Re: [Wikitech-l] An actual bikeshed
On 2013-01-23 3:38 PM, Jon Robson jdlrob...@gmail.com wrote: Suggested solution: Maybe some kind of voting system might be of use to force some kind of consensus rather than leaving problems unsolved. I'm fed up of receiving emails about the same problem I discussed weeks before that never got solved. It makes my mailbox ill. I mean if the question is really what colour is the bikeshed it would be good for people to propose colours, people to vote on preferred colours and at the end of say a week the majority colour wins and gets implemented (or in cases where there is no majority we discuss the front runners and other possible solutions). What colour should the polling booth be? I don't think the answer is voting. Perhaps there are some sheds that don't need to be painted. -bawolff P.s. if someone built a bikeshed in the wmf office they would be my hero ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Why are we still using captchas on WMF sites?
On 2013-01-22 3:30 PM, aude aude.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 8:18 PM, Luke Welling WMF lwell...@wikimedia.org wrote: That was not the end of the problem I was referring to. We know our specific captcha is broken at turning away machines. As far as I am aware we do not know how many humans are being turned away by the difficulty of it. It's at least impossible for blind users to solve the captcha, without an audio captcha. (unless they manage to find the toolserver account creation thing and enough motivated to do that) I am not convinced of the benefits of captcha versus other spam filtering techniques. Cheers, Katie Someone should write a browser addon to automatically decode and fill in captchas for blind users. (Only half joking) -bawolff __**_ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l -- @wikimediadc / @wikidata ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Coding conventions
On 2013-01-22 6:05 PM, Jeroen De Dauw jeroended...@gmail.com wrote: Hey, I hereby admit defeat. My thread was clearly not the ultimate bikeshed. Cheers -- On this bikeshed, allowing both styles sounds perfectly acceptable to me. -bawolff ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Html comments into raw wiki code: can they be wrapped into parsed html?
On 2013-01-22 6:03 PM, Alex Brollo alex.bro...@gmail.com wrote:
2013/1/22 Paul Selitskas p.selits...@gmail.com
What do you mean by
any wikicode (template call, parameter, link) present into
the value of infobox parameter breaks the stuff, since it is parsed
and
expanded by parser with unpredictable results.
If your {{{author}}} doesn't have anything and it's aсceptable, then
make
it {{{author|}}}, or {{#if:{{{author|}}}|span .}}. Please clarify
the
statement above.
Imagine that my infobox had a parameter author=, and imagine a clean
content as this:
author=Alessandro Manzoni
With my template code:
span data-author={{{author}}}/span
I get into parsed html:
span data-author=Alessandro Manzoni/span
Perfect!
But imagine that my template parameter is:
author=[[Alessandro Manzoni]]
When I pass the parameter content to span
data-author={{{author}}}/span, I dont' get into html page what I'll
like:
span data-author=[[Alessandro Manzoni]]/span
since wikicode [[Alessandro Manzoni]] will be interpreted by the server,
and parsed/expanded into a html link as usual, resulting into a big mess.
The same occurs for any wikicode and/or html passed into a infobox
template
parameter.
Alex brollo
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Have you tried {{#tag:nowiki|{{{author} to prevent interpretation?
There may still be issues with quotes. Im not sure.
