Wikitech-l October 2011

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

117 participants
104 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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ResourceLoader and IE's stylesheet limits
by Daniel Barrett 09 Feb '12

09 Feb '12

This is a question about an infrastructural detail of ResourceLoader and how it interacts with Internet Explorer. (It's my first post to wikitech-l, so apologies if it's the wrong forum.) Our MediaWiki 1.17.0 site recently installed a bunch of extensions that use ResourceLoader, such as Extension:WikiEditor. To our surprise, some of our site's unrelated CSS styles stopped working. This was happening only in Internet Explorer. After some detective work, we discovered the problem is Internet Explorer's limit of 31 stylesheets: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/262161 With so many extensions calling $wgOut->addModule [PHP} and mw.loader.load [JavaScript], the limit of 31 stylesheets is exceeded quickly. I removed a few mw.loader.load calls - it didn't matter which ones - and the problem went away. Obviously this is an IE problem, not MediaWiki's, but it's going to cause issues on MediaWiki sites. WikiEditor itself loads about 10 stylesheets, for example, taking the site ~30% of the way toward a CSS failure. So my questions are: 1. Is there a workaround for sites like mine, with many stylesheets from separate extensions loaded by ResourceLoader? 2. Should ResourceLoader address this IE problem? Maybe start combining stylesheets (with @import) automatically? Thanks, DanB

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About to commit improved DB2 database support
by Leons Petrazickis 21 Dec '11

21 Dec '11

I've been informally mentoring André, Tiago, Diego, and César. They are four students at Minho University who are currently working on a project to improve DB2 database support in MediaWiki. So far, they've: - Fixed several outstanding issues with DB2 support involving character encoding, Windows vs Linux, etc - Added DB2 support to the new MediaWiki 1.17 Installer and Updater - Put in the appropriate Updater sql patches to reflect database schema changes since 1.14 MediaWiki already had some DB2 support, but it's been broken since 1.15 and never complete. As a result of their work, it's now possible to successfully install MediaWiki on DB2 out of the box and to use the core wiki features. I'll shortly commit their first patch using my SVN account (leonsp). I've taken some care to look over the code and make sure it abides by the MediaWiki code guidelines. Regards, Leons Petrazickis http://lpetr.org/blog/

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A program to simultaneously upload images to two websites (Wikimedia Commons being one)
by James Heilman 30 Nov '11

30 Nov '11

I have been in discussion with two institutions (the University of British Columbia and a military hospital in the USA) who are interested in collaborating with Wikipedia. One of the proposed ideas is to create a program that would simultaneously upload images deemed suitable to both Wikimedia Commons and the other Wiki in question. Are there any programmers interested in taking on this project? -- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian

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RFC: Should we drop the rendering preferences for math?
by Brion Vibber 29 Nov '11

29 Nov '11

Bug 24207 requests switching the math rendering preference default from its current setting (which usually produces a nice PNG and occasionally produces some kinda ugly HTML) to the "always render PNG" setting. I'd actually propose dropping the rendering options entirely... * "HTML if simple" and "if possible" produce *horrible* ugly output that nobody likes, so people use hacks to force PNG rendering. Why not just render to PNG? * "MathML" mode is even *MORE* limited than "HTML if simple", making it entirely useless. * nobody even knows what "Recommended for modern browsers" means, but it seems to be somewhere in that "occasionally crappy HTML, usually PNG" continuum. So we're left with only two sane choices: * Always render PNG * Leave it as TeX (for text browsers) Text browsers will show the alt text on the images, which is... the TeX code. So even this isn't actually needed for its stated purpose. (Hi Jidanni! :) lynx should show the tex source when using the PNG mode.) It's conceivable that a few folks really honestly prefer to see the latex source in their graphical browsers (should at least do a quick stat check to see if anybody uses it on purpose), but I wouldn't mind removing that either. Fancier rendering like MathJax etc should be considered as a separate thing (and implemented a bit differently to avoid parser cache fragmentation!), so don't let future mode concerns worry y'all. Any thoughts on whether this makes sense to do for 1.18 or 1.19? https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24207#c9 -- brion

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Adding MD5 / SHA1 column to revision table (discussing r94289)
by Diederik van Liere 28 Nov '11

