Wikitech-l July 2009

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

104 participants
110 discussions

secure slower and slower
by William Allen Simpson 20 Jul '09

20 Jul '09

I've been using secure for login for months now, and at first it seemed pretty good, other than the inability to switch sites easily. (And always editing links from secure.wikimedia.org/.../w to en.wikipedia.org/w, but I've gotten used to doing that extra bit by hand.) Anyway, it's just been a dog lately. During EDT daylight hours, it often gives an error not able to access page, especially saving. So, I've reverted to the old practice from the dog days of 2005-06, and mostly edit in very off hours. Yet it slowed down drastically again! The logs show a problem some hours ago. But nothing recent. Are there too many secure users? I've found no way to see the status.

11 27

Convert XML to HTML?
by Chengbin Zheng 19 Jul '09

19 Jul '09

Since the static HTML Wikipedia is not updating (please update), and XML updates like everyday, the logical choice is to go with XML. Is there any way to convert XML to HTML, like the static HTML version? I need it in HTML, and I don't want a one year old version of Wikipedia, with all the useless information on user talk, discussions, etc. Thank you.

2 2

Formatting links according to the wikiproject
by Helder Geovane Gomes de Lima 18 Jul '09

18 Jul '09

Hi! Is there any way of customize the formatting of links according to the wikiproject that they are pointing to? For example, if at Wikibooks we want to make the links to Wikipedia to be green and the links to the Wiktionary to have and dotted grey underline (or if some user wants to have a complete rainbow of colors and effects in his links ;-)), or each of these links have an small icon corresponding to the project, how could this be achieved? Is there any css classes for the links? Thanks, Helder

3 5

Downloading dumps: Connection closed at byte 4100096.
by Luis Zarrabeitia 18 Jul '09

18 Jul '09

$ wget http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xm… After a while, I get: 2009-07-17 21:17:28 (0.00 B/s) - Connection closed at byte 4100096. Giving up. I try again, and I get the same error (again). I've tried downloading it from various locations (france, cuba, finland), and the connection always closes at byte 4100096. Is there anything wrong? -- Luis Zarrabeitia (aka Kyrie) Fac. de Matemática y Computación, UH. http://profesores.matcom.uh.cu/~kyrie

2 1

Gender and age balance
by Lars Aronsson 18 Jul '09

18 Jul '09

Today I was able to make a graph of the biographies in the Swedish Wikipedia, showing how male and female biographies are distributed by decade of birth, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LA2-gender-age.png Among living people (born 1920 or later, secion A), there are 1 woman to 3 men. The gender inequality ratio peaks at 1:13 among people born 1800-1849 (section B). The Swedish Wikipedia contains articles about 16,987 women and 70,318 men, together making up 27 percent of all articles in the Swedish Wikipedia. Knowing this is the result of a long and hard group effort in categorizing all biographies, that started a year ago. Samples in older printed encyclopedias indicate that Wikipedia, with an overall ratio of 1 female to 4 male biographies, as inequal as that might seem, could be the most gender equal Swedish encyclopedia to date. And we're the first to keep count. ---- A year ago, I was intrigued by the various parody illustration of Wikipedia's content as a bookshelf, such as http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Size_of_English_Wikipedia_broken_dow… The embarrasing fact is that we don't know what an accurate diagram would look like. We know how many articles there are in total, but not what percentage is about geographic places, people, historic events, popular culture, or abstract scientific concepts. So one year ago I started to categorize all biographies in the Swedish Wikipedia as either "men" or "women". This is something the German Wikipedia had already done. With the help of some friends and a modified pywikipediabot script, it took 18 weeks and was completed at the end of December 2008. We had found 80,150 biographies or 26.6 percent of all articles. Of these, 15,500 were women (5.1%) and 64.650 were men (21.4%) for a ratio of 1 woman to 4 men. The German Wikipedia had (and still has) 1:6. That was 26.6 % of all articles. I suspect another big section of the bookshelf is articles about geographic places. I have not yet started to identify them systematically. That should probably be done by assigning geographic coordinates. During the first half of 2009, another 7000 biographies have been added to the Swedish Wikipedia (280 each week). This remains 27% of all articles and the ratio of women:men also remains constant. Already before, we had categories for years of birth and death, but nobody had tried to cover all biographies. After all 80,150 biographies were categorized by gender, only 80% of them were categorized by birth year. This has since increased to 91%. It turns out that people born 1920 or later, i.e. mostly living people, are 1 women to 3 men, and quite evenly distributed over the decades, from 4,195 born in the 1920s to 8,439 in the 1970s. As one goes back into the 19th century, the total number of biographies declines (2,122 born in the 1870s, 1,494 in the 1840s) and at the same time the gender inequality steadily increases, to peak at 1:13 among people born 1800-1849. For people born in the 18th century, the ratio is "only" 1:8. The great inequality in older times could be the result of good coverage of scientists and members of parliament (all men), and less coverage of artists and writers (many women active in this time). -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

