Re: [Wikitech-l] What do we want to accomplish? (was Re: WikiCreole)
On 5 January 2011 04:58, Jay Ashworth j...@baylink.com wrote: The last time I spent any appreciable time on wikitech (which was 4 or 5 years ago), *someone* had a grammar and parser about 85-90% working. I don't have that email archive due to a crash, so I can't pin a name to it or comment on whether it's someone in this thread... or, alas, comment on what happened later. But he seemed pretty excited and happy, as I recall. Many, many bright people have dashed their foreheads against the problem. Andreas Jonsson thinks he's largely cracked it: http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2010/08/22/staring-into-the-eye-of-cthulhu/ - and even that required custom patches to ANTLR. The result runs in C and is of comparable speed to PHP. It isn't quite a specification as I understand it, but it's on the way. - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG)
On 05.01.2011 05:25, Jay Ashworth wrote: I believe the snap reaction here is you haven't tried to diff XML, have you? A text-based diff of XML sucks, but how about a DOM based (structural) diff? -- daniel ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Cleanup of too small categories
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 4:21 PM, Lars Aronsson l...@aronsson.se wrote: What tools are there to count the number of categories, sort them by the number of members (subcategories and articles), and to determine which branches of the category tree should be pruned? With the new category table in 1.16 it should be relatively easy to create a special page SmallCategories, just like ShortPages. Bryan ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG)
On 11-01-05 02:09 AM, Daniel Kinzler wrote: On 05.01.2011 05:25, Jay Ashworth wrote: I believe the snap reaction here is you haven't tried to diff XML, have you? A text-based diff of XML sucks, but how about a DOM based (structural) diff? -- daniel I don't think a discussion on diff comparison of XML has much point. I believe the idea floating around here (or at least the idea I'm thinking of based on these discussions) is that we would store page text in an xml format or a serialized php format or something else where contents are semantically noted with things like 'template title=Template:Fooparam name=1.../paramparam name=foobar/param/templateiThis is italic/ilink internal=true title=FooBarFooBar/link', to actually edit this page content we provide the data in multiple formats: - Fully parsed output for page viewing - A semantically marked up version of the html that is compatible with the use of a WYSIWYG editor and can be converted back to the xml format and then saved - A WikiText like format similar to the WikiText we already have that users can edit in plaintext, we use the xml and covert it into that format, and then when the user saves parse that back into the xml format. Naturally, if we're doing things like this, then rather than diffing the ugly xml, the natural thing would most likely be to take the xml format of both pages, convert it into that WikiText-like plaintext format and show the user a diff of that so they know what meaningful changes were made to the page. If you really wanted to, you could also show them a diff of the end html as an option, but that's fairly pointless. As an extra bonus, besides enabling WYSIWYG, having that xml format also has a good chance of making efforts of giving users an in-page diff marking up what was actually changed in the contents itself much easier. ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name] -- ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name] ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG)
On 5 January 2011 22:16, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: Having XML-based content would also enable a wide variety of new re-uses of Wikimedia content. People could build all sorts of custom apps, games, feeds, etc., without having to worry about broken syntax or resorting to screen scraping (like we do for our mobile site). It would also make implementing semantic features easier and thus could improve our search capabilities. Plus it makes a great Bloody Mary! Before we go haring off - what would be *really* nice would be getting Magnus' WYSIFTW developed to a stage where it's fit to put in front of nontechnical users and do some decent usability testing: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WYSIFTW Magnus does this stuff in his spare time. and has to get back to actual work - but there's a list of needed features (which of course anyone can add to) and I know he very much welcomes other people hacking on it. It's not ready for prime time yet, but it's one of the most promising approaches I've seen in a while. (And the nice thing about WYSIFTW is that it requires *no* action on server side - the only thing it needs right now is to be developed to a state where it can be usability-tested.) - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Need some input
Chad wrote: David Gerard wrote: You're just saying that because pirates stole all the well-formed XML. Real pirates use serialized PHP objects. -Chad Can Pirate Roberts be considered a Real Pirate or does account sharing disqualify him? ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] References bookmarklet?
