James,
I just want to say a public "thank you" for VE saving my sanity by doing
something that I didn't know was possible. I was able to copy a table from
Word onto Meta using VisualEditor, and much to my surprise it mostly
worked. I must have tried at least five other ways to get one of Cascadia
Wikimedians' annual plan tables copied from Google Docs onto Meta, all with
poor results. While VisualEditor only copied part of the formatting into
MediaWiki, the results were far better than anything else I had tried for
the past few hours. So thank you very much for supporting this
copy-and-paste functionality with VisualEditor.
Pine
*This is an Encyclopedia* <https://www.wikipedia.org/>
*One gateway to the wide garden of knowledge, where lies The deep rock of
our past, in which we must delve The well of our future,The clear water we
must leave untainted for those who come after us,The fertile earth, in
which truth may grow in bright places, tended by many hands,And the broad
fall of sunshine, warming our first steps toward knowing how much we do not
know.*
*—Catherine Munro*
We had an RFC meeting today about an RFC
(https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Watch_Categorylinks) regarding
watching categorization changes.
The original proposal was to use Echo. However, there were some
concerns regarding that, regarding performance and UX (this seems more
consistent with the watchlist's UX).
The decision at the end was to use the recentchanges table. There are
two many remaining design questions:
1. Should categorization changes (on pages using the template) due to a
template change be ignored? This would simplify implementation, but
limit the usefulness of the feature.
If template changes are reflected, there were some suggestions on
implementation.
One was to create a single bulk event when the template is edited. The
problem with this is the template can have different effects on
different pages using it.
So it would somehow need to keep track of the effects, and create an RC
entry (with the relevant info either in, or pointed to by, rc_params) at
the end of the template processing.
Gabriel Wicke suggested an alternate approach that might be easier:
Point from the RC entry to an ID, and keep updating the list of pages
affected by that categorization batch as it progresses. It could maybe
use the revid of the template/underlying page change as this ID.
2. Whether to allow watching only the category page (i.e. the
description of the category), or require watching both that and
categorization/decategorization together. If the latter, filtering
(e.g. "ignore categorization/decategorization" view) could be done on
the watchlist page.
The RFC will be updated.
Matt Flaschen
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rachel Farrand <rfarrand(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 4:37 PM
Subject: 2016 European Hackathon: Looking for Proposals
To: chapters(a)wikimedia.ch, wikitech-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Hello!
Is your chapter interested in hosting the 2016 European Hackathon? We are
looking for proposals!
We have put together some information for potential hackathon organizers
here <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hackathons#Proposing_a_hackathon> and
some general information about hackathon objectives here
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hackathons>.
This years Wikimedia Hackathon 2015
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Hackathon_2015> will be held in
Lyon, France in May. Ideally we will announce the host for 2016 in Lyon. If
multiple chapters are interested, we will work together to figure out the
the best solution.
If you are interested in hosting or have any questions about the process
you have a few options:
1) Create a Phabricator task and associate it with the
Engineering-Community project. Include as much information as possible from
the first step section of the proposing a hackathon
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hackathons/Proposing_a_hackathon> wiki
page.
2) Email me at rfarrand(a)wikimedia.org with any questions or concerns
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Rachel Farrand
Events Coordinator
Engineering Community Team
Wikimedia Foundation
In the next RFC meeting, we would like to discuss the following RFC:
* Watch Categorylinks
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Watch_Categorylinks>
The meeting will be on the IRC channel #wikimedia-office on
chat.freenode.net at the following time:
* UTC: Wednesday 21:00
* US PDT: Wednesday 14:00
* Europe CEST: Wednesday 22:00
* Australia AEST: Thursday 07:00
-- Tim Starling
Please join us for the following tech talk:
*Tech Talk**:* The state of Team Health across Wikimedia Engineering
*Presenter:* Kristen Lans
*Date:* April 14th
*Time:* 1900 UTC
<http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Tech+talk%3A+The+s…>
Link to live YouTube stream <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YfkxpJTuY4>
*IRC channel for questions/discussion:* #wikimedia-office
Google+ page
<https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/103470172168784626509/events/crrengrbtbca8ncn…>,
another
place for questions
*Talk description: *The WMF’s Team Practices Group (TPG) believes that
healthy teams reliably deliver customer value and innovative products. Over
the past six months, the TPG has been engaging with WMF Engineering teams
to pilot a Team Health check survey to establish a baseline of health for
individual teams and across Engineering. This talk will provide a brief
overview of the health check and the health check process, focusing on what
we have learned to date and the next steps. There will be time for
discussion and questions.
