Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

An idea was floated this week on the wikitech-l mailing list about converting the present MediaWiki logo (an embellished photograph of a sunflower, above right) into an SVG (i.e. converted it to a pictorial representation that can be easily scaled, below right). Whilst opinion was mixed over this colour of the bikeshed issue, Markus Krötzsch summarised the case for updating the logo:

The question was also raised about whether or not a revised MediaWiki logo would have to conform to WMF logo guidelines, which are based around the core colours of blue, green and red. "As for the colours", wrote developer Trevor Parscal, "I think there's no reason for MediaWiki's logo to conform to the WMF colour scheme. MediaWiki, like Wikipedia, has its own community of which some WMF staff are a part - it's totally reasonable for them to have their own identity."

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

• The automatic blocking of Tor exit nodes is working reliably again (bug #23321).
• Developer Max Semenik (User:MaxSem) urged those familiar with the technical English vocabulary of the new MediaWiki installer and proficient in a language other than English to help translate it into their language (wikitech-l mailing list).
• XML data "dumps" (backups) have been temporarily suspended given a significant hardware failure and the potential risk of losing data posed by overly hasty action (wikitech-l mailing list).
• Head of the 2010 Fundraising campaign Philippe Beaudette said on Saturday that, following 22 hours of testing, his team was happy with the technical infrastructure they had in place ahead of the official launch today. "There were a few initial hiccups," he wrote, "but they're resolved or being resolved nicely. The new cluster of servers for supporting the traffic is [also functioning well]" (foundation-l mailing list). See also this week's "News and notes".
• Developer and sometime Technology report writer User:TheDJ blogged about printing Wikipedia articles and his work in improving the process.
• At the end of last month, Microsoft published a cost-free Microsoft Office Word Add-in For MediaWiki that allows users to save Word documents into a MediaWiki wiki.

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15 November 2010 (all comments)

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• A quick test of the Microsoft add-in doesn't do much for me. In the Word document I used italics, underlining, bold face, and colored text at various points in a sentence. When I went to "save as" for the MediaWiki converter, it saved it as a text file of wikimarkup. Okay, that's not too bad. The not-so-good part was when I viewed the newly created file's contents it showed that only the standard wikimarkup for bolding and italics was saved. No spans were used for color, no underlining. Meh. Killiondude (talk) 07:48, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • When converting a Word document for the purpose of it becoming an article, omission of spans and underlining would actually be a feature, not a bug, since those things are typically only used in articles - if ever - in templates. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:06, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Did you reverse the order of articles and templates? I can see your point. However, it's not a "Wikipedia article converter according to WP:MOS" -- it's a generalized wiki thing. I tested a bit more after posting here and it can center content, create bullets and numbered lists, so there's a bit more functionality than I expected. I suppose the omissions are forgivable seeing as they've only just released it and there's likely to be *some* missing things in it. Killiondude (talk) 17:43, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Press release by Microsoft, from today: http://wikieducator.org/Microsoft_Launches_Open_Source_Filter_for_Mediawiki Regards, HaeB (talk) 10:30, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Ok, the new logo is good. 87.2.85.223 (talk) 20:17, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  Aw. I'd be sad to lose the direct connection from File:WikiThanks.png to the logo. - BanyanTree 02:06, 23 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]