Wikitech-l August 2010

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

123 participants
97 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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Un-commingling Libraries in MediaWiki
by Trevor Parscal 09 Sep '10

09 Sep '10

I have been working on the ResourceLoader branch, where I've ended up writing a CSSMin class which performs CSS minification, URI-remapping and data-URI in-lining. It got me thinking that this class would be pretty useful to non-MediaWiki projects too, but sadly we don't have a history of sharing in this way... * Software we've ported to PHP ourselves like our native-PHP CDB implementation or CSSJanus are buried in our code-base, and make use of a couple of trivial wf* global functions, making it somewhat inaccessible to third-party users. Which sucks because third-party users are important! They use the code in their own systems, make improvements and potentially pass them back to us, however if we don't make these things more general-purpose the code will more likely get taken from our repository, tweaked and never passed back; if we don't make it more easily accessible the code will never be found and we won't be taking advantage of the entire PHP development community. Sadness... * Software we've borrowed from other projects like JSMin are also buried within our MediaWiki-proprietary code, and while these libraries can operate independently of MediaWiki, we need to make it clear that they should be kept in sync with their original sources both, upstream and down. * Software we've created is often potentially useful to other projects, but unfortunately tied to and buried within MediaWiki. In some of these cases, the ties to MediaWiki are trivial and could be either optional or removed entirely, and the component could be factored out to a more general-purpose library, available for re-use. I don't have a very mature proposal for solving this completely, but as a first step, it seems like we should have a libraries folder which we can move things that can function in a stand-alone manner to. Initial candidates appear to be libraries that already function in a stand-alone way such as JSMin.php, CSSJanus.php, and CSSMin.php (in the resourceloader branch right now but will be coming to trunk soon). Additional software could be moved into this space after some un-tethering such as Cdb/Cdb_PHP, DjVuImage, etc. Overall, I think it would be great if we could take a look at this and other ways to better share our work with non-MediaWiki projects, and give back to the open-source community. I welcome your thoughts and input. - Trevor

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Transaction nesting and savepoints
by Platonides 06 Sep '10

06 Sep '10

There are some places in our code where we are nesting transactions. A code like: $dbw->begin(); $dbw->insert( 'image', ... ); $article->doEdit( $pageText, $comment, EDIT_NEW | EDIT_SUPPRESS_RC ); $dbw->query( "UPDATE $site_stats SET ss_images=ss_images+1" ); $dbw->commit(); Is apparently safely grouped into a transaction, but the UPDATE won't be in the same transaction as the insert, since Article::doEdit will itself open a transaction, breaking the old one. This is an unexpected result, and hard to realise, should the second transaction lie several calls down (or even inside a hook!). The transaction break, common to all our supported databases is not even consistent among them: * Mysql will commit the open transaction if you begin another one [1]. * Postgres will ignore the second begin (and issue a warning) if you are inside a transaction [2]. * In sqlite an attempt to invoke the BEGIN command within a transaction will fail with an error [3] (our driver forces a commit there, matching mysql behavior). * Oracle is not using a specific statement in our driver begin(). Calling begin() inside another transaction will be silently ignored (matches postgres). * Mssql only takes into account the outermost transaction [4] (matches postgres). * Ibm_db2 driver is changing the autocommit property like Oracle, thus matching postgres. I propose changing Database::begin() / commit() / rollback() to keep the count in mTrxLevel and perform a savepoint instead of a BEGIN should it be called inside another one. Savepoints are a way to perform partial rollbacks inside a bigger transaction. They are supported by all our databases [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]. We shouldn't even have problems with our 4.0.30 servers, since its support was added in mysql 4.0.14 [11]. 1-http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/implicit-commit.html 2-http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/sql-begin.html 3-http://sqlite.org/lang_transaction.html 4-http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188929.aspx 5-http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/savepoint.html 6-http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/sql-savepoint.html 7-http://sqlite.org/lang_savepoint.html 8-http://www.dba-oracle.com/t_savepoint.htm 9-http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms378414.aspx 10-http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v9/topic/com.ibm.db2.udb… 11-http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/savepoint.html

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latextwowki: latex to mediawiki translator
by asia Jędrzejewska-Szmek 01 Sep '10

01 Sep '10

I would like to announce latextwowiki -- a latex to mediawiki translator. It uses tralics to transform latex to xml. Latextwowiki is written in Python3.1 and uses lxml. Code is under GPL v.3 or later. The pre-alpha version can be downloaded from http://escher.fuw.edu.pl/git/latextwowiki. Features: * translates \ref{} to sections to proper mediawiki references in [[]] * various complicated latex equations work correctly * supports equation, figure, table references via Extension:CrossReference * latex bibliography support via Extension:Cite. Every comment, bug and hairy latex file to test will make me happy. Asia Jędrzejewska-Szmek

2 1

Testing server update
by mah＠everybody.org 31 Aug '10

31 Aug '10

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been working on getting the test server at http://ci.tesla.usability.wikimedia.org/ up and running on a regular basis. To do this, I've had to scale back the static code analysis for now, so the old style checks (which don't yet target the MW style, so may not be too useful), as well as other, more complicated static code analysis, may not be working when you look. In the mean time, I've put the configuration of the server under version control at http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/test-server/ Soon, I'll have the build server bootstrapping from the configuration in SVN so that anyone can help maintain it if they have commit access to that part of the tree. In the meantime, I've worked with MZMcBride to so that the codurr bot in #mediawiki announces whenever the tests (including the parser tests) break along with the possible culprits in terms of committers/commits. Since not everyone's IRC nick is the same as their commit ID (for example, “hexmode” is my IRC nick and “mah” is my commit ID), there is an attempt to use the USERINFO files to translate from commit ID to IRC nick. To take advantage of this, update your USERINFO file. See http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/USERINFO/mah for an example. Finally, as a preview, this week I'm starting to integrate the Selenium tests into the PHPUnit run. Mark. -- http://hexmode.com/ Embrace Ignorance. Just don't get too attached.

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Wikitech-l August 2010