(sending this message again, as I somehow was unsubscribed from wikitech-l for a while. Damn computers;-)
Hi all,
a long time ago, en:User:Egil wrote a great MediaWiki extension to handle geographic coordinates, like ISBNs are handled by Special:Booksources, and ran it off his server. When said server broke down, and Egil was unreachable, I wrote a workaround [1] to run it as a standalone script, and put it on the toolsever as a temporary measure.
As it is tradition for temporary fixes, this one seems to have become permanent ;-) with ~640000 hits in October, making up >8% of toolserver traffic.
I wonder if this would be the time to add Egils extension to the standard Wikipedia extension set. This would not only look more seamless, and offer localized pages, but also take advantage of the usual caching mechanisms. AFAIK, all that needs to be done is adding the extension, copying the wikisource to a local page, and fix the geo templates. This could be done gradually; unless the templates are adapted, the default behaviour (using toolserver) won't change, even if the extension is activated.
Magnus
On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 09:27:20AM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
As it is tradition for temporary fixes, this one seems to have become permanent ;-) with ~640000 hits in October, making up >8% of toolserver traffic.
Could you please change the logo of that page? I guess it's not really necessary to use a 1MB big image on a page frequented that often.
Regards,
jens
On 11/13/06, Jens Frank jf@mormo.org wrote:
On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 09:27:20AM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
As it is tradition for temporary fixes, this one seems to have become permanent ;-) with ~640000 hits in October, making up >8% of toolserver traffic.
Could you please change the logo of that page? I guess it's not really necessary to use a 1MB big image on a page frequented that often.
Done.
About my original question...?
Magnus
On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 09:52:09PM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
On 11/13/06, Jens Frank jf@mormo.org wrote:
On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 09:27:20AM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
As it is tradition for temporary fixes, this one seems to have become permanent ;-) with ~640000 hits in October, making up >8% of toolserver traffic.
Could you please change the logo of that page? I guess it's not really necessary to use a 1MB big image on a page frequented that often.
Done.
About my original question...?
geohack is not an extension, but a standalone tool. It does not integrate at all into MediaWiki, but does everything on its own. Thus, it ignores all user settings for example. No matter which skin a user uses, he'll get pseudo-monobook from geohack.
geohack is full of hardcodes, and has no support for internationalization.
I don't think it can be easily activated right now.
Regards,
jens
Jens Frank wrote:
On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 09:52:09PM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
On 11/13/06, Jens Frank jf@mormo.org wrote:
On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 09:27:20AM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
As it is tradition for temporary fixes, this one seems to have become permanent ;-) with ~640000 hits in October, making up >8% of toolserver traffic.
Could you please change the logo of that page? I guess it's not really necessary to use a 1MB big image on a page frequented that often.
Done.
About my original question...?
geohack is not an extension, but a standalone tool.
Magnus explicitly explained that the standalone tool was his, and that it was a "temporary workaround" that was introduced because the extension somehow couldn't be used on the live site. I'm sure Magnus knows the difference between an extension and a standalone thing.
geohack is full of hardcodes, and has no support for internationalization.
Magnus claimed that it does, so again I'm inclined to assume that you are referring to Magnus' workaround, and not the actual extension he's proposing.
Timwi
On 11/14/06, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Jens Frank wrote:
geohack is not an extension, but a standalone tool.
Magnus explicitly explained that the standalone tool was his, and that it was a "temporary workaround" that was introduced because the extension somehow couldn't be used on the live site. I'm sure Magnus knows the difference between an extension and a standalone thing.
geohack is full of hardcodes, and has no support for internationalization.
Magnus claimed that it does, so again I'm inclined to assume that you are referring to Magnus' workaround, and not the actual extension he's proposing.
The extension (yes, I'm talking about that, not my lousy wrapper;-) basically takes all its text from a wiki page, which would then be in the respective wikipedia (and not, like now, a subpage of my en user page).
I have a few requests for updates on the extension itself, which I'm not entirely comfortable with doing myself, and I don't really have time to invest until the end of the month. Making it an "used" extension might attract some more developers.
Egils extension appears to be in SVN "trunk/extensions/gis", if you're curious.
Magnus
On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 07:34:33PM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
On 11/14/06, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Jens Frank wrote:
geohack is not an extension, but a standalone tool.
Magnus explicitly explained that the standalone tool was his, and that it was a "temporary workaround" that was introduced because the extension somehow couldn't be used on the live site. I'm sure Magnus knows the difference between an extension and a standalone thing.
Egils extension appears to be in SVN "trunk/extensions/gis", if you're curious.
Doh! I even worked on that one myself, a year ago. I'll have a look. I think I remember that it was not really production ready, but I don't remember why.
jens
On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 08:02:03PM +0100, Jens Frank wrote:
On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 07:34:33PM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
On 11/14/06, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Jens Frank wrote:
geohack is not an extension, but a standalone tool.
Magnus explicitly explained that the standalone tool was his, and that it was a "temporary workaround" that was introduced because the extension somehow couldn't be used on the live site. I'm sure Magnus knows the difference between an extension and a standalone thing.
Egils extension appears to be in SVN "trunk/extensions/gis", if you're curious.
Doh! I even worked on that one myself, a year ago. I'll have a look. I think I remember that it was not really production ready, but I don't remember why.
I had a look at it again. There's some things that need to be done before getting this into production:
- localization Lots of hardcodes, e.g. 'N', 'E', 'W', 'S', 'to', 'type:city', ...
- update to MW1.9alpha. gis is an extension for MW1.5, and does not work with MW1.9 any more
- I'd like to have some changes on the syntax of the <geo> tag. There were many problems with people cut-and-pasting the geo markup template from one article to another, not understanding its syntax. Especially the population was often wrong. type:city(500000) could become type:city population:500000
- The map page should become a real special page, instead of a standalone page.
- I'm not sure how good the search for nearby places will scale. MySQL has no proper spatial index. The pseudo-index I added will work for smaller sites, but Wikipedia might kill this.
jens
Jens Frank wrote: <snip>
- I'm not sure how good the search for nearby places will scale. MySQL has no proper spatial index. The pseudo-index I added will work for smaller sites, but Wikipedia might kill this.
Skiplist? Hashtable? How hard are they to use an SQL database as the backend for?
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