post details here so others can easily spin up pseudo-production boxes. William

5 8

Single-revision deletion expansion to administrators
by Andrew Garrett 30 Nov '09

30 Nov '09

There are a few bugs open on granting single-revision deletion rights to administrators on English (<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21165>) and German (<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19697>) Wikipedias, as well as all Wikimedia sites (<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18780>). I've had a few users ask me what's holding up implementation. I can see one bug blocking one of them (<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20186>), but other than that I'm not aware of any outstanding issues. I'm assuming that nobody really knows what's going on here, and that nobody is actively working on any of the bugs that supposedly block implementation. Does anybody know any more about what's going on with this? -- Andrew Garrett agarrett(a)wikimedia.org http://werdn.us/

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[MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background)
by Alexander Shulgin 30 Nov '09

30 Nov '09

Hello everyone, I'm totally new to this list, so please pardon me if it's the wrong place to discuss my idea and please point me to a more suitable list. Today, while reading my morning load of news I've come across a Wikipedia article[1] with some embedded LaTeX formulae, used within a table. The table header on that page has background of a distinct color which makes formula images look ugly. Sorry, the article is in Russian and I didn't find an English counterpart to demonstrate the issue, but by looking at the table you should get the idea. My first thought was "What if we could eliminate that white background in favor of alpha channel?" Then it will look equally well no matter what background it is put. As I have some experience with PNG images and alpha channel stuff, I've wrote this simple half-page program (attached) in C++ to transform any grayscale PNG image containing black-on-white text to image with alpha channel added, so it display nicely on any background (except black :). The program uses PNG++, a C++ wrapper library[2] around libpng. A mockup of what it'll look like if we replace currently used formula image in the table header, with an image transformed by my program is attached as well. I think that visual improvement is immediately obvious. Now, thanks for your patience if you read till here. :) I'd like to know if there any drawbacks[3] to the proposed approach? Was it by design that white background is preserved, if so why and can this be refined somehow? -- Regards, Alex [1] http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B5%D0%B9%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%… Note: scroll down one page to see the table [2] http://www.nongnu.org/pngpp/ [3] It needs to be tested with IE6, as it is well known for problems with transparent PNGs.

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Wikitech-l November 2009