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Jay Ashworth | 1 Jan 2011 01:32

Re: How would you disrupt Wikipedia?

----- Original Message -----
> From: "George Herbert" <george.herbert <at> gmail.com>

> MW was designed to build an encyclopedia with Web 1.5 technology. It
> was a major step forwards compared to its contemporaries, but sites
> like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter are massive user experience advances
> over where we are and can credibly go with MediaWiki.

MediaWiki is nearly perfectly usable from my Blackberry with CSS, images,
and JavaScript disabled; please don't break that.

Cheers,
-- jra
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Jay Ashworth | 1 Jan 2011 01:35

Re: How would you disrupt Wikipedia?

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Neil Kandalgaonkar" <neilk <at> wikimedia.org>

> Meanwhile, MediaWiki is perhaps too powerful and too complex to
> administer for the small organization. I work with a small group of
> artists that run a MediaWiki instance and whenever online collaboration
> has to happen, nobody in this group says "Let's make a wiki page!"

Why not?

> That used to happen, but nowadays they go straight to Google Docs. 

Oh.

Well, that's bad.  But people will choose the wrong tools; I don't think
that's evidence that MediaWiki's Broken As Designed.

"Too powerful and complex to administer"?

It needs administration?  In a small organization?

I set one up at my previous employers, and used it to take all my notes,
which required exactly zero administration: I just slapped it on a box,
and I was done.

And my successor is *very* happy about it.  :-)

Cheers,
-- jra
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Ryan Kaldari | 1 Jan 2011 03:03
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Re: How would you disrupt Wikipedia?

On this note, MTV Networks (my previous job) switched from using 
Mediawiki to Confluence a couple years ago. They mainly cited ease of 
use and Microsoft Office integration as the reasons. Personally I hated 
it, except for the dashboard interface, which was pretty slick. Some 
Wikipedia power-users have similar dashboard style interfaces that they 
have custom built on their User Pages, but I think it would be cool if 
we let people add these sort of interfaces without having to be a 
template-hacker.

The sort of interface I'm talking about would include stuff like 
community and WikiProject notices and various real-time stats. If you 
were a vandal fighter, you would get a vandalism thermometer, streaming 
incident notices, a recent changes feed, etc. If you were a content 
reviewer, you would get lists of the latest Featured Article and Good 
Article candidates, as well as the latest images nominated for Featured 
Picture Status, and announcements from the Guild of Copyeditors. The 
possibilities are endless.

Ryan Kaldari

On 12/31/10 4:35 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>    
>> From: "Neil Kandalgaonkar"<neilk <at> wikimedia.org>
>>      
>    
>> Meanwhile, MediaWiki is perhaps too powerful and too complex to
>> administer for the small organization. I work with a small group of
>> artists that run a MediaWiki instance and whenever online collaboration
>> has to happen, nobody in this group says "Let's make a wiki page!"
(Continue reading)

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Ashar Voultoiz | 1 Jan 2011 04:18
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Re: New committers

On 29/12/10 20:18, Chad wrote:
> Just added 3 new committers. Let's give them a warm welcome.
>
> Core&  extensions:
> Zak Greant (zak) - WMF contractor, working on documentation
>
> Extensions only:
> Jason Giglio (gigs) - Working on GoogleNewsSiteMap
> Robert Scheiber (rscheiber) - General extension cleanup/fixes/etc

Welcome!

I have rscheiber & zak USERINFO files :-)

--

-- 
Ashar "happy new year" Voultoiz
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Tei | 1 Jan 2011 12:22
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Re: How would you disrupt Wikipedia?

On 1 January 2011 03:03, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari <at> wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On this note, MTV Networks (my previous job) switched from using
> Mediawiki to Confluence a couple years ago. They mainly cited ease of
> use and Microsoft Office integration as the reasons. Personally I hated
> it, except for the dashboard interface, which was pretty slick. Some
> Wikipedia power-users have similar dashboard style interfaces that they
> have custom built on their User Pages, but I think it would be cool if
> we let people add these sort of interfaces without having to be a
> template-hacker.
>
> The sort of interface I'm talking about would include stuff like
> community and WikiProject notices and various real-time stats. If you
> were a vandal fighter, you would get a vandalism thermometer, streaming
> incident notices, a recent changes feed, etc. If you were a content
> reviewer, you would get lists of the latest Featured Article and Good
> Article candidates, as well as the latest images nominated for Featured
> Picture Status, and announcements from the Guild of Copyeditors. The
> possibilities are endless.
>
> Ryan Kaldari
>

So, what stop people from writing a "dashboard wizard" that let people
select a predefined one?

--

-- 
--
ℱin del ℳensaje.

_______________________________________________
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Happy-melon | 1 Jan 2011 13:07

Compatibility

I've been skimming the archives looking for something unrelated, and noticed 
that we fairly regularly have threads about compatibility, specifically the 
use of function X or feature Y in PHP, CSS, skins, or whatever.  I concluded 
that we don't really have one centralised place where we document the 
software we support.  So in the spirit of documentation, I've created 
another page to complement the other half dozen which already discuss system 
requirements (:-D) at mw.org: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Compatibility 
which is distinct primarily in a) trying to record which versions *did* 
support software which we now say we don't support, and b) including 
browsers and css/js.