-bawolff
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Completed ! Re: More Update on Ashburn data center switchover / migration – target date is week of 1/22/13
Good work to everyone involved! -bawolff On 2013-01-22 6:53 PM, Ct Woo ct...@wikimedia.org wrote: All, The switchover work is done. The site was was available to readers throughout the migration work though it was in read-only mode for about 32 minutes, when Asher and Mark had to migrate the database masters over from Tampa to Ashburn. We will cancel the reminding maintenance windows. Thank you all for your patience and understanding. Regards, CT Woo On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 10:57 AM, Ct Woo ct...@wikimedia.org wrote: All, We will be proceeding with the datacenter switchover plan this coming Tuesday (Jan 22, 2013), unless we discover some unexpected and insurmountable issues in our tests between now and then. During the 8-hour migration window on the 22nd, 23rd and 24th (from 17:00 UTC to 01:00 UTC hours / 9am to 5pm PST), there would be times (lasting about 30 minutes) where the site would be set to read-only mode, to facilitate master database switchovers from one datacenter to another. While the site should be available to readers, no new contents could be created, edited or uploaded. We are aware of the inconvenience and we have put together plans to minimize such annoyances, e.g., automating much of the procedures, mitigating known risks, and performing tests to identify issues prior to deployment. Given the scale and complexity of this migration, we do realize not all operational impact is predictable. Some users could experience intermittent site unavailability and/or performance issues unfortunately. You can follow the migration on chat.freenode.net http://irc.freenode.net (and not irc.freenode.org as mentioned in previous email) in the #wikimedia-operations channel. Thanks, CT Woo -- Forwarded message -- From: Ct Woo ct...@wikimedia.org Date: Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 12:07 PM Subject: Update on Ashburn data center switchover / migration – target date is week of 1/22/13 To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org, Development and Operations Engineers engineer...@lists.wikimedia.org All, The Migration team is in the last lap on completing the remaining tasks to ready our software stack and Ashburn infrastructure for the big switchover day. Per my last update, http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-October/063668.html with the Fundraising activity behind us now, the team has scheduled the *week of 22nd January*, 2013 to perform the switchover. We are going to block a 8-hour migration window on the *22nd, 23rd and 24**th*. During those periods, *17:00 UTC to 01:00 UTC hours (9am to 5pm PST*), there will be intermittent blackouts and they will be treated as 'planned' outages. You can follow the migration on irc.freenode.org in the #wikimedia-operations channel. The team is putting the finishing touches to the last few tasks and we will make the final Go/No decision on 18th Jan, 2013. An update will send out then. For those interested in tracking the progress, the meeting notes are captured on this wikitech page http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Eqiad_Migration_Planning#Improving_Switchover . *Please note that we will be restricting code deployment during that week, allowing only emergency and critical ones only.* Thanks. CT Woo ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Why are we still using captchas on WMF sites?
On 2013-01-21 3:56 AM, Andre Klapper aklap...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Mon, 2013-01-21 at 07:48 +, David Gerard wrote: On 21 January 2013 05:13, Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com wrote: On 01/20/2013 04:22 PM, David Gerard wrote: The MediaWiki captcha is literally worse than useless: it doesn't keep spambots out, and it does keep some humans out. I don't see how the spambot statement is true. Do you have evidence for it? That spambots get through at all. Evidence is not provided by simply repeating the statement. :) Does http://elie.im/publication/text-based-captcha-strengths-and-weaknessescount as evidence? (Copied and pasted from the mailing list archives) Sure captchas do prevent some limitted attacks - it makes it more effort then a 5 minute perl script. Most spammers are more sophisticated than that. -bawolff ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Why are we still using captchas on WMF sites?
Given that there are algorithms that can solve our captcha presumably they are mostly preventing the lazy and those that don't have enough knowledge to use those algorithims. I would guess that text on an image without any blurring or manipulation would be just as hard for those sorts of people to break. (Obviously that's a rather large guess). As a compromise maybe we should have straight text in image captchas. -bawolff On 2013-01-21 7:40 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 3:00 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: I mean, you could redefine something that doesn't block all spambots but does hamper a significant proportion of humans as successful, but it would be a redefinition. It's not a definition, it's a judgment. And whether or not it's a correct judgment depends on how many spambots are blocked, and how many productive individuals are hampered, among other things. After all, reverting spam hampers people too. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Why are we still using captchas on WMF sites?