28 Nov '11

Hi! I am starting this thread because Brion's revision r94289 reverted r94289 [0] stating "core schema change with no discussion" [1]. Bugs 21860 [2] and 25312 [3] advocate for the inclusion of a hash column (either md5 or sha1) in the revision table. The primary use case of this column will be to assist detecting reverts. I don't think that data integrity is the primary reason for adding this column. The huge advantage of having such a column is that it will not be longer necessary to analyze full dumps to detect reverts, instead you can look for reverts in the stub dump file by looking for the same hash within a single page. The fact that there is a theoretical chance of a collision is not very important IMHO, it would just mean that in very rare cases in our research we would flag an edit being reverted while it's not. The two bug reports contain quite long discussions and this feature has also been discussed internally quite extensively but oddly enough it hasn't happened yet on the mailinglist. So let's have a discussion! [0] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/94289 [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/94541 [2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21860 [3] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25312 Best, Diederik

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page view stats redux
by Ariel T. Glenn 16 Nov '11

16 Nov '11

I think we finally have a complete copy from December 2007 through August 2011 of the pageview stats scrounged from various sources, now available on our dumps server. See http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-raw/ Ariel

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Making developer access easier to get
by Yaron Koren 16 Nov '11

16 Nov '11

Hi, I think developer accounts on the Wikimedia SVN repository should be easier to get. I say this because a consultant of ours at WikiWorks, Ike Hecht, asked for a developer account last week and was rejected. He created his first major MediaWiki extension, Ad Manager, recently, which I added to the repository a few weeks ago - you can see it here: http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/AdManager/ When he requested access, this was the relevant part of the response from Sumana: "Right now, we are not approving your request for commit access. I'm sorry. We'd like for you to get more practice writing code for MediaWiki, submit patches for review via Bugzilla attachments, and ask us for comments... Please come back and request access again in a few months." I don't know whether this is WMF policy now, or a personal decision from Sumana, or a decision made by someone else, but in any case I don't understand it. It seems to me that there are two valid reasons for not simply allowing everyone to get a developer account: the first, and major, reason is to prevent malicious users from vandalizing or deleting code. The second is to prevent well-intentioned but incompetent developers from checking in buggy and/or badly-written code that requires lots of fixes and review time by the reviewers. In both cases, the person's presence in SVN would cause more harm than good. Neither of those cases apply here - the Ad Manager code was well-written, and it works. If you're curious, you can see for yourself the kinds of fixes and changes that were made to the code after it was checked in - all minor stuff, the only major thing being that the extension originally included support for MediaWiki 1.15, which people thought was unnecessary. Clearly a higher bar is being applied here than what's spelled out in the mediawiki.org documentation - which only says that "we don't have time to train programmers from scratch": http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Commit_access#Prerequisites Note, by the way, that if there's a more stringent policy in place now, it's not being applied consistently, because the students in this year's Google Summer of Code got developer access after much less proof of programming ability. It seems to me that if someone writes an extension that basically matches the MediaWiki guidelines, works, and does something useful, they should pretty much be granted automatic access to an account, because they will have proved that their presence will be a net positive overall. Any thoughts on this? And out of curiosity - is there a new policy in place? -Yaron -- WikiWorks · MediaWiki Consulting · http://wikiworks.com

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Native HTTPS support live on all projects
by Ryan Lane 15 Nov '11

15 Nov '11

I'm happy to announce we've added native HTTPS support to all of the projects. See the blog post for more information: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/10/03/native-https-support-enabled-for-all-w… If you find any bugs, please report in bugzilla. - Ryan Lane

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Search completion
by Lars Aronsson 14 Nov '11

14 Nov '11

In the search box, I get suggestions on the fly as I type, and I'm often impressed by the good suggestions. However, right now at Wiktionary I get suggestions that aren't the best ones for the given prefix. For example, at en.wiktionary.org if I type "lagru" it doesn't suggest"lagrum", but instead a bunch of inflected and derived forms: lagrumshänvisning lagrums lagrumshänvisnings lagrummets lagrummen lagrummet lagrumshänvisningars lagrumshänvisningar lagrumshänvisningarnas lagrumshänvisningarna Since these are Swedish entries in the English Wiktionary, none of these pages get much traffic. Are the completion suggestions based on traffic stats? In this case, link count might be a better predictor for best suggestion, since all derived forms link back to the basic form. Not much traffic: 5 page views in 30 days, http://stats.grok.se/en.d/latest/lagrum -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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Wikitech-l October 2011