Hi
Understanding how to contribute in MediaWiki is essential to new bees. Here
is the MediaWiki page : https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_contribute
I found very interesting thing for Mozilla :
http://www.whatcanidoformozilla.org/
This is very useful stuff with localised in many languages.
Can we do the same thing by converting our How to contribute page into some
interesting way and user friendly so that new contributors may find very
easy way to kick start.
Two ideas there
1. Create Extension
2. Separate Website (I guess Yuvi has already bought Domain
whatcanidoforwikimedia)
If this idea is good then it may become GSOC project.
Thanks
Harsh
--
Harsh Kothari
Intern at Google Summer of Code,
Wikimedia Foundation
Follow Me : harshkothari410 <https://twitter.com/harshkothari410/>
Hi Everyone
Firstly I, Shubham would like to introduce myself to the developers of this
commmunity. I am currently pursuing Computer Science and Engineering at IIT
Roorkee INDIA. I had got a good knowledge of the tools used for the
development of open source
software.
My skills include Programming languages: GNU C/C++, Java, Python,
Javascript,
Version control systems Git/Github and SVN. I am also aware with many of
the web
development application tools and content management systems. I am an
ambitious person willing to
learn other technologies when need in future.
I choose this organisation for the contribution as the work the community
does looks very appealing and interesting to me and useful for the whole
community. The
skills used by the organisation for the development of open source software
matches with my
skills to much extent.
I have ideas to improve and excel interest in lay people in Gene wiki* by
including the short interesting video based learning which takes the data
from Wikimedia and create a short video which helps the people to
understand easily. I need a help to work on this.*
In this approach I would like to implement mechanism in which long
paragraphs will be extracted from geneWiki and organized in a way that can
be shown as pictures or frame of pictures. Through this mechanism people
would be able to learn easily because pictures or videos are remembered
more easily.
Thanks
Shubham
> On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 3:38 PM, Steven Walling
<steven.walling(a)gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>> Even an *exceptionally* plain product like Gmail has a more specific
font family setting than Vector does at the moment.
>>
>>
>And in Gmail, "I" and "l" look identical in the font that they chose.
Often
>that doesn't matter, but sometimes it does and since they override it
it's
>not as simple as configuring a better font in the browser (or not having
to
>at all).
>
>And then there are the several ways they screw around with the normal
>browser behavior in these reply boxes that are usability issues for me: I
>can't Ctrl-PgUp or Ctrl-PgDn to switch tabs, I can't Shift-PgUp or
>Shift-PgDn to select large blocks of text, I have to always choose the
"Pop
>out reply" because the scrolling is screwed up in the inline reply and I
>can't actually see the entirety of the input field, etc.
>
>So saying "We're not as fancy as Gmail" doesn't sound like a very
>compelling argument to me.
While I have been following the conversation (or trying to) Brad's
comments about '1' versus 'l' hits a sore point for the Wikisources. As the
Wikisources are working often working with texts that have been OCR'd, the
easy visual ability to differentiate between similar looking characters is
very important.
To note that I know _not_ the difference between web fonts, which bits are
downloaded, uploaded or whatever, and while it is presumably quite
fascinating, it is the right output and outcomes that are pertinent for me,
and the community in which I am involved. Characters needs to be individual
and clear, and for there to be a diverse character set of characters
(roman/greek/...) are used in the printing industry, especially in the 19th
and early 20th century printing industry.
Regards, Billinghurst
MediaWiki Bugzilla Report for February 10, 2014 - February 17, 2014
Wikimedia Bugzilla report (FAILED), DB connection failure FAILED
DB connection failure
The latest Snowden docs have some great screenshots of the NSA-internal
MediaWiki installation Snowden is alleged to have obtained a lot of his
material from:
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/18/snowden-docs-reveal-c…
Looks like a static HTML dump, as a few of the external extension images
haven't loaded.
The last details on their technical infrastructure indicated that Snowden
used "web crawler" (love the quotes) software to obtain information from
their internal wiki:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/us/snowden-used-low-cost-tool-to-best-nsa…
What's not mentioned in the NYT piece is that their MediaWiki instance
likely didn't have any read-only ACLs set up, or if they did they were
buggy (are any of the third-party ACL extensions good?) -- which was
perhaps one reason why Snowden was able to access the entire site once he
had any access at all?
"If you actually need fancy read restrictions to keep some of your own
people from reading each others' writing, MediaWiki is not the right
software for you." -brion.
