Wikitech-l March 2010

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

102 participants
74 discussions

Uploads on small wikis
by Erik Moeller 04 Apr '10

04 Apr '10

Hello all, together with Frank Schulenburg and Naoko Komura, I just participated in a video-conference with the winners of the Google Kiswahili Wikipedia challenge ( http://www.google.com/events/kiswahili-wiki/ ), and we talked about some of the challenges they encountered when contributing to the Swahili Wikipedia. One of the issues was that it was very hard for them to upload files. Specifically, when you're a new user on a small wiki like sw.wp, you _cannot upload_ locally due to a restriction of uploads to autoconfirmed users. The upload link isn't even visible in the sidebar until you're autoconfirmed, and you get a confusing error message if you happen to call up Special:Upload. >From a user experience standpoint, this is horrible. For the immediate future, I suggest lifting this restriction for wikis between 1,000 and 50,000 articles in size (large enough to have a few active users, small enough to not yet have lots of policy around these issues). Ultimately we'll want to integrate Commons better into the user experience, but until then, IMO we should eliminate artificial impediments like this which prevent people from growing their communities and frustrate them -- unless there's a proven issue of large scale abuse. Does that make sense? Thanks, Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Lots of proxy errors on secure server
by George Herbert 31 Mar '10

31 Mar '10

FYI - I am seeing a lot (10-20% of queries) on secure.wikimedia.org return proxy errors, since the recent outage. I had been hoping it would just go away, but the rate is still high... --- Proxy Error The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server. The proxy server could not handle the request GET /wikipedia/en/wiki/User_talk:Foobar. Reason: Error reading from remote server Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) mod_fastcgi/2.4.6 PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.7wm1 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.8g Server at secure.wikimedia.org Port 443 --- -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

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Re: [Wikitech-l] WMF decommissions servers
by Karun Dambiec 30 Mar '10

30 Mar '10

Are these the servers that wikipedia no longer require due to the increasing number of deletions being made recently? As of today, I will no longer be contributing to MediaWiki through bugfixes. The reason for this being that: the amount new content is decreasing, and the amount of articles being deleted is increasing. Even recently I noticed that there is proposals for deletions on Wikipedia of article about the Australian National University and its colleges, as apparently they are not notable enough and all should be merged into one article. Regards Karun > > On Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:00 -0300, "Mike.lifeguard" > <mike.lifeguard(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > > Hash: SHA1 > > > > Hello, > > > > I wanted to let folks know that WMF is decommissioning some 35 servers, > > and is willing to accept requests from users interested in using them > > for Wikimedia-related purposes. If you can ship a server from Tampa to > > where you are, and if you can put it to good use, please see > > http://tinyurl.com/r3xhp7 and send your request in. > > > > Many thanks to the tech team (in particular RobH - looks like he's > > handling most or all of this) for reaching out to community members > > first. I'm sure we can find happy homes for lots of this hardware, which > > will help community members be productive in helping achieve Wikimedia's > > mission. > > > > - -Mike > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > > Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) > > > > iEYEARECAAYFAkqv1iAACgkQst0AR/DaKHtN8gCdEMaFLzmPRQQcz0f3d2vCajJI > > woIAn1PV0fN9uvoKoobFMmB/kt0LmxYJ > > =VrGB > > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Wikitech-l mailing list > > Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > > >

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Floating gadget box
by Alex Brollo 29 Mar '10

29 Mar '10

Please be patient for my question. We (into it.source) are faced with Vector skin, and all our beloved editing js gadgets are lost. My question is: is it technically possible to imagine a *js floating box as a container for buttons, menus and so on*? It would be great since customable buttons & menu are often unconfortable for their fixed location into the edit window. If it's impossible.... simply tell me "It's impossible". :-) -- Alex (User:Alex_brollo)

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OPEN POSITION: Move to Berlin, work on DBpedia (1 year full-time contract)
by Chris Bizer 29 Mar '10

29 Mar '10

Hi all, DBpedia [1] is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia knowledge [2]. DBpedia also plays a central role as an interlinking hub in the emerging Web of Data [3]. The DBpedia Team at Freie Universität Berlin [4] is looking for a developer/researcher who wants to contribute to the further development of the DBpedia information extraction framework, investigate approaches to annotate free-text with DBpedia URIs and participate in the various Linked Data efforts currently advanced by our team. Candidates should have + good programming skills in Java, in addition Scala and PHP are helpful. + a university degree preferably in computer science or information systems. Previous knowledge of Semantic Web Technologies (RDF, SPARQL, Linked Data) and experience with information extraction and/or named entity recognition techniques are a plus. Contract start date: 15 May 2010 Duration: 1 year Salary: around 40.000 Euro/year (German BAT IIa) You will be part of an innovative and cordial team and enjoy flexible work hours. After the year, chances are high that you will be able to choose between longer-term positions at Freie Universität Berlin and at neofonie. Please contact me via email (chris(a)bizer.de) until 15 April 2010 for additional details and include information about your skills and experience. The whole DBpedia team is very thankful to Neofonie GmbH for contributing to the development of the DBpedia project by financing this position. Neofonie is a Berlin-based company offering leading technologies in the area of Web search, social media and mobile applications (http://www.neofonie.de/). Cheers, Chris [1] http://dbpedia.org/ [2] http://wiki.dbpedia.org/FacetedSearch [3] http://esw.w3.org/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData [4] http://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/en/institute/pwo/bizer/ -- Prof. Dr. Christian Bizer Web-based Systems Group Freie Universität Berlin +49 30 838 55509 http://www.bizer.de chris(a)bizer.de

