Wikitech-l November 2011

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

127 participants
144 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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Please preload a space in the page for the banner
by David Gerard 15 Mar '12

15 Mar '12

A Wikipedia page loads. The last thing to load is the banner. This pushes the page content down. If you've clicked on a link near the top of the page, the banner grabs it instead. This happened last year and it was reported then (and it was incredibly annoying then too). It also fouls up stats on banner effectiveness, as banners are clicked on without intention to do so. Please load the page with a space for the banner to avoid this effect. - d.

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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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VIPS test
by Tim Starling 03 Jan '12

03 Jan '12

A test page for the new VIPS image scaler is now available: https://test2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:VipsTest You can give it names of images from Commons and it will show a comparison with a moving divider, with the thumbnail from ImageMagick on the left, and the one from VIPS on the right. I'll explain what you would expect to see when using this tool: For JPEG images, using a sharpening radius of 0.8 will make the VIPS result roughly match the ImageMagick result, as long as the thumbnail is reduced to less than 85% of the original width. With not enough sharpening, the resulting image looks blurry. With too much sharpening, contrast in fine detail will be unrealistically enhanced and high-contrast borders will develop "halos". Above about 50% reduction factor, the block average introduces artifacts in fine detail, so enabling the "bilinear" option will look better, and will more closely match ImageMagick. But if the bilinear option is used with a reduction factor much smaller than that, severe artifacts will be seen in areas of contrasting fine detail. At small reduction factors, the main difference between ImageMagick and VIPS is that VIPS uses a simple block average whereas ImageMagick uses a more complex windowing function. This leads to minor differences in fine detail. What we're looking for out of this test is: * Confirmation that VIPS is not completely failing fpr some class of images. * Suggestions for parameter values (sharpening, bilinear) for various source and destination sizes. VipsScaler allows these parameters to be configured depending on source size and reduction factor. -- Tim Starling

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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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Quick Mumbai hackathon followup
by Sumana Harihareswara 06 Dec '11

06 Dec '11

Earlier this month, Wikimedia staff and volunteers got together in Mumbai, India to work on mobile, offline, and internationalisation/localisation. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/India_Hackathon_2011 Photos are up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Victorgrigas#Hackathon_Mumbai_2011 Some notes on our outcomes, which included many new localisations for Kiwix and new input methods for MediaWiki, readying Narayam for Wikimedia Incubator, a prototype onscreen keyboard built in Narayam, Wikimedia Mobile ready for translation, new UI prototypes for language selection, and more: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/India_Hackathon_2011/Schedule_notes#Day_1_ou… And I haven't even touched on mobile! An update specifically on mobile progress at the hackathon: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mobile-l/2011-November/005200.html -- Summary from Phil Chang: > In summary, over one weekend more than 50 volunteers from many parts of > India added their hard work and insights to the technical foundation of > Wikipedia. In the mobile area alone, volunteers contributed to 17 features, > as listed here (features that were worked on are marked with an "H"): > > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Projects/features#India_Hackathon > > We also got support and input from most of the major mobile operators in > India about how to make our user experience better. Free access to > Wikipedia is moving forward on a number of fronts, as we identified several > forms of collaboration, not just in the form of Wikipedia Zero. For > example, there seems to be widespread interest in using an RSS feed of the > Article of the Day, and the top 5 languages in India are important. I'm asking Emmanuel to send an offline-related summary to https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/offline-l . And I'm predicting the localization folks will have a summary in their next showcase; watch https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n . This was the largest Wikimedia tech outreach event I've been a part of, with 80 or so new folks learning and becoming contributors. Thanks to the Wikimedia staffers who came, for -- as Alolita put it -- "leading project teams to do some nice development, UI design, testing and accomplishing a lot in a short blip of time." Thanks to the local community and chapter for putting on Wiki Conference India, which happened at the same time: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011 Sorry to be brief; more details are at the links provided. I know that the i18n team also led a translation sprint and an intro to MediaWiki hacking in Pune after the Mumbai hackathon, but I'll leave it to them in case they want to report about that. -- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation

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MathJax integration to stock MediaWiki Math extension? (was RFC: math options)
by Brion Vibber 06 Dec '11

