Wikitech-l October 2011

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

117 participants
104 discussions

Brighton & Mumbai meetups this month
by Sumana Harihareswara 10 Nov '11

10 Nov '11

Just to remind you: * India hackathon (18–20 November, Mumbai, India) — Alolita Sharma, Siebrand Mazeland, Sumana Harihareswara and the local India team are preparing for this event, which will focus on language, mobile and offline support for MediaWiki content. You can register to request a free invitation; approximately 100-125 attendees are expected. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/India_Hackathon_2011 * Brighton hackathon (19–20 November, Brighton, England) — Free registration is open for the general MediaWiki hackathon planned by Lewis Cawte. You can register online. WMF engineers Antoine Musso, Roan Kattouw, and Sam Reed plan to attend. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Brighton_Hackathon_2011 -- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia lacks a "share' button
by bawolff 08 Nov '11

08 Nov '11

> "Carl (CBM)" <cbm.wikipedia at gmail.com> writes: > > > On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Mark A. Hershberger > > <mhershberger at wikimedia.org> wrote: > >> Posted this issue at <http://hexm.de/8m>. > > > > The above link is to : > > > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals%29#Does_Wi… > > As of this morning, I count 21 "support" and 25 "oppose". > > Part of the opposition was how I phrased it. Wikipedia obviously > doesn't "need" a share button. > > I also didn't make it clear that I didn't think we should or would use > any one else's "share" button since that would allow them to track their > users through Wikipedia. As a result, I didn't count the one opposition > that seemed primarily concerned with the tracking issue. > > Someone pointed to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TheDJ/Sharebox and > I tried it out, but it only worked after disabling the Firefox extension > that I use to stop trackers. I'm glad TheDJ has made this available for > those that want to use it, but I would like to get something else in > place that doesn't share data with any intermediaries (such as > AddThis.com) beyond the place that the user actually wants to share > the page. > > Mark. Making a share this link box is really trivial. There are several implementations on different wikis (I wrote one at enwikinews - http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Template:Social_bookmarks . Commons used to have one with stockphoto.js. Not sure if they still use it, several other wikis do their own thing) The issue has always been if people actually want it, which I believe is one of those discussions that comes up over and over again on enwikipedia. -bawolff

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other conferences in November - grow the MediaWiki dev community
by Sumana Harihareswara 01 Nov '11

01 Nov '11

Next month: Museum Computer Network http://www.mcn.edu/mcn-2011-atlanta 16-19 Nov, Atlanta. Wikimedians there will present about mobile, OpenStreetMap, Commons, uploading, and other museum-related issues. Wikimedian Lori Phillips will attend and would love for Wikimedia developers to come too, because outreach people who concentrate on relationships and content will need help discussing the tech side of MediaWiki-museum integration. Attendees will include "the tech and IT professionals in museums who can make these cross-platform integrations really work in their museums." More info at https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:HstryQT/MCN . Also happening next month -- if you're going, please see below: * https://festival.mozilla.org/ Mozilla Festival, 4-6 November, London (a few Wikimedians & MediaWiki developers are going) * http://openfest.org/english/ OpenFest, Nov 5-6, Bulgaria * http://www.t-dose.org/ Technical Dutch Open Source Event, Nov 5-6, Fontys University of Applied Science in Eindhoven * http://fscons.org/ Free Society Conference & Nordic Summit, Nov 11-13, Sweden * http://sc11.supercomputing.org/?pg=papers.html SC11 (high performance computing), Nov 12-18, Seattle * http://foswiki.org/Community/FoswikiCamp2011 Foswiki Camp, Nov 18-20, CERN If you are going to one of those and you'd like Wikimedia stickers or buttons to pass out, please let me know. And here's a leaflet you can print and give out to encourage people to contribute to MediaWiki: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:MediaWiki_flyer_20110725-1.pdf Editable version: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:MediaWiki_flyer_20110725-1.svg A longer list of things tech volunteers can do -- customize this & print it out to take with you: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Sumanah/TechVolunteersCanDo Also, if you'd like to teach a short "How to customize/hack MediaWiki" workshop at some event, look at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker/Workshop -- or ask RobLa for the lightning talk he gave at ZendCon. -- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: [Wikitech-l] For your enjoyment: Localisation team development showcase
by Brion Vibber 01 Nov '11

01 Nov '11

On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 11:47 AM, Siebrand Mazeland (WMF) < smazeland(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > Today the localisation team has had its first development showcase, > something we hope to repeat every two weeks. Outside of three of our > team members, one invitee was present (Robin Pepermans). A recording > of the WebEx session is available at > https://translatewiki.net/static/showcase/. Unfortunately it is not > very easy (better: extremely difficult) to convert this into an open > format, so you need a WebEx recording player to view it. > I've recorded it as a screencast and converted to Ogg Theora+Vorbis: http://leuksman.com/misc/temp-vids/Localisation-team-showcase.ogv (149mb) I was going to upload it to Commons or mediawiki.org, but it's over 100M so the web upload form won't work. We really need that fixed. :) -- brion

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ALAC is open source
by Magnus Manske 31 Oct '11

31 Oct '11

The Apple Lossless Audio Codec has been released under Apache license 2.0: http://alac.macosforge.org/trac/wiki Something to add to the Commons file format portfolio? Do we support FLAC already?