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Review of content before publishing
by Makelesi Kora-Gonelevu 29 Mar '10

29 Mar '10

Hi i have a list of people that i would like to allow to edit my wiki pages but i want to review them before they are published. Is there a way that i can be notified that this page has been updated and is waiting for my approval before being published? Similar to moderating a list i suppose. Thanks.

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28 Mar '10

Hi I've edited the footer for the Monobook skin but the "contact us" link is still not showing. Any ideas? Thanks.

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secure problems again this morning
by William Allen Simpson 28 Mar '10

28 Mar '10

Proxy Error The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server. The proxy server could not handle the request GET /wikipedia/en/w/index.php. Reason: Error reading from remote server Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) mod_fastcgi/2.4.6 PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.7wm1 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.8g Server at secure.wikimedia.org Port 443

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hiphop progress?
by Ryan Bies 26 Mar '10

26 Mar '10

Hello all. For those of you who have tried to get mediawiki running under hiphop, I've run into a block. After applying the patches from Domas and converting a few e-flagged preg_replace functions to preg_replace_callback, I have it running successfully, hitting the database as many times as it needs to, invoking no errors, and generally being very fast. I get a 200 response on my requests (very quickly), no errors raised, but no matter the request, the body is completely blank and the content-length header is 3. I suspect that the skin is not getting loaded properly, but as I'm not deeply familiar with the codebase I'm wondering if any of you can see anything obviously wrong. This happens on api requests and requests to the index after a 301 to MainPage. Thanks for your help! Ryan I have applied the following patch from Domas against svn rev 63062: http://stafford.wikimedia.org/current-patch.txt I replaced a couple e-flagged preg_replace functions with preg_replace_callback and did some type interference: http://projects.yaauie.com/hphp/mediawiki/hphp-yaauie.patch I'm using the following file list: http://projects.yaauie.com/hphp/mediawiki/hphp-files.list My environment variables are set by source-ing this file: http://projects.yaauie.com/hphp/mediawiki/hphp.env I'm compiling with the following string: $HPHP --input-list=files.list --force=1 --k 1 --log=3 --program=mediawiki I'm running the resulting application with the following string: sudo /tmp/hphp_abc123/mediawiki -m server -c hphp-runtime-config.hdf The config file I'm loading is: http://projects.yaauie.com/hphp/mediawiki/hphp-runtime-config.hdf

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ExternalAuth design
by Ryan Lane 26 Mar '10

26 Mar '10

I'd like to discuss the proposed change to the authentication plugin system (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ExternalAuth). As proposed, I don't see how I'll be able to keep most of the functionality in the LDAP extension. I don't disagree that policy and implementation shouldn't be mixed, but core shouldn't be making all policy decisions. For instance, there is an option in the LDAP extension ($wgLDAPDisableAutoCreate) that disables auto-creation, but still allows auto-authentication. Essentially, it says, if the user exists in LDAP, but not in the local directory, don't automatically create the local account. Some administrators want to create accounts for users in the wiki locally, even though they already have accounts in LDAP. Will getGroups() assign users to whatever groups the backend returns? The way I'm currently doing this is adding users to groups if they are available groups in the wiki (if they've been defined in $wgGroupPermissions). I don't use auto-promote at all. The LDAP plugin can add users to the LDAP database. Is this also going to support that? The LDAP plugin allows a user to authenticate with one username, but have the username created be something else. This is absolutely a must-have for auto-authentication, where a user might authenticate with Kerberos or an SSL certificate. If a user authenticates with an SSL certificate, their username may be something insane, like a numeric ID with special characters. The LDAP plugin would search the LDAP directory for another attribute that should be used for the username. Notice that you don't necessarily want to treat the auto-auth name as an ID either. You may pull both a new username, and a unique ID from the LDAP server; this is an especially likely scenario in a large organization, where a user may have a global unique ID, but in some places they may have a locally unique ID (think mergers). There are situations where newFromId( $id ) and getId() won't work. Active Directory (AD) is a case where it is unlikely to work for most people. By default AD does not allow anonymous searches. There are two ways to handle this: 1. Use a proxy agent (AD administrators *hate* this) 2. Bind as the user first In the second case, newFromId( $id ), and getId() will only work if authenticate( $password ) is called first. In fact, many things require the user to be authenticated before another action can happen. >From the LDAP server's perspective, MediaWiki *is* the user binding. A few things I'd really like to see fixed with any new system are: 1. Extensions being able to display error messages (bug 16524) 2. Ability to rename a local account when the external account is renamed 3. Local group name size increased in the schema (bug 11057) so that all external groups can be synced properly Respectfully, Ryan Lane

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Wikitech-l March 2010