06 Dec '11

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com> wrote: > On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 3:05 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote: > >> Brion Vibber wrote: >> > [snip my notes about removing the non-PNG non-source options, wanting > higher-resolution renderings] > >> Did you have a chance to evaluate MathJax? <http://www.mathjax.org/> I >> know >> it's come up in past math discussions and that a lot of math folks think >> it >> looks promising. A technical analysis of its feasibility on Wikimedia >> wikis >> would be great. Killing the less-used, ancient math options is great, but >> perhaps adding one wouldn't be too bad to do too. :-) >> > > That's an excellent thing to bring up -- MathJAX *does* look very > promising, and things seem to render pretty nicely. Need to make sure that > we can either do that type of rendering cleanly with the PNG fallback > (older browsers will still need the PNGs, so it may still be worth spending > the time to fix baselines). > I've done a quick experimental mode commit: <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/104521> definitely promising in terms of things look nice. :) Total library size is pretty large but that includes a bunch of fallback images which will be rarely used; don't have a good sense of the 'weight' of including the library yet. It does load a bit slowly, but hopefully won't interfere much while it does so. The initial method I'm using is to output the latex source in a <script type="math/tex"> which MathJax recognizes, and then putting the image or text source form in a <noscript> next to it. Browsers with JS off or unavailable will use the fallback image/text silently, while those with script will get the pretty math inserted at runtime. This isn't perfect though, and for instance breaks on MobileFrontend because the <script> that actually _loads_ MathJax doesn't get loaded, and on top of that the fallback images are still in <noscript>. ;) Also, browsers that have script support but don't work with MathJax won't load images, so this is insufficient. Most compatible thing is probably to let it include the images/text form as-is, then make sure MathJax goes over and replaces them in-place. It might need tweaks to understand the images (source in alt text). I'm hoping to get some feedback and advice from folks who have worked with MathJax previously; I'll whip up some detail notes as an RFC page in a bit. -- brion

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Who actually reads @wikimediatech ?
by Guillaume Paumier 06 Dec '11

06 Dec '11

Hi all, We've had @wikimediatech accounts on twitter & identica for some time now: * http://identi.ca/wikimediatech * https://twitter.com/#!/wikimediatech that basically broadcast every single action that is logged to the server admin log: * http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Server_admin_log The account has 78 followers on identica and 430 on twitter (probably counting the spammers). I'm wondering if there are actually people reading all the stuff that's pushed through these channels. My gut feeling is that the few people reading these feeds are also those that would know to check the SLA if they encountered an issue, or know how to use the RSS feed of the SLA page if they really wanted the information in real time. Meanwhile, we don't really have social media channels dedicated to Wikimedia tech stuff, i.e. channels where we can actually post stuff, links, blog posts, outage info, etc and engage with a larger community of people interested in our tech operations. I feel that the accounts would be much more useful if we reduced the amount of semi-random information we post there. So, I'm basically proposing to repurpose the @wikimediatech accounts for this. Thoughts? Good idea? Bad idea? You don't care? -- Guillaume Paumier Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation http://donate.wikimedia.org

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Git migration and obfuscated e-mail addresses
by Daniel Friesen 02 Dec '11

02 Dec '11

Looking over our USERINFO files we have 82 (out of our 330) users who obfuscate their e-mail address. It's rather trivial to de-obfuscate them, and we will need to for the git migration. Have we considered asking these users if they would like a different e-mail address to be used for get when we migrate? -- ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]

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1.18 issues triage
by mhershberger＠wikimedia.org 01 Dec '11

01 Dec '11

What: 1.18 Triage When: Friday, Nov, 2130UTC Time zone conversion: http://hexm.de/ap Where: #wikimedia-dev on freenode Use http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=wikimedia-dve if you don't have an IRC client With the recent release of 1.18, I want to hold a triage to see if there are enough issues to have a point release. This Friday, I'll be covering bugs listed on the tracking bug https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/32711 to determine the severity and number of issues. If you know of issues not listed on that bug that have shown up in your 1.18 installation, especially regressions in MediaWiki behavior, please add them. Hope to see you at the triage! Mark.

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Wikitech-l November 2011