..like, if you're a nation-state's intelligence agency, or something :P
I think it's fascinating that this technical decision[1] by the MediaWiki
team long ago may have had such an impact on the world! And much more
fascinating that the NSA folks may not have read the docs.
-Philip
1.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Preventing_access#Restrict_viewing_of_…
I took a closer look at Linux Libertine for possible use as a webfont for
headers. Linux Libertine is a "classic" serif font that would match the
character of the site (i.e. it looks "encylopedic"). It has a wide
character coverage (over 2000 characters) and support for most ligatures.
It even has its own bug tracker (
http://sourceforge.net/p/linuxlibertine/bugs/). It's only shortcoming is
that it has an install base of pretty much no one.
Unfortunately, the WOFF file for the base font (not including bold, italic,
etc.) is 516K which is way too large to use as a webfont. I imagine this is
due to the font's character coverage. One option would be for us to fork
Linux Libertine, reduce the character coverage (for example, it's very rare
to need math and symbol glyphs in headers), and see if we can get it small
enough to try delivering as a webfont. This is probably not something we
could do immediately, but I think it's an idea worth looking at. Another
option would be seeing if we could convince some major Linux distros to
include it as a default font.
As far as it's aesthetic qualities (cover your ears, devs), it has been
positively reviewed by several design sites.[1] Apparently the font
designers put so much work into tweaking the kerning that it would cause
some older word processors to run out of kerning memory! You can see
samples of it here: http://www.linuxlibertine.org/index.php?id=86&L=1.
The
[1] See sidebar at http://www.linuxlibertine.org/index.php?id=2&L=1
Ryan Kaldari
On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 11:49 AM, May Tee-Galloway
<mgalloway(a)wikimedia.org>wrote:
> We've been testing out Open Sans on the apps team, it's an open source
> font. The goals with any font choice is high quality (legible, scannable,
> well-kerned, etc), has wide character set, and since every font has its own
> personality, we want the font choice to reflect us and our content, and
> among that is credible, neutral, and high quality.
>
> Not all fonts are created equal. Helvetica is very widely used not only
> because it's such a polished font but it was designed specifically to be
> the font that is neutral and to have no implied meanings like many fonts
> do. Sounds perfect, except for the not free part.
>
> We're actively looking and trying out helvetica neue alternative that's
> open source but it's been challenging. They either don't come with enough
> characters, not well-kerned, or has too much personality that is not us.
>
> I understand the preference for an open source font but we are giving up
> certain areas that are probably just as important as being open source like
> reading experience.
>
> As for Georgia or Helvetica, serif (Georgia) fonts are recommended with
> larger texts because they don't reduce well on screen. Sans serif
> (Helvetica) fonts are recommended with smaller texts because they retain
> their general character shapes better than serif fonts. [1] One might argue
> that our web body text is not that small, hence we can use serif. There are
> three reasons why I wouldn't recommend that. 1. Content looks large and
> fine on the web but when it's displayed on phones and tablets, it's not as
> big anymore to use serif. 2. Why don't we use serif on web and sans serif
> on other platforms? Because that causes inconsistency. Readers should
> experience the same experience regardless of platform. WP content should be
> the one that takes center stage, not "why is my content appearing different
> on my tablet or phone?" We have fallback font options only when we must
> choose an alternative. 3. Helvetica has a neutral font personality. Serif,
> on the other hand, has many implications like traditional, Roman, formal,
> etc. [2,3]
>
> We know the importance for using an open source font and we have been
> looking for an alternative. We also know that we care deeply for our
> reader's experience. Helvetica was chosen to use because it helped reflect
> our content type, it's high quality, has good amount of character set (and
> if it doesn't, it's fairly easy to find a similar-ish font to match). But I
> can't lie it's a beautiful font, I can assure you we didn't judge Helvetica
> by its cover though. ;P Hope this helps!
>
> [1]
> http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/03/serif-vs-sans-the-final-battle/
> [2]
> http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/81/PersonalityofFonts.asp
> [3] http://opusdesign.us/to-be-or-not-to-be-the-serif-question/
>
> May
>
> On Feb 15, 2014, at 9:07 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> Frankly, I think there has been a large degree of intransigence on both
> sides. The free font advocates have refused to identify the fonts that they
> want to be considered and why they should be considered other than the fact
> that they are free, and the designers have refused to take any initiative
> on considering free fonts. The free fonts that I know have been considered
> are:
> * DejaVu Serif. Conclusion: Widely installed, but horribly ugly and looks
> nothing like the style desired by the designers.
