Wikitech-l July 2010

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

80 participants
53 discussions

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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wikipedia is one of the slower sites on the web
by jidanni＠jidanni.org 27 Sep '10

27 Sep '10

Seems to me playing the role of the average dumb user, that en.wikipedia.org is one of the rather slow websites of the many websites I browse. No matter what browser, it takes more seconds from the time I click on a link to the time when the first bytes of the HTTP response start flowing back to me. Seems facebook is more zippy. Maybe Mediawiki is not "optimized".

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Showing bytes added/removed in each edit in "View history" and "User contributions"
by Jason Spiro 17 Sep '10

17 Sep '10

Hi all. "Recent changes" shows bytes added/removed in green/red. But "View history" only shows revision length in bytes, and "User contributions" shows no byte counts at all. I think it would be nice for both "View history"[1] and "User contributions" to show bytes added/removed. This would make it easier to distinguish between small contributions from big ones: between multiple-sentence additions and small typo fixes. What do you think? All the best, -Jason ^ [1]. You can already get bytes added/removed to history revisions using a gadget. Just add the following line to your vector.js: importScript('fr:MediaWiki:Gadget-HistoryNumDiff.js');

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serious questions about UsabilityInitiative going live
by Glanthor 17 Sep '10

17 Sep '10

Hi! I've read on the techblog that the new UI go live in April. I have some questions: 1) What version? Acai, babaco, citron? 2) How/where could a wiki customize the special character insert menu, and the inserted strings? And the embed file (picture) button inserts this: "[[Example.jpg]]", without any "File:" or "Image:"! 3) The search and replace button is available in firefox, but does not appear at all in opera. Why? 4) Currently the new navigable TOC does not work on FF/Opera at all (I've tried those). Not too early for live deployment? Regards, Akos Szabo (Glanthor Reviol)

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CellsExtension feasibility?
by James Bowery 10 Sep '10

10 Sep '10

If you install: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VariablesExtension#Installation Then edit the main page to contain the following (between the '---'): --- {{#vardefine:pi|3.14159265418}} {{#expr:{{#var:pi}}+1}} --- The main page should, when rendered, now, show the number 4.14159265418 What I would like is something very similar called "CellsExtension" which provides only the keyword "#cell" as in: --- {{#expr:{{#cell:pi}}+1}} --- However, it gets the value of "pi" from: http://somedomain.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=Pi Ideally, whenever a mediawiki rendered page is cached, dependency pointers are created from all pages from which cells fetched values during rendering of the page (implying the evaluation of #expr's. That way, when the mediawiki source for one of the cached pages is edited, not only is its cached rendering deleted, but so are all cached renderings that depend on it directly or indirectly. This is so that the next time those pages are accessed, they are rendered -- and cached -- again, freshly evaluating the formulas in the #expr's (which, of course, will contain #cell references such as {{#cell:pi}}).

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Storing data across requests
by Bryan Tong Minh 18 Aug '10

18 Aug '10

Hi, I have been working on getting asynchronous upload from url to work properly[1]. A problem that I encountered was that I need to store data across requests. Normally I would use $_SESSION, but this data should also be available to job runners, and $_SESSION isn't. As I see there are basically two ways to get a data store. The first is to store the objects in the DB using wfGetCache( CACHE_DB ); I'm not sure though whether it is meant to be used this way. Alternatively I could revive my staged-upload work. In this branch, all so called stashed uploads, uploads that require user intervention before they can be completed have their meta data stored in the database instead of in the session. That would be still quite a lot of work though. Or is there any other mechanism to be able to share data between the jobqueue and requests? Regards, Bryan [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/author/btongminh?offse…

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Architectural revisions to improve category sorting
by Aryeh Gregor 17 Aug '10