Dear list members,
I read with interest the article on `Great canon'; and, as an immediate
stop-gap measure, recommend:
Policy: Advise every Wikipedia user to install `HTTPS Everywhere'.
Reference: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS_Everywhere>.
Sincerely Yours,
Kent
On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 8:01 AM, <wikitech-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
wrote:
> Send Wikitech-l mailing list submissions to
> wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> wikitech-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
> wikitech-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of Wikitech-l digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: Another reason to consider forcing https (Ryan Lane)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2015 13:27:13 -0700
> From: Ryan Lane <rlane32(a)gmail.com>
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Another reason to consider forcing https
> Message-ID:
> <CALKgCA2u2qWuNK9J7sPSN56_=Cpne_TKNUP_FFe=
> XmNmOdS8BQ(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On Sat, Apr 11, 2015 at 7:44 PM, Brian Wolff <bawolff(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Apr 11, 2015 1:18 PM, "Pine W" <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > https://citizenlab.org/2015/04/chinas-great-cannon/
> > >
> > > Pine
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > > Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> >
> > A surprisingly bold move on China's part.
> >
> > Im not sure if what is talked about applies directly to Wikipedia. Seems
> > the goal was to try to compel github to remove specific content "hostile"
> > to China's censorship interests, without china itself getting blocked,
> > which might happen if DDOS was comming entirely from China IPs (since
> > blocking github angers local programmers). To do that they needed to
> > intercept connections inbound to servers in China, which doesn't apply to
> > us as our servers are mostly in US (and despite various abuses of the NSA
> > so often talked about, it is hard to imagine the US would ever consider
> so
> > blatently misusing other people's computers in a ddos-via-mitm-js
> attack).
> > Of course one never knows if future attacks might target outbound
> > connections from China, or if some other group might try to do something
> > similar (again hard to imagine, and it seems like there are very few
> > entities other than China who could get away with this, but im still kind
> > of shocked that China did this)
> >
> > -
> >
> > The most interesting aspect of the report (imo) from the context of
> > Wikipedia is, to quote:
> >
> > "The attack on GitHub specifically targeted these repositories, possibly
> in
> > an attempt to compel GitHub to remove these resources. GitHub encrypts
> all
> > traffic using TLS, preventing a censor from only blocking access to
> > specific GitHub pages. In the past, China attempted to block Github, but
> > the block was lifted within two days, following significant negative
> > reaction from local programmers."
> >
> > So because github encrypted everything with https (and thus blocking is
> an
> > all or nothing afair), and because it was very popular, China was
> unwilling
> > to block it entirely despite a small portion being objectionable.
> >
> > I don't really know what the status of wikipedia in China is, or how
> > popular it is, but its conceivable that we could be in a similar
> position.
> > Food for thought.
> >
> >
> The only reason we remain unblocked is because we don't force SSL.
> Wikipedia is relatively unused in China. If it was blocked, there'd be no
> major public outcry.
>
> - Ryan
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
> End of Wikitech-l Digest, Vol 141, Issue 24
> *******************************************
>
I sent this message to MediaWiki-l but as I am yet to receive a reply
despite sending it about a day ago I have decided to forward it here.
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Math extension, errors that may be Windows-related
Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2015 14:42:43 +1000
From: Brenton Horne <brentonhorne77(a)gmail.com>
To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list
<mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi,
I have a local Wiki that I have been trying to install the Math
extension on. In LocalSettings.php I have the following lines for the
extension:
> require_once("extensions/Math/math.php");
>
> $wgUseTeX = true;
> $wgTexvc = "/extensions/Math/math/texvc.exe";
texvc was installed via following instructions here [1
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Texvc#Windows>]. I have a texvc.exe file
in the directory extensions/Math/math/ created via following these
instructions. I also have LaTeX installed on my PC via MiKTeX, currently
my path variable points to C:\Program Files\MiKTeX\miktex\bin\x64 (where
latex.exe and dvipng.exe files exist). Despite this inserting an
equation via <math></math> into a Wiki page gives the error:
> *Failed to parse (Missing <code>texvc</code> executable. Please see
> math/README to configure.):*
Thanks for your time,
Brenton