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Bugzilla Weekly Report
by reporter 31 Oct '11

31 Oct '11

MediaWiki Bugzilla Report for October 24, 2011 - October 31, 2011 Status changes this week Bugs NEW : 314 Bugs ASSIGNED : 11 Bugs REOPENED : 36 Bugs RESOLVED : 114 Total bugs still open: 6491 Resolutions for the week: Bugs marked FIXED : 81 Bugs marked REMIND : 0 Bugs marked INVALID : 7 Bugs marked DUPLICATE : 11 Bugs marked WONTFIX : 8 Bugs marked WORKSFORME : 8 Bugs marked LATER : 2 Bugs marked MOVED : 0 Specific Product/Component Resolutions & User Metrics New Bugs Per Component android 11 generic 11 Javascript 6 iphone 5 Internationalization 4 New Bugs Per Product MediaWiki 46 Wikimedia 15 MediaWiki extensions 22 Wikimedia Mobile 27 CiviCRM 1 Top 5 Bug Resolvers mah [AT] everybody.org 22 sam [AT] reedyboy.net 13 roan.kattouw [AT] gmail.com 10 aschulz4587 [AT] gmail.com 6 herman.wong [AT] nitobi.com 5

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Temporary password too short
by William Allen Simpson 31 Oct '11

31 Oct '11

I've been around a long time (2003) and have old accounts that I never use, usually explicitly setup to prevent folks from creating accounts with different capitalization for misleading user names in comments. After SUL, that case variance problem should be handled correctly. But those existing variants could still be re-activated. Many of these accounts have expired email, so I don't see any notices. Recently, one that has a current email sent me a notice that reads in relevant part: # Temporary password: YH2MnDD # # This temporary password will expire in 7 days. # You should log in and choose a new password now. If someone else made this # request, or if you have remembered your original password, and you no longer # wish to change it, you may ignore this message and continue using your old # password. # I use fairly long passwords with special characters (a 96 character set including space). This replacement password is much more easily guessed. The account could have been stolen within minutes or hours. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Password_strength (Merely 7 case insensitive alphanumeric characters is equivalent to only 40-bits of strength.) Please update the password generator to use at least 17 characters, with at least some punctuation! (Users reading the text might have trouble noticing blanks, so don't use the space character.) Of course, I know that various studies show that 12 to 15 characters using a 95 character set are probably enough. And that's fine for the user's choose. But this is an automatically generated replacement, emailed out in the clear. It should be something stronger!

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#parser parser function - does this make any sense?
by Daniel Werner 30 Oct '11

30 Oct '11

I am thinking about creating a very simple parser function #parse doing nothing but returning parameter 1 with an "'noparse' => false" option. Is there anything like this (or what could be abused for this) already or is there any reason why this might be a bad idea? The reason I want to have something like this is, I want to create a template (for template and parser function black-box tests) accepting something like {{((}}#somefunction:a{{!}}b{{!}}c{{))}} as parameter value, showing {{#somefunction|a|b|c}} as output and at the same time calling {{#parse: {{((}}#somefunction:a{{!}}b{{!}}c{{))}} }} so that besides the definition also the result can be shown by the template output. regards, Daniel

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declining Google Code-In
by Sumana Harihareswara 30 Oct '11

30 Oct '11

(What follows is MediaWiki community stuff, not technical discussion, offered in the interests of transparency and collaborative planning.) TL;DR version: I don't think we can do Google Code-In well, so I don't think we should apply to participate this year. Since MediaWiki has participated in the Google Summer of Code mentorship program, we have also received an offer to apply to participate in Google Code-In, which runs Nov. 21 2011-Jan. 16 2011. "Google Code-in is a contest for pre-university students (e.g., high school and secondary school students) with the aim of encouraging young people to participate in open source. We work with open source organizations, each of whom will provide a list of tasks to be completed by student contestants. Tasks can be anything a project needs help with, from bug fixes to writing documentation to user experience research." http://www.google-melange.com/gci/document/show/gci_program/google/gci2011/… https://code.google.com/p/google-code-in/wiki/GCIAdminMentorInformation I have now gotten more information about what it's like to participate in GCI, from organizations that have taken part in the past. And it sounds like we just do not have the community capacity to do GCI this year. * I can't take the time to develop the task lists or wrangle others to do so by the deadlines (applying by 1 November, creating big task lists by 21 November), due to other commitments (another volunteer development/mentoring program, India hackathon 18-19 November, mentoring existing new contributors). And I do not believe anyone else in the MediaWiki community has the capacity to administer our participation between now and mid-January, either. Tell me if I'm wrong! * We'd need enough mentors on call to review the teenagers' assignments as soon as they're submitted, so they aren't stuck waiting around before they can grab a new task. This is for the whole two-month period, including any winter holidays. Right now I do not think we can satisfactorily guarantee that. We all have too much other work that takes priority. So: it's a cool idea, but I don't think we can do it well in the given time period, so I'm turning it down. (Unless you want to run it, and can guarantee some mentors' attention! In which case, tell me ASAP so we can get an application in by 1 November.) BUT: the number of participants we're getting in our Coding Challenge (thanks, Greg!) means that if we want to do something like this *ourselves* next year, on our timeline, we could probably get some pretty good participation rates -- especially if we partner with Wikimedia Foundation's Global Education Program. So let's come back to this idea, perhaps sometime in the spring. -- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia lacks a "share' button
by John Du Hart 30 Oct '11

30 Oct '11

Why. Why does an encyclopedia need a share button? I can see the purpose on Commons, but for an article? I just don't see the justification. What do you really need to share with your friends from an reference source. What does a button do that copypaste can't? There's also the technical problems this would incur. Each of these buttons require yet another HTTP request each, which would make the hard work by RL team moot. It just doesn't make sense. On Oct 20, 2011 11:54 PM, <jidanni(a)jidanni.org> wrote: Gentlemen, where is the Share button? All other sites have them by now, but on Wikipedia one cannot even find its definition in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share . At least on ones account preferences there should be a way to "activate sharing with the following websites ... " causing a share button to appear in the navigation menu. If there is an extension, then wikipedia should install it and not depend on browser plugins, etc. OK, I made https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31853 _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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Wikitech-l October 2011