17 Aug '10

I'm going to begin working on the following bugs: * "Support collation by a certain locale (sorting order of characters)", https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164 (only parts related to category sorting) * "Subcategory paging is not separate from article or image paging", https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1211 * "CategoryTree is inefficient", https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23682 As well as possibly: * "Categories need to be structured by namespace", https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=450 * "Natural number sorting in category listings", https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6948 There are essentially two problems here: 1) We currently sort articles on category pages by the Unicode code point of their sort key. This is terrible for anything other than English, and dodgy sometimes even for English. (This is bugs 164 and 6948.) 2) We have no way to efficiently get all items that are in a category and also in a particular namespace. Particularly, we can't retrieve all subcategories without scanning all items in the category, which is inefficient when we have a few (or no) subcategories and tons of items. (This is bugs 1211, 23682, and 450.) One part of (2) needs to be clarified. The primary use-case is obviously that we want to be able to count subcategories efficiently, or display all of them when we only display some of the items in the category: this is bugs 1211 and 23682. Secondarily, we have a request at bug 450 to organize category pages by namespace, so main, Talk:, User:, etc. are all paginated separately. I think the goal for (2) should be to allow efficient separate retrieval of subcategories, files, and other pages, but not to distinguish between namespaces otherwise. The major motivation is that to do this efficiently, we'll need to add namespace info to the categorylinks table, and we want this to stay consistent with the info in the page table. Categories, files, and other types of pages cannot be moved to one another, as far as I know (it would hardly make sense), so it automatically stays consistent this way. This is a big plus, because there are inevitably bugs that cause denormalized data to fall out of sync (look at cat_pages). Furthermore, I don't think it's obvious that we want separate namespaces to display separately at all on category pages. What's a case where that would be desired? It would break up the display a lot, with a bunch of separate headers for different namespaces, when each namespace might only have a few items. Most categories whose sort appearance you'd care about (i.e., excepting maintenance categories) will have nearly everything in one namespace anyway. You could always split the category into separate ones per namespace if you want them separate. So I propose that we keep the current category/normal page/file split, and paginate those three parts of the page separately. So you'd have up to 200 subcategories, then below that up to 200 normal pages, then below that up to 200 files. (The numbers could be adjusted. Currently they're hardcoded, which is stupid.) Paginating subcategories separately is obviously needed. Paginating files separately is not really needed, but it would be much more consistent. The overall solution, then, would be: 1) Change the way category sortkeys are generated. Start them with a letter depending on namespace, like 'C' for category, 'P' for regular page, 'F' for file. After that first letter, append a sortkey generated by ICU or whatever. I think Tim has opinions on what would be a good choice to convert the article title into sort key -- if not, I'll have to research it and hopefully not come up with a completely incorrect answer. 2) On category pages, maintain three offsets and do three queries (or maybe UNION them together, doesn't matter), one for each of categories/regular pages/files. Because of (1), this will be efficient and will also sort less unreasonably for non-English languages. One problem that was pointed out somewhere in the massive useless discussion on bug 164 is that we'd have to do something to display the first letter for each section. Currently it's just the first letter of the sortkey, but if that's some binary string, that becomes a problem. I'm not seeing an obvious solution, since the sortkey-generation algorithm will be opaque to us. If it sorts Á the same as A, then how do we figure out that the "canonical" first letter for the section should be "A" and not "Á"? How do we even figure out where the sections begin or end? Would that even make sense in all cases? At a first pass, I'd say we should just skip the first letter and display all the items straight from beginning to end without section divisions. I don't think that's a big problem. This is just my initial thoughts. Feedback appreciated. If people agree with the general approach, I can start coding this up tomorrow.

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MediaWiki version statistics
by Tim Starling 08 Aug '10

08 Aug '10

Cross-posted to <http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/07/mediawiki-version-statistics/> Some kind people at Qualys have surveyed versions of open source web apps present on the web, including MediaWiki. Here is the relevant page from their presentation: http://wimg.co.uk/3jK.png For the original see: https://community.qualys.com/docs/DOC-1401 And the press release: <http://www.qualys.com/company/newsroom/newsreleases/usa/view/2010-07-28/> They make the point that 95% of MediaWiki installations have a "serious vulnerability", whereas only 4% of WordPress installations do. While WordPress's web-based upgrade utility certainly has a positive impact on security, I feel I should point out that what WordPress counts as a serious vulnerability does not align with MediaWiki's definition of the same term. For instance, if a web-based user could execute arbitrary PHP code on the server, compromising all data and user accounts, we would count that as the most serious sort of vulnerability, and we would do an immediate release to fix it. We're proud of the fact that we haven't had any such vulnerability in a stable release since 1.5.3 (December 2005). However in WordPress, they count this as a feature, and all administrators can do it. Similarly, WordPress avoids the difficult problem of sanitising HTML and CSS while preserving a rich feature set by simply allowing all authors to post raw HTML. If you are running MediaWiki in a CMS-like mode, with whitelist edit and account creation restricted, then I think it's fair to say that in terms of security, you're better off with MediaWiki 1.14.1 or later than you are with the latest version of WordPress. However, the statistics presented by Qualys show that an alarming number of people are running versions of MediaWiki older than 1.14.1, which was the most recent fix for an XSS vulnerability exploitable without special privileges. There is certainly room for us to do better. We have a new installer project in development, which we hope to release in 1.17. It includes a feature which encourages users to sign up for our release announcements mailing list. But maybe we need to do more. Should we take a leaf from WordPress's book, and nag administrators with a prominent notice when they are not using the latest version? Such a feature would require MediaWiki to "dial home", which is controversial in our developer community. -- Tim Starling

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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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Wikitech-l July 2010