1 0

CentralNotice
by Robert Rohde 17 Jul '09

17 Jul '09

CentralNotice was disabled on all sites except Meta on the 11th as part of the fight with ms1. Is there a likely timeline for when that will be restored? -Robert Rohde

4 3

Downloadable fonts
by Amir E. Aharoni 17 Jul '09

17 Jul '09

Hi, I am proofreading Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar [1] on the English Wikisource. It uses intricate formatting and for proper display of Biblical Hebrew it needs a font which isn't installed on most people's computers. Fortunately, this font, called Ezra SIL SR, is Free Software, released under the Open Font License.[2] Some modern browsers, such as Firefox 3.5 are able to render downloadable fonts in a way that is consistent with draft CSS 3 standard. Would it be possible to upload such a free font to Wikimedia servers and let people who use modern browsers, but don't have the font on their computer, enjoy the book with proper fonts without bothering with installing new fonts? Thanks in advance. [1] ( http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Gesenius%27_Hebrew_Grammar_%281910_Kaut…) [2] ( http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=silhebrunic2 ) -- Amir Elisha Aharoni http://aharoni.wordpress.com "We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

8 19

wmf-deployment branch
by Brion Vibber 17 Jul '09

17 Jul '09

Since we seem to routinely have our deployment linger a bit behind trunk but still need to make updates on it, I've gone ahead and created a branch with out live versions of MediaWiki & extensions on it: http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/branches/wmf-deployment Misc coders: please don't commit to it or we break you. :) With Subversion 1.5 or later on the client, merging updates from trunk should be easier, as SVN now saves merge info into properties and can more intelligently figure out where you last left off. For instance to update the UsabilityInitiative extension to the current version from trunk: cd extensions/UsabilityInitiative svn merge \ svn+ssh://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/UsabilityIni… svn commit The theoretical workflow is: * Merge updates that need to go live into branches/wmf-deployment * Test it locally & on staging server (once we've got a nicer staging area set up) * Update deployment master: svn up * Poke live test on test.wikipedia.org * Deploy updates to all servers: scap For the moment I've applied the various 'svn up' and manually merged live patches from our live deployment, with the exception of any _manually added_ files. There's a lot of cruft and I'm not sure yet which of the extra files are ancient one-offs and which we really need. :) We'll want to test a fresh checkout on test.wikipedia for a bit before syncing live to all wikis. -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)

6 9

database schema error
by dan nessett 17 Jul '09

17 Jul '09

I tried to run parserTests on the latest version in Trunk (r53382). However, I get the following error: A database error has occurred Query: SELECT lc_value FROM `mw_l10n_cache` WHERE lc_lang = 'en' AND lc_key = 'deps' LIMIT 1 Function: LCStore_DB::get Error: 1146 Table 'wikidb.mw_l10n_cache' doesn't exist (localhost) Since I can run the tests on 1.16a (r52088), this suggests there is a database schema change contemplated between 1.16a and REL1_16. Is this correct? If so, how do I update my database to conform to the new schema?

2 3

Corrupt images
by Steve Bennett 17 Jul '09

17 Jul '09

I understand there was some issue with image generation, but I'm still seeing a corrupt image in the main box here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echuca,_Victoria The actual image itself is ok: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Echuca_docks_Stevage.jpg Is there a hack to get the image regenerated? Steve

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Wikitech-l July 2009