Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-08-30/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-08-30/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-08-30/In the media
Developers, most of them unpaid, help to write improvements to the MediaWiki software on which WMF wikis are based. Some of these improvements are very specific to running a wiki; however, others could be useful to completely different projects, such as the provision of support for .OGG files and general-purpose handlers of CSS and JavaScript files. Trevor Pascal, one of a handful of paid programmers for the Foundation, has outlined proposals to untangle the specifically MediaWiki-only code from those sections which (i) had either been imported from other projects and would be easier to update in isolation, or (ii) could be reused by other projects in the same way that text and images can already be easily found and reused by others: "Overall, it would be great if we could take a look at this and other ways to better share our work with non-MediaWiki projects, and give back to the open-source community." How this could best be achieved is still up for debate. Suggestions include the use of the PEAR mechanism for sharing PHP modules.
We continue a series of articles about this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) with student Peter Potrowl, who describes his project to develop a system for transcluding templates from other wikis:
| “ | I have been a daily user of MediaWiki for more than five years and, in the months before the application phase of GSoC, I noticed that sharing templates across wikis would be particularly interesting and could save a lot of energy, especially for the small wikis whose users often have to re-create templates which already exist in bigger wikis. Having some templates (license templates, climate and population charts and, why not, infoboxes) stored on a reference wiki (like the images on Commons) would allow each wiki to transclude them on demand and updating the data on that wiki would update it on the small wikis as well. After consulting MediaWiki's central bug and feature request repository Bugzilla, I found that some feature requests had already been opened for quite a long time and I decided that my proposal for GSoC would be to answer those requests.
After my proposal was accepted, I worked for three months this [northern] summer, supervised by Roan Kattouw (User:Catrope), to implement this "interwiki template transclusion" in MediaWiki's core. The challenge was to produce reliable and efficient code ... to allow its deployment on the WMF's servers. For this, the opinion and advice of the other MediaWiki developers was very helpful and, with them and my mentor, I managed to produce a prototype which is currently running and can be tested by anybody. Further improvements still need to be made before this code is merged into the trunk (i.e. goes live to any sites) and I hope Wikimedia contributors will be able to use this feature in a few months. I plan to continue improving MediaWiki after this. Thanks to all the people who contributed! |
” |
Readers interested in the possibilities of interwiki transclusion may wish to refer to Daniel Kinzler's blog post earlier this month.
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.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-08-30/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-08-30/Opinion
On his Inkdroid blog, Library of Congress coder Ed Summers published a list of the most heavily linked websites on Wikipedia. (Summers recently started Linkypedia, a tool analyzing external links on the English Wikipedia to a given web site, providing more information than MediaWiki's own external link search function – see Signpost story.) The number-one host, not surprisingly, is the Wikipedia toolserver, with 3,169,993 links; this is followed by Google.com, with 2,117,967 links.
To generate more meaningful results, a mainspace-only chart was then generated. The most frequently linked host in the article namespace is the website of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, with over 400,000 links, followed by the digital object identifier database at dx.doi.org, the Internet Movie Database and books.google.com.
Summers also provided lists of the most linked hosts in the .edu and .gov domains, and of the 100 most frequently linked top-level domains (the three country domains of non-English language countries that are linked most often are .de, .fr and .jp).
In a related endeavour, researcher Finn Årup Nielsen compiled a list of the most frequently linked news sites, based on the usage of the {{cite news}} template.
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Last weekend, Wikipedians/Wikimedians gathered at the two-day Wiki-Conference NYC at New York University. The event comprised various panels, open-space discussions, and five-minute lightning talks. Two keynote presentations were made, by author (and NYU lecturer) Clay Shirky and by the Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director Sue Gardner. Shirky's presentation was mostly based on topics from his recent book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (the book's review in next week's Signpost will mention a few more details from his talk). Some of his statements were taken up by Sue Gardner on the next day, who spoke on the "Role of the Wikimedia Foundation in Supporting and Building the Movement". She started by showing slides that she normally uses to introduce non-Wikimedian audiences to Wikipedia and Wikimedia, and explained why she highlights certain aspects which audiences often misunderstand or don't know about. She then presented some new PR videos based on interviews with Wikimedia volunteers, produced at last month's Wikimania Conference. The audience found the videos to be well-made, although there was some concern whether the age of the interviewed persons was representative of the community as a whole. A low quality recording of Shirky's keynote is available, along with several audio recordings and slides from the talks. Better quality recordings from the live video stream might become available later.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-08-30/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-08-30/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-08-30/In focus
The Arbitration Committee closed one case and opened none this week, leaving one open.
This case resulted from the merging of several Arbitration requests on the same topic into a single case, and the failure of a related request for comment to make headway. Innovations have been introduced for this case, including special rules of conduct that were put in place at the start of the arbitration. However, the handling of the case has received criticism from some participants (for example, although the evidence and workshop pages were closed for an extended period, no proposals were posted on the proposed decision page and participants were prevented from further discussing their case on the case pages (see Signpost coverage).
Last week, a proposed decision drafted by Newyorkbrad, Risker, and Rlevse was posted. This sparked a large quantity of unstructured discussion which mostly consists of concerns about the proposed decision (see also last week's Signpost coverage). Recently, arbitrators started modifying the proposed decision as they attempt to address these concerns. Participants also started managing the quantity of unstructured discussion which has significantly increased during the week.
This case concerned accusations of incivility, disruptive editing, a flawed informal mediation, and tag-teaming to control the content on articles related to race and intelligence. Following a number of delays (see Signpost coverage from June 28, July 5, and July 12), the case moved to the proposed decision phase. The decision that was proposed by the drafting arbitrator, Coren, sparked several concerns among participants and non-participants, and 9 out of 10 active arbitrators opposed the proposed outcome (see last week's Signpost coverage for more details). Several proposals by other arbitrators were voted on, a number of which were drafted by Roger Davies. The case was closed during the week, and the final decision was posted.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-08-30/Humour
