gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical

Stub quota

Lars Aronsson — 2008-12-01T09:29:37

After some more thought on the origins of stub articles and a better overview of the contents of the Swedish Wikipedia, it is clear that very few individuals are responsible for creating large numbers of stubs, a few years back. Now, depending on religion (mergists, deletionists...), these should either be deleted, improved, merged or put on lists of necessary quality improvements. Either way, it's a lot of work and it would have been better to have stopped those invidiuals back then. At least we want to stop such individuals today, so the same mistake isn't repeated while the old mess is being cleaned up. What we want is to foster a spirit of writing better articles, improving the one you started, before you start the next one. But instead of increased patrolling and speedy deletions, this could be implemented in the Mediawiki software. If a user (logged in or IP address) tries to create a new page, their recent contribution history could be checked, and if any of their five most recently created articles (except redirects) are shorter than, say, 300 bytes, they would simply be unable to create another article. This would be a very soft kind of blocking (as soon as you have improved your existing article, you can start the next one), each case being completely an affair between the user and the software, not involving opinions of individual admins. Such an extension (is there an "article creation hook"?) could be fully parameterized, so each community could decide where to set the limits (5 recently created articles, 300 bytes), and what message to show to the user who violates these limits. Has this been suggested before? Has it been implemented? Would it be a really bad idea to suggest this?

FW: [FOSDEM] Your devroom request has not been accepted

Siebrand Mazeland — 2008-12-01T08:09:37

FYI. This is too bad. It would have been a great opportunity for our project to go forward by bringing a substantial number of developers together in the official part of FOSDEM 2009. On the other hand: I and a few others will definitely be going to FOSDEM 2009[1]. Is it worth exploring possibilities to have some kind of thing in Brussels in the same weekend, should we try and organise something completely different as soon as possible, or should we cancel the idea for the next 6 months altogether? Cheers! Siebrand [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:FOSDEM_2009 -----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- Van: Pascal Bleser [mailto:loki-8Ycg9RsmSNMdnm+yROfE0A< at >public.gmane.org] Verzonden: maandag 1 december 2008 1:37 Aan: Siebrand Mazeland CC: FOSDEM DevRooms Onderwerp: [FOSDEM] Your devroom request has not been accepted -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 We're sorry to give you bad news, but your developer room request for FOSDEM 2009 has not been accepted. We realize that this must be disappointing news, but unfortunately we don't have a sufficient number of rooms to our disposal to cover all requests. Just to clarify: your request is perfectly valid, but we had to pick. Thanks for your interest in FOSDEM, nevertheless. - -- -o) Pascal Bleser public.gmane.org> http://www.fosdem.org /\\ FOSDEM 2009 :: 7 + 8 February 2009 in Brussels _\_v Free and Opensource Software Developers European Meeting -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFJMzGWr3NMWliFcXcRAsXpAKCYRW3tG+XrTAgZPXNA5+PP+se0vgCdFX9x d4LIWf+KG9uCaFrnfqBAzH4= =rkCZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Bugzilla Weekly Report

2008-12-01T03:00:01

MediaWiki Bugzilla Report for November 24, 2008 - December 01, 2008 Status changes this week Bugs NEW : 93 Bugs ASSIGNED : 4 Bugs REOPENED : 10 Bugs RESOLVED : 45 Total bugs still open: 3168 Resolutions for the week: Bugs marked FIXED : 31 Bugs marked REMIND : 0 Bugs marked INVALID : 5 Bugs marked DUPLICATE : 3 Bugs marked WONTFIX : 2 Bugs marked WORKSFORME : 3 Bugs marked LATER : 1 Bugs marked MOVED : 0 Specific Product/Component Resolutions & User Metrics New Bugs Per Component General/Unknown 6 Site requests 6 General/Unknown 3 Templates 3 Internationalization 3 New Bugs Per Product MediaWiki 25 Wikimedia 12 MediaWiki extensions 9 Top 5 Bug Resolvers rhalsell [AT] wikimedia.org 8 JSchulz_4587 [AT] msn.com 8 brion [AT] wikimedia.org 6 alex.emsenhuber [AT] bluewin.ch 5 mrzmanwiki [AT] gmail.com 2

Non-latin characters broken in donation comments

Jesse Plamondon-Willard — 2008-11-30T09:52:21

Hello, Names with non-Latin characters in the donation comments are broken and outputting as question marks. Some people are understandably unhappy that their names are not appearing next to their donations. For example, see < http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:ContributionHistory?offset=1228023677 (Thanks to [[ja:user:Aotake]] for pointing it out in #wikimedia.)