This question is something we've also been asking ourselves on the E3 team, as part of our work on account creation. I think we all agree that CAPTCHAs are at best a necessary evil. They are a compromise we make in our user experience, in order to combat automated attacks. That's kind of missing the point of the original poster. The point being that they are an *un*nessary evil and do not prevent automated attacks whatsoever. [Snip] To get more numbers on how much taking away the CAPTCHA might gain us in terms of human registrations, we have considered a two hour test (to start with) of removing the CAPTCHA from the registration page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Account_creation_UX/CAPTCHA That kind of test would probably not be an accurate measurement of what kind of spam would be unleashed if we permanently removed it, but the hourly volume of registrations on enwiki is enough to tell us the human impact. That would be interesting. Remember that captchas arent just on the user reg page though. -bawolff ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Caching of images in varnish
There are reports everywhere of uploading new versions of images failing (upload works but new version does not show up). Last time this happened all that needed to be done was fot varnishhtcpd to be restarted on the image cache servers. [1] could someone with the ability to check, check if that needs to be done again? Imho this type of issue is a rather serious one which causes lots of frustration and confusion. [1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41130 -bawolff ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Huggle is now in git
English is a useless language anyhow. There's not even a compilier for it! -bawolff On 2013-01-18 11:49 AM, Petr Bena benap...@gmail.com wrote: * in case anyone is interested in * common mistake done by me. One day I will hopefully master english :) On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 4:48 PM, Petr Bena benap...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I would like to remind even here that we have moved the source code to github this week. In case anyone is interesting in improving huggle or joining the project, you are welcome to do so: https://github.com/benapetr/huggle Please note that branch csharp is the branch containing latest version you probably want to work on. Trunk is huggle 2x. Have fun ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Google Summer of Code 2013
One thing I would like to see is code from projects being merged into core at a regular basis instead of just at the end. Obviously that might not be possible for all projects depending on what your project is, but many that modify core can be done in incremental steps. I don't know about last year specificly but in other years there have been gsoc projects coded away happily in branches, getting code review but not held to the same standard as core was. When they tried to merge it the student gets a rather rude awekening with all sorts of objections to their code they didnt expect. Tl; dr: good in depth feedback early and often is critical for success. If we make people merge their projects in small steps as they complete independant features (like once every 2 weeks) gsocers get better feedback and no giant painful merge at the end. -bawolff On 2013-01-17 3:47 PM, Petr Bena benap...@gmail.com wrote: hi, Can you explain the roles of mentors and admins? Also what is requirement for participants? I suppose it's for students? On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 8:32 PM, Quim Gil q...@wikimedia.org wrote: Surprised? Me too! Please read / watch / discuss https://www.mediawiki.org/**wiki/Summer_of_Code_2013 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2013 *Nothing* about GSOC 2013 is confirmed at this point, but there is no harm in starting collecting ideas and recruiting participants. Your feedback is welcome at the wiki page - or here if you are really really lazy. Reason: potential participants visiting that page in the near future will have an easier time following background discussions if they are take place there. Thank you! -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/**User:Qgil http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil __**_ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Generating documentation from JavaScript doc comments
Would it be possible/difficult to get something similar working for gadgets on WMF wikis? Helder What would be really cool would be if the js content handler code detected code doc comments and formatted them nicely. Something similar to how back in the old days people used to have things like /* ==header == */ That would be picked up by mw and formatted as headers. But automatic and more complete. -bawolff ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] The ultimate bikeshed: typos in commit messages
On 2013-01-16 7:20 PM, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 6:07 PM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 17/01/13 00:14, Chad wrote: Really, I think the whole thread is moot with the pending upgrade. Typos should always be fixed before merging (I think we all agree?), and the new abilities to fix these from the UI means we won't need to mark people as -1 to do so. I didn't mention commit summaries in my post. My interest is in nitpicking in general. Jeroen calls arguments over commit summaries the /ultimate/ bikeshed, which they may or may not be; there are plenty of other examples which may compete for that title. Indeed, I had missed that. Nitpicking is the minor end of the negative feedback spectrum. By definition, it has the smallest concrete payoff when advice is followed, in exchange for complex, context-dependent social costs. You should think carefully before you do it. *nod* I agree. And really, nitpicks in code can always be cleaned up later (heck, we did it for years with SVN). It's only nitpicks in commit messages that should always be fixed, since they're immutable after submission. And it's *that* that I think won't be a big deal anymore (since any drive-by contributor could fix a typo on the spot). If we're talking nitpicks in general. Ive seen -1 for things like someFunc($a, $b) instead of someFunc( $a, $b ) which I agree does more harm than good. I imagine how much someone considers spelling issues to be a minor nitpick varries quite a lot between people. -bawolff ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
