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Trials and tribulations of image rotation, Article Feedback version 5, and new diff colours

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By Jarry1250

Image rotation change mishandled?

As reported previously, 1.18 fixed the display of images that would previously have displayed upside-down.

Questions were asked this week about the handling of a bug fix, deployed weeks ago with MediaWiki 1.18 (and reported at the time), that aimed to correct MediaWiki's display of photographs taken with the camera upside-down or sideways.

It has now been calculated that the number of images which had been relying on the previous behaviour numbered in the tens of thousands, according to lists generated on 4 December. Human tagging followed up on by a bot has since been able to reduce the number substantially, leaving approximately 3000 at the time of writing, although many more may still be tagged. Although the potential for this kind of problem had been discussed since deployment, it only attracted great attention after thumbnail deletions begun earlier this month revealed the issue on hundreds more images. One Commons contributor commented that they had "trouble thinking of any single act of vandalism we've ever suffered that rivals the amount of damage to Wikimedia done by this [change]".

The criticism has prompted suggestions that greater care should be taken with future fixes to any problematically large existing corpus such as photographic images. Proposals include relying on future projects such as the parser rewrite to "ancestor" existing pages and images, that is, leaving them untouched by fixes until they can be dealt with at a later date. Developer Bryan Tong Minh admitted on the wikitech-l mailing list that it looked like "automatic image rotation [was] not as good an idea as Brion and I originally thought".

ArticleFeedback version 5

One of the four possible interfaces users may experience when version 5 of the Article Feedback extension goes live later in the week

Later this week, version 5 of the ArticleFeedback extension will be deployed to approximately 10,000[1] articles on the English Wikipedia. The version differs from its predecessor insofar as it moves away from an emphasis on participation and quality, and instead is set to focus on "finding ways for readers to contribute productively to building the encyclopedia".

Visitors to the 10,000 articles will, after deployment, no longer see the existing interface for "star rating" pages, but instead find alternative designs at the bottom of articles. The four such designs being trialled include a freetext suggestion field, an invitation to edit, and a series of more directed text fields that the user can select between. Visitors to the pages will be allocated at random to one of the four designs and the designs compared.

In brief

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.

Corrections

  1. ^ An earlier version of this article gave an earlier estimate of 100,000; the number of articles affected has since been reduced.
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Regarding the AFTv5 roll-out, we've reduced the sample size initially to 10,000 articles.--Eloquence* 18:25, 13 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Erik, corrected now. Skomorokh 18:29, 13 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Another update on AFTv5: We're likely postponing the initial deployment to next week to do some more QA and fix some remaining known issues. Schedule updates will be visible on the Software deployments page.-Eloquence* 02:22, 15 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]



       

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