Hi everyone,
Let me introduce myself first. I’m Dev, one of the selected Google Summer of
Code 2011 participants for Wikimedia Foundation. I’m will be working on
Semantic MediaWiki[1], and my project involves trying to make
Special:Ask[2][3] more intuitive for the general user. I’m writing this
email so that you can share your views, comments and insights regarding what
we are hoping to build.
Currently, Special:Ask is targeted towards the power-user to build complex
queries and to get the results in a preferred format, such as RSS feeds or
JSON. Which is brilliant, _if_ you know what you are doing.
For others, who are trying to find a quick answer to a question (“How many
cities are there in Bolivia?”), Special:Ask is tricky to figure out. Queries
which are malformed will give you all results, and the interface allows you
to output data into conflicting formats (try getting a BIBTEX export of all
places in Germany, and SMW will oblige).
These features make the power user happy, while the newbie and dare I say
the average user will be left poring through documentation to figure out how
to get results. The first 5 minutes of their life with Special:Ask is not
pleasant. My intention is to make things easier for them.
One of the ways many others have attacked the problem is by building
extensions for SMW which make it easier to find data or build queries, such
as Halo, Drilldown and Exhibit. These products do a great job, but they have
common aspects (which people at the dev-list were kind to point out) that
could be abstracted out. In short, if we could separate (i) a powerful
result printer and (ii)a clean usable interface, from Special:Ask, then in
the future one could build an awesome query builder/a new result printer/a
data-explorer by writing less code.
My hope is to be able to:
(i) separate these two use cases, and
(ii) bring in more usability to the Special:Ask interface such as a
(a) better auto-complete (which scales with large number of properties, and
helps in writing the query)
(b) more helpful hints for the new user.
Please email me your thoughts about this project. Some of you already know
me a bit (thanks Jeroen, Markus and Neill for your encouraging emails!), and
I look forward to meeting more of you guys.
~Dev Ayon
[1]www. semantic-mediawiki.org/
[2] http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Ask
[3]
http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/SemanticMediaWi…
Passing on an issue from IRC -- there's some talk of updating the core
jQuery copy from 1.5.2 to the recently-released 1.6.1, which among other
things fixes a bug mdale was encountering with certain JSON loads with
$.ajax() being evaluated in the incorrect way.
Krinkle & mdale are doing some quick testing with 1.6.1 to make sure it
doesn't seem to break anything, but please feel free to test & check your
own code!
Full release notes:
http://blog.jquery.com/2011/05/12/jquery-1-6-1-released/
A few specific things to watch out for:
* .attr() and .prop() have been split apart; some .attr() things may behave
different now
* .attr() behavior for boolean properties has changed
* .data() now pulls in HTML 5 data attributes automatically; make sure
there's no conflict?
* animations have changed a bit, which could conceivably affect things using
it
-- brion
WMF has started a process for fully automating the Monthly Report Card
generation process. Sources are generated automatically right now, yet the
Report Card itself is a mixture of scripting and manual processing, with a
large spreadsheet as intermediary between csv files and charts. More on this
on http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Wikistats/API
Your feedback is very welcome. Please use the talk page of that article, to
keep discussions centered at one place.
Erik Zachte
Hi
My name is ankit garg. I have been selected as one of the students for
google summer of code,2011 representing mediaWiki. I will be working on a
new extension "Semantic Schemas" under the guidance of Mr. Yaron Koren. I am
very excited to work on this project and hopeful that this project will be a
real help in the MW community .
*Short *summary*:* Semantic
Schemas<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_Schemas>a proposed
extension , that would let users and admins define everything
about the wiki's data structure via XML contained within wiki pages. That
XML in turn would be used to generate all the other relevant pages:
templates, properties, forms, etc. And the XML would be editable via a
helper form, so that ideally users would never have to do direct XML
editing. Also, the XML could theoretically be imported from, and exported
to, other data-structure formats, like OWL and UML.
I have already made some small contributions to SMW which are listed below.
== Some contributions to MediaWiki=========
1) Extension UrlGetParams :
The extension didn't have support for array parameters, like if you have
"?a[b]=c", there was no way to display "c" on the page. Modified the
extension to accept array parameters now . now u can write
{{#urlget:a[key]|default-
value))
2)Extension:ReplaceText
(
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:Replace_Text#Regex_.28big_wish…)
added regular expression support for the extension . Now a user can type
regular expression for both search and replace patterns.
for eg. a(.*)b" into "search string" and "ab$1" into "replacement string",
and then each instance of "acb" would change into "abc".
