Wikitech-l December 2010

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

95 participants
60 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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User-Agent:
by Domas Mituzas 17 Apr '25

17 Apr '25

Hi! from now on specific per-bot/per-software/per-client User-Agent header is mandatory for contacting Wikimedia sites. Domas

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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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Missing Section Headings
by Marc Riddell 13 Sep '24

13 Sep '24

Hello, I have been a WP editor since 2006. I hope you can help me. For some reason I no longer have Section Heading titles showing in the Articles. This is true of all Headings including the one that carries the Article subject's name. When there is a Table of Contents, it appears fine and, when I click on a particular Section, it goes to that Section, but all that is there is a straight line separating the Sections. There is also no button to edit a Section. If I edit the page and remove the "== ==" markers from the Section Titles, the Title then shows up, but not as a Section Heading. Also, I don't have any Date separators on my Want List. This started 2 days ago. Any thoughts? Thanks, Marc Riddell [[User:Michael David]]

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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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Deprecating content_actions
by Daniel Friesen 31 Jan '11

31 Jan '11

Right now in the skins system (if you consider vector part of the skins system) we have two parallel methods of adding tabs to the page: - Into content_actions via SkinTemplateTabs, SkinTemplateBuildContentActionUrlsAfterSpecialPage, and SkinTemplateContentActions, - Into vector's navigation_urls via SkinTemplateNavigation (the missing two hooks should be added) The only important difference between these (besides some vector specific stuff that can stay in vector) is that content_actions is a flat array, and navigation_urls is an array of arrays organized into categories. Besides that, they are basically mirrors of each other with the same functional purpose, but you need to add tabs to both of them to avoid something not showing up in vector. There's also the misfortune that other skins can't take advantage of the organized navigation_urls because the actual implementation (which is basically a reimplementation of buildContentActionUrls with code duplication) without being a vector subskin because the code in question is inside of vector. Right now we have extensions using both methods of adding tabs to the page, code duplication on their part. And a few extensions that are broken in vector because they haven't added the hooks. Doing a quick grep, it appears the following extensions are missing vector support: Oversight, CommentPages, Todo, WikiTrust, Tasks, CategoryTree, DeleteQueue, Wikidata, Imagetabs, purgetab, Tab0, AuthorProtect, TidyTab, Purge, SpecialTalk Shouldn't be to hard to fix, especially if we fix the bug of missing hooks for navigation_urls. Now onto my focal point. As I've been improving the skin system trying to pull out the thorns that make building skins troublesome and mesh in new features and helpers which are missing, I'd like to remove the content_actions hooks and deprecate content_actions in 1.18 and start using navigation_urls style data everywhere. Since content_actions and navigation_urls are the same, content_actions can be built by having SkinTemplate take the navigation_urls data and flatten it into a single array. Similarly to how I already have $wgFooterIcons work and fold it for some skins like Monobook which don't organize it the way vector does. The effects will be like this: - The three content_actions related hooks will no longer work in 1.18, thus extensions that haven't started supporting vector tabs will also stop showing tabs in other skins - In their place extensions will use 3 navigation_urls related hooks (most extensions are already using the one hook available) - Extension code for those already using both forms of hooks will stay the same, the only difference being that 1.18 will use the navigation_urls related hooks and the content_actions related ones will become redundant code which the extensions can keep for back compat but drop once they stop supporting pre-1.18 installations - All standard skins will be using navigation_url based data and content_actions will be available but deprecated - 3rd party skins will still function using content_actions but it would be preferred for them to be updated to use the new BaseTemplate and use the helpers in there (a navigation_urls related one would be added) once they don't need to support pre-1.18 - SkinTemplatePreventOtherActiveTabs will probably still work, though I may want to find a cleaner method to transition to (ie: one that says "this is the active tab" rather than "don't make other tabs active"). Any comments, rejections? -- ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]

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Christmas server failure report
by Platonides 12 Jan '11

12 Jan '11

Earlier today, /a filled with binlogs in db27, which was s3 & s7 master. nagios had warned too early / nobody noticed. Slaves lagged, lots of locks, the wikis got to a halt. Revisions between 6:50 and 8:20 pm UTC were lost (although they can be manually reimported from db27). The new s3 and s7 master is db17, with only one slave: db25. After the master switch, we started having problems due to cached revision text in memcached, due to the duplication of old_id values, so we made them read-only until UTC midnight. We decided not to disable $wgRevisionCacheExpiry but to remove the faulty entries, thus I quickly prepared the script maintenance/purgeStaleMemcachedText.php to clean them. There were problems in hewiki, since data there didn't clean. On one instance doing $wgMemc->get persisted even after a $wgMemc->delete on that same key (???). Other than the hewiki issues, it seemed to run fine. There will be lots of wrong entries in diff and parser cache needing a manual action=purge but a purge will clean them. Flagged revs caches were not touched. Wikis using it may show the wrong content (with the additional fun of some users viewing the right one). There are also PPFrame_DOM->expand errors that started around the same time, even on wikis on a different cluster. They usually only happen once, and it succeeds just reloading. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26429

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dataset1, xml dumps
by Ariel T. Glenn 11 Jan '11