Donor's names are broken

mizusumashi — 2008-11-29T07:16:48

Why are some names of donors broken in http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:ContributionHistory ? examples: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:ContributionHistory?offset=1227942255#160557 http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:ContributionHistory?offset=1227942255#160539 I think no-latin characters are displayed not successfully. ---- mizusumashi

Local wikipedia server configuration

Bilal Abdul Kader — 2008-11-28T07:38:46

Greetings, I am trying to setup a local box to run it as a local Wikipedia server. It would have Ubuntu 8.04 with PHP5 and Mysql 5. I would like to replicate all en.wikipedia with the history and conversation. This would be part of an academic research on the quality of Wikipedia as an information source. I need your input on the hardware configuration please. - RAM: 16 GB or 32 GB? - CPU: double quad-core (Xeon 2 Ghz) or 1 quad-core or 1 double-core? - I intented to have 4-5 TB of storage space. How much space you think I need for temporary tables? Is 300 GB enough or I should get more. The full database might be around 600 GB uncompressed. One user only is going to run queries on this server and some queries might span several entire tables. Thanks in advance for all your suggestions. bilal

Depth and other quality estimates

Lars Aronsson — 2008-11-28T02:08:49

On my favorite page, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias there is a column for "depth", which is "a rough indicator of a Wikipedia's quality, showing how frequently its articles are updated". Tomorrow that column has been there for two full years, with slight modifications of its formula. I wrote a separate page about this, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Depth (Note that this is completely unrelated to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Depth ) There has been a lengthy discussion on the good and evil of trying to estimate the quality of Wikipedia. But I think "depth" is the only measurement that we can track over such a long time. What other estimates of Wikipedia quality do we have, that can be applied across language versions? Erik Zachte's Wikipedia Statistics (last updated in May 2008) presents a number of values that could be used to calculate a quality estimate: number of articles, number of articles longer than 0.5 kbytes or 2 kbytes (excluding some markup), mean edits per article, mean bytes per article, number of edits (total), size of database in bytes or words, number of internal or interwiki or image or external links, number of redirects. The editing depth is essentially the number of edits divided by the number of articles (with two more factors in the formula). This means edit wars and repeated use of the save button (instead of preview) will give a higher depth. But if an article is made perfect before it is saved, it gives a low depth. Thus, "depth" measures the amount of editing activity within Wikipedia, as opposed to the real quality of the resulting article. This can be interesting in itself, but it might also be interesting to estimate the amount of interconnectivity between articles, where orphan articles or articles with just one link to them are discounted as a kind of stub. How can such a measurement be defined? If possible, by just combining the values we already know. Earlier (2005-2006), the Swedish language Wikipedia created many (mostly very short) articles, giving it a high ranking position in the list of Wikipedias (by article count). But since these stubs were created once and never touched again, this gave it a rather low "depth" of 14 (in November 2007). During 2008, a number of subprojects have gone back and made minor edits to many old articles, so the "depth" has climbed to 23. This is not high, but no longer among the very lowest. The increase by +64 percent is however overshadowed by the Turkish Wikipedia's increase by +125 percent (from 39 to 88). Also, the French Wikipedia has increased its depth from 58 to 113, while the German Wikipedia only moved from depth 68 to 80.

autolink revision numbers

Jack Bates — 2008-11-27T19:09:32

What is the easiest way to automatically link the pattern /r(\d+)/ to a URL like http://code.google.com/p/qubit-toolkit/source/detail?r=\1 wherever it appears in MediaWiki articles? For example, I want an article containing: ... blah blah r1632 blah blah... - to have r1632 automatically replaced with a link to http://code.google.com/p/qubit-toolkit/source/detail?r=1632

Stats on navigation through Wikipedia pages

David Gerard — 2008-11-26T15:32:56

There's a question being discussed on wikien-l at present about whether [[en:Ireland]] should be the country, the island or a disambig. The arguments are both on correctness and on reader expectation. The first is for Manual of Style wonks (as well as anyone with an opinion), but the second is theoretically numerically ascertainable. The question is: * how to get numbers on how readers travel from one page to another within Wikipedia * without risking a privacy violation. Examples of the latter would be if we included jumps to or from a user page or even a WP: pseudo-pagespace page. So let's ignore those. The first idea that springs to my mind is logging referers for article pages, if the referer is an article page on the same Wikipedia or [[Special:Search]]. 1. Is this technically feasible given our logging structure? 2. Is there a privacy gotcha I'm ignoring? The huge benefit from this would be seeing how readers actually use Wikipedia, which would give us solid reasons to put given pages, links, redirects, etc. somewhere. This should of course include jumps from [[Special:Search]], so we know what the heck people are actually searching for! I realise our current logging of pretty much every page view without crippling the servers is a miracle of computer system administration. How feasible is my idea? - d.