3)Calender format in Semantic Result Formats
calendar' format, which lets users display dates in a calendar. Some
people wanted to be able to change the first day of the week to something
other than Sunday I added a fix for supporting any day as the first day in
the calender view.
Looking forward to interact with you guys ..
--
Ankit Garg
Student @ SKIT
Thank you Benjamin!
But I tried this solution before and got more error information.
Any other suggestion?
Thanks a lot,
MS
Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 04:07:31 -0400
From: Benjamin Lees<emufarmers(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] help: error with Extension:Runphp
To: Wikimedia developers<wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:<BANLkTim_wnfewCKH4GKXFwNai_JiTAuYvw(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
In the line
function parsePHP( $input, $argv,&$parser ) { return runphpExecCode(
$input, $argv ); }
Change&$parser to $parser
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 12:28:11 +0800
> From: ms20080623<ms20080623(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] help: error with Extension:Runphp
> To: wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Message-ID:<4DD9E25B.1020506(a)gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Hi All,
>
> I am trying to use the Extension:Runphp, but I got the following error
> message:
>
> Warning: Parameter 3 to parsePHP() expected to be a reference, value
> given in
> C:\xampp\htdocs\mywork\mediawiki-1.16.1\includes\parser\Parser.php on
> line 3333
>
> Other information:
>
> Version: mediawiki-1.16.2
>
> Script:
>
> <runphp>
> <?php
> echo "Hello World!\n";
> ?>
> </runphp>
>
> What's wrong with the extenssion? Could you please give me some hints
> for solving this problem? Thanks a lot.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> MS
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 04:07:31 -0400
> From: Benjamin Lees<emufarmers(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] help: error with Extension:Runphp
> To: Wikimedia developers<wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:<BANLkTim_wnfewCKH4GKXFwNai_JiTAuYvw(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> In the line
> function parsePHP( $input, $argv,&$parser ) { return runphpExecCode(
> $input, $argv ); }
> Change&$parser to $parser
Hi All,
I am trying to use the Extension:Runphp, but I got the following error
message:
Warning: Parameter 3 to parsePHP() expected to be a reference, value
given in
C:\xampp\htdocs\mywork\mediawiki-1.16.1\includes\parser\Parser.php on
line 3333
Other information:
Version: mediawiki-1.16.2
Script:
<runphp>
<?php
echo "Hello World!\n";
?>
</runphp>
What's wrong with the extenssion? Could you please give me some hints
for solving this problem? Thanks a lot.
Best wishes,
MS
My script to show me the diffs,
svn diff -r BASE:HEAD RELEASE-NOTES|wdiff -d -3
I suppose will now have to be
for i in $(ls -r RELEASE-NOTES-*|sed 2q)
do
echo $i diff:
svn diff -r BASE:HEAD $i|wdiff -d -3
done
in order to not have to be rewritten each time a version number changes. Hmmm.
Hi,
I just posted the last post in our series on the Berlin hackathon on
the tech blog:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/05/16/developers-go-home-after-productive-be…
I'm particularly interested in hearing about how people here felt
about the communications around and during the event (whether they
attended in person or followed the event remotely): e.g. did you watch
and/or participate in the live video feed, live note-taking, IRCing,
tweeting, blogging, and did you find it useful.
Setting up the live video feed isn't easy, and taking notes in real
time is pretty time- and energy-consuming, but we can make efforts to
continue to do it in the future, if it's worth it. We'd just like to
know how useful it is.
Thanks!
--
Guillaume Paumier
Hoping the hackathon is still running, or folks can discuss.
Secure is pretty slow lately, day and night.... Sometimes, the revised
articles don't show up for the non-logged-in, but that's easy to fix
with &action=purge. I just have to remember to check after sessions.
But lately, and fairly consistently, as I've checked the history to
compare with Google's cache date (not logged-in), I've discovered an
old history seems to be served. "&action=history&action=purge" doesn't
fix it.
Yeah, I've flushed my own local browser cache. That's not it.
The only solution I've found is to log-in insecure, check the history,
and then log out. Then, the history is up-to-date for non-logged-in.
Why do we cache history?
Dear all,
The Wikimedia Foundation will be performing network maintenance on
Tuesday, May 24 between 13:00 and 14:00 (UTC) (see other timezones on
timeanddate.com: http://ur1.ca/49cl2 ).
During the maintenance period, you may experience intermittent
connection issues to Wikimedia Foundation websites, including
wikipedia.org.
We have been experiencing router networking issues (and as a direct
result, latency issues) since last week. After much investigation, and
temporary fixes, the Operations team decided to update the router
software and tune the configuration.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
--
Guillaume Paumier