11 Jan '11

For folks who have not been following the saga on http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Dataset1 we were able to get the raid array back in service last night on the XML data dumps server, and we are now busily copying data off of it to another host. There's about 11T of dumps to copy over; once that's done we will start serving these dumps read-only to the public again. Because the state of the server hardware is still uncertain, we don't want to do anything that might put the data at risk until that copy has been made. The replacement server is on order and we are watching that closely. We have also been working on deploying a server to run one round of dumps in the interrim. Thanks for your patience (which is a way of saying, I know you are all out of patience, as am I, but hang on just a little longer). Ariel

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Big problem to solve: good WYSIWYG on WMF wikis
by David Gerard 10 Jan '11

10 Jan '11

[crossposted to foundation-l and wikitech-l] "There has to be a vision though, of something better. Maybe something that is an actual wiki, quick and easy, rather than the template coding hell Wikipedia's turned into." - something Fred Bauder just said on wikien-l. Our current markup is one of our biggest barriers to participation. AIUI, edit rates are about half what they were in 2005, even as our fame has gone from "popular" through "famous" to "part of the structure of the world." I submit that this is not a good or healthy thing in any way and needs fixing. People who can handle wikitext really just do not understand how offputting the computer guacamole is to people who can cope with text they can see. We know this is a problem; WYSIWYG that works is something that's been wanted here forever. There are various hideous technical nightmares in its way, that make this a big and hairy problem, of the sort where the hair has hair. However, I submit that it's important enough we need to attack it with actual resources anyway. This is just one data point, where a Canadian government office got *EIGHT TIMES* the participation in their intranet wiki by putting in a (heavily locally patched) copy of FCKeditor: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2010-May/034062.html "I have to disagree with you given my experience. In one government department where MediaWiki was installed we saw the active user base spike from about 1000 users to about 8000 users within a month of having enabled FCKeditor. FCKeditor definitely has it's warts, but it very closely matches the experience non-technical people have gotten used to while using Word or WordPerfect. Leveraging skills people already have cuts down on training costs and allows them to be productive almost immediately." http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2010-May/034071.html "Since a plethora of intelligent people with no desire to learn WikiCode can now add content, the quality of posts has been in line with the adoption of wiki use by these people. Thus one would say it has gone up. "In the beginning there were some hard core users that learned WikiCode, for the most part they have indicated that when the WYSIWYG fails, they are able to switch to WikiCode mode to address the problem. This usually occurs with complex table nesting which is something that few of the users do anyways. Most document layouts are kept simple. Additionally, we have a multilingual english/french wiki. As a result the browser spell-check is insufficient for the most part (not to mention it has issues with WikiCode). To address this a second spellcheck button was added to the interface so that both english and french spellcheck could be available within the same interface (via aspell backend)." So, the payoffs could be ridiculously huge: eight times the number of smart and knowledgeable people even being able to *fix typos* on material they care about. Here are some problems. (Off the top of my head; please do add more, all you can think of.) - The problem: * Fidelity with the existing body of wikitext. No conversion flag day. The current body exploits every possible edge case in the regular expression guacamole we call a "parser". Tim said a few years ago that any solution has to account for the existing body of text. * Two-way fidelity. Those who know wikitext will demand to keep it and will bitterly resist any attempt to take it away from them. * FCKeditor (now CKeditor) in MediaWiki is all but unmaintained. * There is no specification for wikitext. Well, there almost is - compiled as C, it runs a bit slower than the existing PHP compiler. But it's a start! http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitext-l/2010-August/000318.html - Attempting to solve it: * The best brains around Wikipedia, MediaWiki and WMF have dashed their foreheads against this problem for at least the past five years and have got *nowhere*. Tim has a whole section in the SVN repository for "new parser attempts". Sheer brilliance isn't going to solve this one. * Tim doesn't scale. Most of our other technical people don't scale. *We have no resources and still run on almost nothing*. ($14m might sound like enough money to run a popular website, but for comparison, I work as a sysadmin at a tiny, tiny publishing company with more money and staff just in our department than that to do *almost nothing* compared to what WMF achieves. WMF is an INCREDIBLY efficient organisation.) - Other attempts: * Starting from a clear field makes it ridiculously easy. The government example quoted above is one. Wikia wrote a good WYSIWYG that works really nicely on new wikis (I'm speaking here as an experienced wikitext user who happily fixes random typos on Wikia). Of course, I noted that we can't start from a clear field - we have an existing body of wikitext. So, specification of the problem: * We need good WYSIWYG. The government example suggests that a simple word-processor-like interface would be enough to give tremendous results. * It needs two-way fidelity with almost all existing wikitext. * We can't throw away existing wikitext, much as we'd love to. * It's going to cost money in programming the WYSIWYG. * It's going to cost money in rationalising existing wikitext so that the most unfeasible formations can be shunted off to legacy for chewing on. * It's going to cost money in usability testing and so on. * It's going to cost money for all sorts of things I haven't even thought of yet. This is a problem that would pay off hugely to solve, and that will take actual money thrown at it. How would you attack this problem, given actual resources for grunt work? - d.

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Does anybody have the 20080726 dump version?
by Monica shu 04 Jan '11

04 Jan '11

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Wikitech-l December 2010