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13 June 2011

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Wikipedians 90% male and largely altruist; 800 public policy students add 8.8 million bytes; brief news
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Revere, Palin and Colbert generate activity; British Wikipedia "cleanser"; brief news
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Featured lists hit the main page
Arbitration report
More workshop proposals in Tree shaping case; further votes in PD of other case
Technology report
1.18 extension bundling; mobile testers needed; brief news
 

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2011-06-13

1.18 extension bundling; mobile testers needed; brief news

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By Jarry1250

Which extensions should be bundled with MediaWiki 1.18?

With the release of MediaWiki 1.17 to external sites (its so-called "tarball" release) being drawn out by the incidence of a long series of bugs – a release is now expected "within 24 hours" of the publication of this issue – attention is rapidly turning to design decisions regarding the MediaWiki 1.18 tarball release. In particular, the installer included in the release of 1.17 supported the packaging of commonly used extensions with the software itself, in an attempt to make "straight out of the box" MediaWiki work more like a Wikimedia wiki. Although it remains both difficult and undesirable to replicate the look and feel of a Wikimedia wiki entirely, given that they run approximately 80 extensions, at the moment, even basic extensions such as ParserFunctions must be manually installed by the end user. Therefore, to ease the technical knowledge required to set up a basic wiki, Wikimedia developer and bugmeister Mark Hershberger this week opened the call for a shortlist of the most needed extensions of the wikitech-l mailing list. Though there was concern from fellow developer Robert Lanphier that including even a small number of extensions would push back the rapidly approaching target date for release of the 1.18 tarball, former CTO Brion Vibber was unconcerned: "all that's required is to drop some directories into the tarball, and they'll be available for selection in the installer".

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.

How you can help
Test the prototype mobile site

Answer the Foundation's call for testers of its new mobile gateway by grabbing your smartphone, if you have one, and navigating to [1]. Then, leave feedback on the experience via the link at the top.

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2011-06-13

Wikipedians 90% male and largely altruist; 800 public policy students add 8.8 million bytes; brief news




       

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