http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2011/01/04/what-you-see-is-for-the-win/comment-page-1/#comment-13632 Someone suggested this on my blog. It's an *excellent* idea and needs a button added for it in the present Vector editor. Jen says: Wednesday 5th January, 2011 at 10:28 pm (Edit) Re John Broughton’s idea for “a **single click** way of generating the standard text/code for a footnote”… Would there be any way to make a nice little bookmarklet so people could drag a URL onto the button, and it would copy a wiki-citation to the clipboard? - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Need some input
On 5 January 2011 22:30, Platonides platoni...@gmail.com wrote: Can Pirate Roberts be considered a Real Pirate or does account sharing disqualify him? He's a role account, hence the honorific Dread. I think we need to consider n00b-biting qualities, that being the other quotidian issue. Ninjas kill them stealthily and you never know they were there. Pirates are rather more flamboyant in introducing them to the sharks. As the technical contributors, which do you think is better for educating the world? - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] SpecialPages and Related users and titles
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 2:32 AM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: Special pages are nice because they have a base class with lots of features. They are flexible and easy to add. The main problem with actions is that most of them are implemented in that horror that is Article.php. This is from a developer's perspective, not a user's. I was only really thinking about user-visible consistency. From that perspective, I think it's clear that using only special pages with no actions would be an improvement. I don't think the URL differences need to be reflected in the code. If you really liked, you could implement the special pages as wrappers around the current code, so the special page just called the same Article method as now (maybe with a bit of refactoring). (I know Aryeh makes up his mind about things like this rather faster than I do; I look forward to his reply which will no doubt tell me all the reasons why he's not changing his position.) Happy to oblige. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG)
I just started testing WYSIWTF; I would like to encourage as many other people on this list to do so as well. On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 2:22 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 5 January 2011 22:16, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: Having XML-based content would also enable a wide variety of new re-uses of Wikimedia content. People could build all sorts of custom apps, games, feeds, etc., without having to worry about broken syntax or resorting to screen scraping (like we do for our mobile site). It would also make implementing semantic features easier and thus could improve our search capabilities. Plus it makes a great Bloody Mary! Before we go haring off - what would be *really* nice would be getting Magnus' WYSIFTW developed to a stage where it's fit to put in front of nontechnical users and do some decent usability testing: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WYSIFTW Magnus does this stuff in his spare time. and has to get back to actual work - but there's a list of needed features (which of course anyone can add to) and I know he very much welcomes other people hacking on it. It's not ready for prime time yet, but it's one of the most promising approaches I've seen in a while. (And the nice thing about WYSIFTW is that it requires *no* action on server side - the only thing it needs right now is to be developed to a state where it can be usability-tested.) - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Introduce phpQuery into MediaWiki?
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 3:04 AM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: CSS selectors are the worst part of jQuery, I wish they weren't in it. Sizzle is slow and bulky -- necessarily so considering what it does, but a more sensible function-based API could have exposed a rich feature set to users without introducing nearly so much overhead. In recent browsers (including IE8), you should be able to implement selectors very efficiently with querySelector() and querySelectorAll(). I should hope jQuery does this. PHP already provides XPath, which is integrated with the DOM extension and is just as feature-rich as CSS. We use it in the ImageMap extension. So if you wanted an insecure text protocol for DOM node selection, you could just use that. Pretty much every web developer already knows selectors, though, while almost nobody uses XPath. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG)
On 5 January 2011 22:47, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: I just started testing WYSIWTF; I would like to encourage as many other people on this list to do so as well. It's not even close to finished - but the more features we can add and the more bugs we can find, the closer to a proper usability test we are. Devs! Please give it a go! Please report problems! - d. On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 2:22 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WYSIFTW Magnus does this stuff in his spare time. and has to get back to actual work - but there's a list of needed features (which of course anyone can add to) and I know he very much welcomes other people hacking on it. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Need some input
Kittahs Ninjas Pirates ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Need some input
Ninjas 9000. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Expensive parser function count
Browsing the html code of source pages, I found this statement into a html comment: *Expensive parser function count: 0/500* I'd like to use this statement to evaluate lightness of a page, mainly testing the expensiveness of templates into the page but: in your opinion, given that the best would be a 0/500 value, what are limits for a good, moderately complex, complex page, just to have a try to work about? What is a really alarming value that needs fast fixing? And - wouldn't a good idea to display - just with a very small mark or string into a corner of the page - this datum into the page, allowing a fast feedback? Alex ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Need some input
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 5:40 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Pirates are rather more flamboyant in introducing them to the sharks. As the technical contributors, which do you think is better for educating the world? [[Project:Don't feed the sharks]] ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Need some input
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 5:43 PM, Benjamin Lees emufarm...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 5:40 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Pirates are rather more flamboyant in introducing them to the sharks. As the technical contributors, which do you think is better for educating the world? [[Project:Don't feed the sharks]] Candygram. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Need some input