> * Nimbus Roman No9 L. Conclusion: Basically a clone of Times. Most Linux
> systems map Times to Nimbus Roman No9 L, so there is no advantage to
> specifying "Nimbus Roman No9 L" rather than "Times" (which also maps to
> fonts on Windows and Mac).
> * Linux Libertine. Conclusion: A well-designed free font that matches the
> look of the Wikipedia wordmark. Unfortunately, it is not installed by
> default on any systems (as far as anyone knows) but is bundled with
> LibreOffice as an application font. If MediaWiki were using webfonts, this
> would likely be the serif font of choice rather than Georgia, but since we
> are relying on pre-installed fonts, it would be rather pointless to list it.
> * Liberation Sans. Conclusion: Essentially a free substitute for Arial.
> Like Nimbus Roman, there is no advantage to specifying "Liberation Sans"
> instead of "Arial" (which is at the bottom of the sans-serif stack) since
> Linux systems will map to Liberation Sans anyway, while other systems will
> apply Arial.
>
> As to proving the quality of Georgia and Helvetica Neue, I don't think the
> designers have done that, but I also haven't seen any evidence from the
> free font advocates concerning the quality of any free fonts. So in my
> view, both sides of the debate have been delinquent.
>
> Ryan Kaldari
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 4:16 PM, Greg Grossmeier <greg(a)wikimedia.org>wrote:
>
>> <quote name="Steven Walling" date="2014-02-15" time="16:08:41 -0800">
>> > On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 3:59 PM, Greg Grossmeier <greg(a)wikimedia.org>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > > <quote name="Federico Leva (Nemo)" date="2014-02-15" time="22:52:31
>> +0100">
>> > > > And surely, before WMF/"MediaWiki" tell the world that no free fonts
>> > > > of good quality exist, there will be some document detailing exactly
>> > > > why and based on what arguments/data/research the numerous free
>> > > > alternatives were all rejected? Free fonts developers are an
>> > > > invaluable resource for serving Wikimedia projects' content in all
>> > > > languages, we shouldn't carelessly slap them in their face.
>> > >
>> > > I just skimmed the entire thread again, and yes, this has been
>> requested
>> > > a few times but no one from the WMF Design team has responded with
>> that
>> > > analysis (or if would respond with an analysis). The first time it was
>> > > requested the person was told to ask the Design list, then the next
>> > > message CC'd the design list, but no response on that point.
>> > >
>> > > I don't see much on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh
>> > > nor it's talk page. Nor
>> > > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Design/Typography
>> > >
>> >
>> > There wasn't an answer because the question is a fundamental
>> > misunderstanding of the way CSS works and options that are within our
>> > reach. The question isn't "are there good free fonts?" the question is
>> "can
>> > we deliver good free fonts to all users?". I'll try to help the UX team
>> > document the answer better.
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> I may be part of the misunderstanding-of-how-things-work-in-font-land
>> contingent. Advice/clarity appreciated.
>>
>> Greg
>>
>>
>> --
>> | Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E |
>> | identi.ca: @greg A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Design mailing list
>> Design(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Design mailing list
> Design(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Design mailing list
> Design(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
>
>
Hoi,
There has been a lot of controversy about language support. Some of the
arguments used indicate a lack of understanding what it is language support
does. In my opinion language support is a primary requirement of MediaWiki.
MediaWiki supports languages really well.
In a blog post [1] I have written what language support is about and, I
have indicated where Wikimedia engineers and developers are involved.
What I hope to achieve is some clarity on this subject. When you find
anything to add or have comments I really want to know.
One final consideration, English is not even 50% [2] of our page views.
Thanks,
GerardM
[1]
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2014/02/the-place-of-language-support-in…
[2] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined.htm
If I install the Visual Editor mediawiki extension on the Wiki that I manage
here at my work and also setup Parsoid, will new pages be saved with Wikitext
still?
The documentation for the extension's installation mentions that after you
install Visual Editor you won't be able to edit Wikitext pages, but you will be
able to create new pages. It also mentions that with Parsoid you will be able
to edit Wikitext pages again. This leaves unclear whether or not having Parsoid
installed makes Visual Editor save new pages as Wikitext as well, or just
previously existing pages.
I'm thinking about letting folks try Visual Editor here, but I need to be able
to work with Wikitext still as there are definitely some unusual things I do in
Wikitext from time to time.
Thank you,
Derric Atzrott
Computer Specialist
Alizee Pathology