programmatically add text to edit page text area

Alline, Matt — 2008-11-25T16:17:13

I've been looking through the following links looking for a hook that will allow me to insert text into the text area on the edit page. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PageSecurity/OutputPage.php (the EditPage.php doc is still empty) http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Hooks/EditPage::showEditForm:fields Am I looking in the wrong place again? Matt Alline *************************************************************************************************** The information in this email is confidential and may be legally privileged. Access to this email by anyone other than the intended addressee is unauthorized. If you are not the intended recipient of this message, any review, disclosure, copying, distribution, retention, or any action taken or omitted to be taken in reliance on it is prohibited and may be unlawful. If you are not the intended recipient, please reply to or forward a copy of this message to the sender and delete the message, any attachments, and any copies thereof from your system. ***************************************************************************************************

wfLocalFile($arg) and file uploads

Alline, Matt — 2008-11-25T14:42:24

Does anyone know where to find the method wfLocalFile($arg)? I've tried to grep for the method but I've not gotten anything but calls to the method. I'm still new to php and mediawiki development so I may be looking in the wrong place. The overlying problem: I am currently working on a new extension that aims to allow users to upload a document (doc, docx, odf,...) and convert that document to wikitext server side. I've gotten other major components of this already worked out. I am currently hung up trying to upload the file (possibly using the UploadForm) while using mediawiki's existing validations. I do not want to use the current base UploadForm to store the document in the current architecture for a few reasons. I have already tried to capture the temp file created by php before calling processUpload but it seems the file gets cleaned up before I can grab it. I could write the the extension to handle the upload as you normally would in php, but again, I would like to use some of the existing validations. Thanks ahead of time, Matt Alline Application Developer II, HGDC BearingPoint Management & Technology Consultants 5912 Highway 49 Suite H1 Hattiesburg, MS 39401 USA T + 1 601 584 1532 F + 1 601 584 0852 www.bearingpoint.com *************************************************************************************************** The information in this email is confidential and may be legally privileged. Access to this email by anyone other than the intended addressee is unauthorized. If you are not the intended recipient of this message, any review, disclosure, copying, distribution, retention, or any action taken or omitted to be taken in reliance on it is prohibited and may be unlawful. If you are not the intended recipient, please reply to or forward a copy of this message to the sender and delete the message, any attachments, and any copies thereof from your system. ***************************************************************************************************

User agent statistics

Melancholie — 2008-11-24T17:21:58

See https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15059 for a request. But such additional stats seem to be *not* really intended, however.

Bugzilla Weekly Report

2008-11-24T03:00:01

MediaWiki Bugzilla Report for November 17, 2008 - November 24, 2008 Status changes this week Bugs NEW : 86 Bugs ASSIGNED : 6 Bugs REOPENED : 14 Bugs RESOLVED : 75 Total bugs still open: 3138 Resolutions for the week: Bugs marked FIXED : 47 Bugs marked REMIND : 0 Bugs marked INVALID : 8 Bugs marked DUPLICATE : 9 Bugs marked WONTFIX : 4 Bugs marked WORKSFORME : 6 Bugs marked LATER : 1 Bugs marked MOVED : 0 Specific Product/Component Resolutions & User Metrics New Bugs Per Component Uniwiki 4 Site requests 4 Special pages 4 Images 4 General/Unknown 3 New Bugs Per Product MediaWiki 18 Wikimedia 10 MediaWiki extensions 14 Top 5 Bug Resolvers rhalsell [AT] wikimedia.org 11 roan.kattouw [AT] home.nl 10 markus [AT] semantic-mediawiki.org 9 brion [AT] wikimedia.org 8 JSchulz_4587 [AT] msn.com 8

$wgRestrictionLevels

K. Peachey — 2008-11-24T02:43:40

I created a new usergroup in my mediawiki install called Staff and I want to set up a Restriction level so i can page edit restrictions/protection except the manual page about RestrcitionLevels doesn't show much information about it so i was wondering how i would go about setting it up? -Peachey

User agent statistics

Marco Schuster — 2008-11-23T22:29:53

Hi all, as Domas' magic stuff(tm) currently gathers article traffic data very efficient: Could this system be expanded to get a list of user agents used to browse Wikipedia, sorted by their count? I think this would be a very cool way to have accurate statistics about browser usage, not only on Wikipedia. Thanks, Marco

