Wikitech-l October 2008

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

98 participants
93 discussions

Database dumps
by Byrial Jensen 17 Apr '25

17 Apr '25

Until some weeks ago http://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html used to show 4 dumps in progress at the same time. That meant that new database dumps normally was available within about 3 weeks for all databases except for enwiki and maybe dewiki where the dump process due to size took longer time. However the 4 dumps processes at one time become 3 some weeks ago. And after massive failures at June 4, only one dump has been in progress at the same time. So at the current speed it will take several months to come thru all dumps. Is it possible to speed up the process again using several dump processes at the same time? Thank you, Byrial

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EBNF grammar project status?
by Steve Bennett 01 Apr '25

01 Apr '25

What's the status of the project to create a grammar for Wikitext in EBNF? There are two pages: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikitext_Metasyntax http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec Nothing seems to have happened since January this year. Also the comments on the latter page seem to indicate a lack of clear goal: is this just a fun project, is it to improve the existing parser, or is it to facilititate a new parser? It's obviously a lot of work, so it needs to be of clear benefit. Brion requested the grammar IIRC (and there's a comment to that effect at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7 ), so I'm wondering what became of it. Is there still a goal of replacing the parser? Or is there some alternative plan? Steve

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MediaWiki to Latex Converter
by Hugo Vincent 18 Jun '12

18 Jun '12

Hi everyone, I recently set up a MediaWiki (http://server.bluewatersys.com/w90n740/) and I need to extra the content from it and convert it into LaTeX syntax for printed documentation. I have googled for a suitable OSS solution but nothing was apparent. I would prefer a script written in Python, but any recommendations would be very welcome. Do you know of anything suitable? Kind Regards, Hugo Vincent, Bluewater Systems.

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Replacement stats for placeholder images?
by David Gerard 13 Oct '09

13 Oct '09

I've been putting placeholder images on a lot of articles on en:wp. e.g. [[Image:Replace this image male.svg]], which goes to [[Wikipedia:Fromowner]], which asks people to upload an image if they own one. I know it's inspired people to add free content images to articles in several cases. What I'm interested in is numbers. So what I'd need is a list of edits where one of the SVGs that redirects to [[Wikipedia:Fromowner]] is replaced with an image. (Checking which of those are actually free images can come next.) Is there a tolerably easy way to get this info from a dump? Any Wikipedia statistics fans who think this'd be easy? (If the placeholders do work, then it'd also be useful convincing some wikiprojects to encourage the things. Not that there's ownership of articles on en:wp, of *course* ...) - d.

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en.wiki migrated to new search backend
by Robert Stojnic 05 Jun '09

05 Jun '09

Hi all, We now have english wikipedia fully migrated to new servers / new search backend. We cannot fully migrate other wikis until we resolve some hardware issues. In the meantime, here is the overview of new features now deployed on en.wiki: 1) Did you mean... - we now have search suggestions. Care has been taken to provide suggestions that are context-sensitive, i.e. on phrases, proper names, etc.. 2) fuzzy and wildcard queries - a word can be made fuzzy by adding ~ to it's end, e.g. query sarah~ thompson~ will give all different spellings and similar names to sarah thompson. Wildcards can now be prefix and suffix, e.g. *stan will give various countries in central asia. 3) prefix: - using this magic prefix, queries can be limited to pages beginning with certain prefix. E.g. mwsuggest prefix:Wikipedia:Village Pump will search all village pumps and archives for mwsuggest. This should be especially useful for archive searching in concert with inputbox or searchbox 4) intitle: - using this magic prefix, queries can be limited to titles only 5) generally improved quality of search results via usage of related articles (based on co-occurrence of links), anchor text, text abstracts, proximity within articles, sections, redirects, improved stemming and such Cheers, Robert

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new extension for embedded music scores
by River Tarnell 24 May '09

24 May '09

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 hello, i have written a new extension to embed music scores in MediaWiki pages: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/mediawiki/wiki/Extension:ABC unlike the Lilypond extension, this uses a simple input language (ABC) that is much easier to validate for security. ABC is mostly used to transcribe Irish trad and other simple tunes, but it recently gained support for more advanced features, e.g. multiple staves and lyrics. this is supported in the extension using the 'abcm2ps' tool. unlike the existing ABC extension (AbcMusic), it doesn't support opening arbitrary files as ABC input (which is a potential security issue), and has several additional features: - - The original ABC can be downloaded easily - - The score can be downloaded as PDF, PostScript, MIDI or Ogg Vorbis - - A media player can be embedded in the page to play the media file i believe the ABC format is suitable for transcribing the majority of scores currently on Wikimedia projects. although it can't handle all of them, it is better than the current situation. plus, as ABC is simple, and existing ABC scores are easily available, it's easier for novice users to contribute. i would be interested to hear peoples' thoughts on enabling this extension on Wikimedia. - river. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iD8DBQFJBwL+IXd7fCuc5vIRAqG6AJ9RxKTGjJ7ywdZoesrTJWrMPtBYrACgjgDX lIY552ilDFaVG1mLzqW1F/Y= =7Tda -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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License information (was: PDF/Collection feature live on de.wikibooks)
by Johannes Beigel 30 Jan '09

