Good idea. After the 1.17 deployment, I've been trying to go through and clean-up some of the Javascript cruft that has built up on the various wikis over the years. One of the main goals of 1.17 was improving page loading speeds by optimizing Javascript delivery. Of course if all the wikis are serving lots of old redundant Javascript, the optimization doesn't accomplish that much. On wiktionary specifically, the importScript and importExternalScript functions are redundant, and the Wiktionary:PREFS system should be retired now that Gadgets are available. I admit I was much too gung-ho in my clean-up regarding Wiktionary, and I intend to let the admins there handle it from here.
As long as we're on the subject of wiktionary, I notice that there's a lot of custom Javascript there for handling specialized editing tasks like editing glosses, managing translations, etc. It seems like some of this functionality could be improved further and developed into full-fledged extensions (making it easy for other wiktionaries to use as well). Would you have any interest in working up a couple Wiktionary project proposals for the upcoming Hackathon in Berlin?
Ryan Kaldari
On 4/1/11 5:53 PM, Conrad Irwin wrote:
Ryan — what is your goal with the cleanup? Part of the reason I think you're getting nowhere on Wiktionary is that as far as anyone there can tell you're just changing stuff for the fun of changing stuff (and breaking it in the process...). If you can tell us what you're trying to achieve, then (given that we wrote the code, and have a reasonably good idea of how it's used), we can probably help you.
Conrad
On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 5:11 PM, Ryan Kaldarirkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
Can you possibly get any more hyperbolic? For your information, I've been trying to clean up the Javascript of en.wiktionary.org this past week, which is a total nightmare (and it's a sister project!). If you'd like to help, feel free to join the discussions: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Common.js http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary_talk:Per-browser_preferences#Propos...
Ryan Kaldari
On 4/1/11 4:51 PM, MZMcBride wrote:
Ryan Kaldari wrote:
Yeah, the local CSS/JS cruft is definitely a problem. I've tried doing clean-up on a few wikis, but I usually just get chewed out by the local admins for not discussing every change in detail (which obviously doesn't scale for fixing 200+ wikis). I would love to hear ideas for how to address this problem.
This caught my eye as Wikimedia has far more than 200 wikis. There seems to be a shift happening within the Wikimedia Foundation. The sister projects have routinely been ignored in the past, but things seem to be going further lately....
Personally, I'm in favor of disbanding all of the projects that Wikimedia has no intention of actively supporting in the near-future or even mid-range future. I think the current situation in which certain sister projects are supported in name only is unacceptable to the users and to the public.
MZMcBride
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