UTF8 Normalization

Jared Williams — 2008-11-22T13:54:40

Hi, I patched UtfNormal.php to use the new intl extension's normalization function, http://php.net/manual/en/normalizer.normalize.php But running UtfNormalTest.php causes 200+ errors, whilst the PHP normalization routines are error free. So kind at a standstill wondering what the problem is. I guess WM use utf8_normalize() which is based on ICU like intl, does than have the same errors? Jared

Upload filesize limit bumped

Brion Vibber — 2008-11-22T00:49:02

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Now that we've got uploads running on our new, beefier file servers, I've experimentally bumped the upload limit from 20 to 100 megabytes. Files nearing the high end of that range might not actually succeed, though, as it'll be hitting post-size limits etc. As time goes on we'll be improving ways to upload large video files in particular... - -- brion -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkknVv4ACgkQwRnhpk1wk45HaQCgzH3rAHh9cvBUQtSt6FZtO0cF s+0AoNNBOGGA9S8vFE4AQqALJuCHVtUZ =YKTr -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Donating/offering domain wikipedia.ro for use

Gutza — 2008-11-21T20:00:28

Dear all, I am an administrator, bureaucrat and checkuser on the Romanian Wikipedia. I have contacted the current owner of domain wikipedia.ro asking him to consider donating the domain to Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (there is no local chapter in Romania). He's considering the option, but in the meanwhile he has offered to allow us use of the domain -- in other words, he asked for the appropriate nameserver IP addresses he should associate with that domain (obviously, that should lead to the content currently served at ro.wikipedia.org). Could that be arranged? If so, please provide the respective IP addresses so I can pass them on to him. In a different train of thoughts, should he agree donating the domain altogether to WMF, can WMF to take ownership, or is that against any policy? Best regards, Gutza

Correct method of pre-processing article text?

Mark Clements (HappyDog — 2008-11-20T15:16:20

I have an extension which parses the contents of a page to store the content of certain embedded tags to the database, and I want the parsing to take place after the pre-processing (comment removal, template expansion, etc.) I also need the code to be compatible with MW1.6 as I am currently unable to upgrade to PHP5 (hopefully soon...) Here is the code I was using until recently (where $Text is the unmodified article text): // Create new Parser object to deal with some transformations that are // required before saving. $Parser = new Parser(); // Use the Parser object to strip out html comments, nowiki and pre tags // and whatever other bits shouldn't make it through when rendering (so // they don't affect saving). $ParserOptions = new ParserOptions(); $StripState =& $Parser->mStripState; $Parser->mOptions = $ParserOptions; $TidyText = $Parser->strip($Text, $StripState, true); // Then replace any variables, parser functions etc. so that 'hidden' tags // (e.g. tags that are created by code, such as using the ExpandAfter // extension) are expanded properly for saving. $Parser->mFunctionHooks = $wgParser->mFunctionHooks; $Parser->mTitle =& $wgParser->mTitle; $TidyText = $Parser->replaceVariables($TidyText); However, I was recently testing this on MW1.12, and this gives the following error: Fatal error: Call to a member function matchStartToEnd() on a non-object in Parser.php on line 2771 I fixed this by inserting the following two lines just before the second $TidyText = ... $Parser->mVariables =& $wgParser->mVariables; $Parser->mOutput =& $wgParser->mOutput; Now, it is clear to me that this is the wrong way of going about this - I shouldn't be having to mess with the internals of the parser object in order to just pre-process the text, as it will clearly break whenever the parser object is updated! Can someone tell me the correct forward-compatible way to pre-process article text in this manner? - Mark Clements (HappyDog).

bad html emitted with custom editnotice (Help Desk)

Steve Summit — 2008-11-20T04:37:13

When you edit [[Wikipedia:Help desk]], you get the custom editnotice [[MediaWiki:Editnotice-4-Help desk]]. The editnotice is emitted inside a table, between and . The editnotice contains a bulleted list, rendered as

's. However, for some reason, the last

come out *after* the closing , making them orphans, so to speak. I don't know if this affects other custom editnotices.

Can I submit a patch?

Lambert Lum — 2008-11-18T19:54:38

For the last 9 months I have been programming mediawiki customizations for my company. Would it possible for me to submit a patch to the core mediawiki code? I have identified a bug in HTMLFileCache.php. One of the member variables is not properly set early enough, and if extension code is written in a certain way, the cache code will crash. I lost an entire week to this bug. I almost gave up, were it not for prodding from others in my company. As a second question, if I am allowed to submit a patch who would submit such a patch to? For reference, here are a couple of sites I have constructed for my company. http://www.santacruz.com http://www.morganhillobserver.com/