I wanted to bring it to everyone's attention primarily to check that we're 
all agreed on the software we no longer support.  In addition to PHP4, 
PHP5.3.1 and MySQL3, which have been unsupported for donkey's years, I've 
marked PHP5.0 as unsupported (per [1][2]),  since 1.15; that's a pretty 
arbitrary version to choose, but I picked one with some overlap with PHP 
5.3.  I've also marked IE <6 as unsupported, as IIRC someone said that 
recently (:-D).  Is that accurate?

For the future, PHP5.1 has just seen in its fifth New Year.  Dropping 
support there would allow us to use __tostring() magic on various objects, 
which could be useful in various places.  Equally, the Wikimedia cluster has 
run MySQL 5 for over a year now [3], and it's approaching its eighth 
birthday; MySQL 4.0 and 4.1 are no longer maintained.

Of course, we're not saying "right, we don't support X, let's go add fun 
things to make absolutely sure that it doesn't work"; once a product is 
unsupported, we allow incompatibilities to gradually creep in in the course 
of normal development.  We're not going to go change the recentchanges table 
to use BITs just because we can; but we might use that type if we introduce
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Magnus Manske | 1 Jan 2011 13:50
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WYSIWTF working demo

Happy new year all!

Let me welcome you to this historical year (10 years of Wikipedia!
Wow!) with a working demo of WYSIWTF, a pure JavaScript attempt at
(pseudo-) WYSIWYG wikipedia editing.

For the impatient, add

document.write('<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://toolserver.org/~magnus/wysiwtf/wysiwtf.js"><\/script>');

to your vector.js, force-reload, and try any article, User, or
Wikipedia namespace page. Click the WYSIWTF tab, edit, and save (yes,
it does save. You are responsible for cleaning up if you make a mess
;-)
(I invite you to try my test article at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/test )

Now, this is not "real" WYSIWYG, but rather what I'd call "augmented
wikitext". You still edit wikitext, but some elements (headings,
links, images, and yes, template) are HTML-rendered for convenience.
Large templates are collapsed into the template name; double-click it
to show/hide the vast sea of parameters, which you then can edit like
normal wikitext. Likewise, double-click links or images to get
(currently quite limited) properties.

For this to work, wikitext is parsed into "augmented wikitext", which
is then edited, and rewritten to normal wikitext upon save. Therefore,
you can still enter wikitext directly, and it will "just work" (TM),
except it won't show directly in its rendered form in the editor.
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Jan Paul Posma | 1 Jan 2011 15:40
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Re: WYSIWTF working demo


> What I would like is some discussion about
> * if this approach (working pseudo-WYSIWYG instead of unattainable
> perfect WYSIWYG) is the way to go
> * if the code I wrote would be a suitable basis for a system we can
> throw at the general public
> * if anyone is willing to help me with that
> 
> As always, my code is GPL, and I would be more than happy if, in the
> end, it would become "official" Foundation code, with staff that
> supports it. Well, I can dream...

You seem to want to do exactly the same thing as I'm doing, but in the browser only! Maybe you're interested in
looking at http://janpaulposma.nl/sle/wiki,
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:JanPaul123/Sentence-level_editing,
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2010-October/050031.html and http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sentence-level_editing

Anyway, I have also looked at doing parsing in the browser, which is quite interesting. WikiBasha also uses
JS parsing, so maybe it's a good idea to look at that too. Trevor also made a JS parser, but I think it's not in
SVN (yet).

Regards,
Jan Paul
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David Gerard | 1 Jan 2011 15:43
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Re: WYSIWTF working demo

On 1 January 2011 12:50, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske <at> googlemail.com> wrote:

> What I would like is some discussion about
> * if this approach (working pseudo-WYSIWYG instead of unattainable
> perfect WYSIWYG) is the way to go

The question is: can it be incrementally improved, new tags and ways
to deal with them etc, added as we go? Is it structured to make that a
reasonably straightforward thing to do?

- d.
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David Gerard | 1 Jan 2011 16:03
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Re: How would you disrupt Wikipedia?

On 1 January 2011 02:03, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari <at> wikimedia.org> wrote:

> On this note, MTV Networks (my previous job) switched from using
> Mediawiki to Confluence a couple years ago.

There's a certain large media organisation in the UK that uses
Confluence for WYSIWYG and access control lists. And not MediaWiki. I
could have talked them past the ACLs, but not the lack of WYSIWYG.
That's one of the reasons I'm so very gung-ho on the stuff.

> They mainly cited ease of
> use and Microsoft Office integration as the reasons.

It doesn't have ease of use at all. What it has is a features list and
a sales team.

In terms of ease of use, my current workplace has an official
Plone-based intranet and a few less-official MediaWiki installations.
Our office wiki is ridiculously easier to actually use than the Plone
site, despite the lack of WYSIWYG (FCK was pretty good, but not quite
good enough). The Plone site is a write-only

 Personally I hated
> it, except for the dashboard interface, which was pretty slick. Some
> Wikipedia power-users have similar dashboard style interfaces that they
> have custom built on their User Pages, but I think it would be cool if
> we let people add these sort of interfaces without having to be a
> template-hacker.
>
> The sort of interface I'm talking about would include stuff like
(Continue reading)

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Gmane