30 Jan '09

Am 10.10.2008 um 21:22 schrieb Erik Moeller: > 2008/10/10 Derbeth <derbeth(a)wp.pl>: >> I wonder about the legal aspects. In my opinion, when you create a >> ready-to-print version, >> you have to attach the text of GFDL license to it - directly, not >> as a link. Like it is done in >> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Image:LaTeX.pdf. As Erik wrote: This is already implemented (either a title of an article or a URL to some license text can be set in LocalSettings.php), but it's currently not configured. >> Secondly, current version of the tool does a plagiarism - beacause >> it does not mention >> image authors and does not provide any mean (like by making images >> clickable) to check >> these authors. > > Ouch, thanks for pointing that out. Tricky to do this automatically > since it's all wiki-text with templates, but we'll investigate a > solution here. We'd highly appreciate input from the community regarding this topic! The printed books from PediaPress contain a list of figures where the license of each image is listed, together with the URL to the image description page. As some kind of "hotfix" this solution could be implemented in the PDF export of the Collection extension, too. But this doesn't really solve the problem. We think it's more of a technical/software thing, so I cross-posted (and set Reply-To) to Wikitech-l. In our opinion, license management/handling must be a core feature of MediaWiki, because the software is explicitely developed for the collaborative distribution of free content. Licenses of the containing articles and images should not be represented via some agreed-upon convention but via structured (and machine-readable) information, available for each relevant object in the wiki. Some information that would be desired: - Full (official) name of the license(s). - Whether the full text of the license has to be included or a reference sufficient. - Reference to the full text of the license(s) (in some rigidly defined format like wikitext). - Whether attribution is required. If so: The list of required attributions. So, basically all the information that's required to check if it's possible to take some part of the MediaWiki and use it somewhere else and all the information that has to be included in that other place. This information could be made accessible via MediaWiki API, but ideally it's contained in the wikitext and/or XHTML, too. All this could be handled via microformats, even inside of templates, but the main point is that any kind of new technique has to be enforced, ideally via MediaWiki software itself: In the commons wikis there are some conventions that can be used in software by people/ companies like us (although we have to work with hacks and workarounds), but oftentimes, in wikis with smaller communities this information doesn't even exist at all. -- Johannes Beigel

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Search options and namespace selection
by FT2 01 Nov '08

01 Nov '08

While search is being updated, a small plea for a slightly better interface to namespace selection (and advanced options generally). (1) At the moment namespace is 18 check boxes at the bottom of the page. A lot of clicking, each in its own box. Changing this to a list box (allowing CTRL-CLICK or selection/deselection of multiple namespaces in one action) would make this much easier to enter. Possibly also the ability in the config file for a wiki sysadmin to specify some standard options for simplicity: * Articles * Articles and article discussion * Articles, discussion, project space, and project talk * Project and project talk spaces * Images, categories, templates and their talk pages * All namespaces * Custom or an option "Also search talk pages". But some way to make namespace selection easier. (2) A number of the options available will be inaccessible to many users because they need to be typed in as a parameterized search text. I'm going to guess most users will not access the new features, even though extremely helpful, because of lack of confidence. As with Google advanced search, one solution might be an "advanced search" interface where different fields can be entered and the user is guided what to put in, for each. It may be a good idea if we're beefing up internal search, to also ensure users discover the new features and can easily access them :) FT2

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Search options and namespace selection
by FT2 01 Nov '08

01 Nov '08

(Snip) In conclusion, we should have a search interface containing three basic elements: - a big search box -- Google has a simple front page with a centralised search box for a reason - some common options, like those proposed by FT2: On 31.10.2008 13:13:13, FT2 wrote: > * Articles > * Articles and article discussion > * Articles, discussion, project space, and project talk > * Project and project talk spaces > * Images, categories, templates and their talk pages > * All namespaces > * Custom - and finally a "Go" button. Leon People are familiar with Google. A somewhat similar interface approach would seem familiar. With an "Advanced search" button. I'd consider also using a second trick Google does. It tries to pick out a few specific useful links and highlight them first. In our case, pages with <text> in the title, or sequentially in the text as a string, may be more likely to be high quality hits, than pages that "just had the words scattered somewhere in the text". Maybe highlight a few of those? So the output might be: <Hit #1 + sample text> <Hit #2 + sample text> <Hit #3 + sample text> ---> Click here for more pages with X in the title <Hit #4 + sample text> <Hit #5 + sample text> <Hit #6 + sample text> <Hit #7 + sample text> --> Click here for more pages containing the text "X" <Regular hits from here on> FT2

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.svg scaling - text not scaling with images on current en.wp
by George Herbert 31 Oct '08

31 Oct '08

I'm not sure if this is a generic problem, but see: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Enriched_uranium The following image's text doesn't scale with the image: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Image:Uranium_enrichment_pro… The image link in the article is: [[Image:Uranium enrichment proportions.svg|right|200px|thumb|Proportions of uranium-238 (blue) and uranium-235 (red) found naturally versus grades that are enriched by separating the two isotopes atom-by-atom using various methods that all require a massive investment in time and money.]] I've checked on Firefox 3.0.3 and IE 7.0 I believe that this must be a recent change - I check that article semi-regularly (it's on my watchlist along with other nuclear topics) and I don't recall seeing any problems with it... -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

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Wikitech-l October 2008