On 1/5/11 5:48 PM, George Herbert wrote: [[Project:Don't feed the sharks]] Candygram. /thread ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiCreole (was Re: What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG))
- Original Message - From: Brion Vibber br...@pobox.com A good document structure would allow useful editing for both simple paragraphs and complex features like tables and templates even on such primitive devices, by giving a dedicated editing interface the information it needs to address individual paragraphs, template parameters, table cells, etc. A 'dedicated editing interface' is the canonical counter example to my #1 fundamental tenet of program and systems design: Get The Glue Right. The Right Glue, in this case, is bare HTML, which can be run nearly everywhere these days. I would go so far as to say that this sort of fallback interface would in fact be far superior to editing a big blob of wikitext on a small cell phone screen -- finding the bit you want to edit in a huge paragraph full of references and image thumbnails is pretty dreadful at the best of times. Of course it would. But the target audience here isn't people who *have* anything else; it's people in the Sudan. Well, the target audience I see from up here at 43,000 feet. Cheers, -- jra ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] What do we want to accomplish? (was Re: WikiCreole)
- Original Message - From: David Gerard dger...@gmail.com Many, many bright people have dashed their foreheads against the problem. Andreas Jonsson thinks he's largely cracked it: http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2010/08/22/staring-into-the-eye-of-cthulhu/ - and even that required custom patches to ANTLR. The result runs in C and is of comparable speed to PHP. I suspect it was Steve Bennett's attack run I was remembering. Did anyone ever pull statistics about exactly how many instances of that Last Five Percent there really were, as I suspect I suggested at the time? Cheers, -- jra ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Expensive parser function count
On 1/5/2011 8:07 PM, Alex Brollo wrote: Browsing the html code of source pages, I found this statement into a html comment: *Expensive parser function count: 0/500* I'd like to use this statement to evaluate lightness of a page, mainly testing the expensiveness of templates into the page but: in your opinion, given that the best would be a 0/500 value, what are limits for a good, moderately complex, complex page, just to have a try to work about? What is a really alarming value that needs fast fixing? And - wouldn't a good idea to display - just with a very small mark or string into a corner of the page - this datum into the page, allowing a fast feedback? The expensive parser function count only counts the use of a few functions when they do a DB query, PAGESINCATEGORY, PAGESIZE, and #ifexist are the only ones I know of. While a page that uses a lot of these would likely be slow, these aren't heavily used functions, and a page might be slow even if it uses zero. The other 3 limits: Preprocessor node count, Post-expand include size, and Template argument size are probably better for a measurement of complexity, though I don't know what a typical value for these might be. -- Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man) ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG)
Original Message - From: Daniel Kinzler dan...@brightbyte.de On 05.01.2011 05:25, Jay Ashworth wrote: I believe the snap reaction here is you haven't tried to diff XML, have you? A text-based diff of XML sucks, but how about a DOM based (structural) diff? Sure, but how much more processor horsepower is that going to take. Scale is a driver in Mediawiki, for obvious reasons. Cheers, -- jra ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] What would be a perfect wiki syntax? (Re: WYSIWYG)
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 7:37 PM, Jay Ashworth j...@baylink.com wrote: Original Message - From: Daniel Kinzler dan...@brightbyte.de On 05.01.2011 05:25, Jay Ashworth wrote: I believe the snap reaction here is you haven't tried to diff XML, have you? A text-based diff of XML sucks, but how about a DOM based (structural) diff? Sure, but how much more processor horsepower is that going to take. Scale is a driver in Mediawiki, for obvious reasons. I suspect that diffs are relatively rare events in the day to day WMF processing, though non-trivial. That said, and as much of a fan of some sort of conceptually object oriented page data approach... DOM? Really?? We're not trying to do 99% of what that does; we just need object / element contents, style and perhaps minimal other attributes, and order within a page. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] What do we want to accomplish? (was Re: WikiCreole)
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 7:35 PM, Jay Ashworth j...@baylink.com wrote: - Original Message - From: David Gerard dger...@gmail.com Many, many bright people have dashed their foreheads against the problem. Andreas Jonsson thinks he's largely cracked it: http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2010/08/22/staring-into-the-eye-of-cthulhu/ - and even that required custom patches to ANTLR. The result runs in C and is of comparable speed to PHP. I suspect it was Steve Bennett's attack run I was remembering. Did anyone ever pull statistics about exactly how many instances of that Last Five Percent there really were, as I suspect I suggested at the time? Cheers, -- jra Expansion off how many instances..? - At some point in the corner, the fix is to change the templates and pages to match a more sane parser's capabilities or a more standard specification for the markup, rather than make the parser match the insanity that's already out there. If we know what we're looking at, we can assign corner cases to an on-wiki cleanup hit squad. Who knows how many of the corners we can outright assassinate that way, but it's worth a go... The less used it is and harder to code for it is, the easier it is for us to justify taking it out. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] What do we want to accomplish? (was Re: WikiCreole)
- Original Message - From: George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 7:35 PM, Jay Ashworth j...@baylink.com wrote: Did anyone ever pull statistics about exactly how many instances of that Last Five Percent there really were, as I suspect I suggested at the time? Expansion off how many instances..? - The thing you want expanded, George, is Last Five Percent; I refer there to (I think it was) David Gerard's comment earlier that the first 95% of wikisyntax fits reasonably well into current parser building frameworks, and the last 5% causes well adjusted programmers to consider heroin... or something like that. :-) At some point in the corner, the fix is to change the templates and pages to match a more sane parser's capabilities or a more standard specification for the markup, rather than make the parser match the insanity that's already out there. If we know what we're looking at, we can assign corner cases to an on-wiki cleanup hit squad. Who knows how many of the corners we can outright assassinate that way, but it's worth a go... The less used it is and harder to code for it is, the easier it is for us to justify taking it out. Yup; that's the point I was making. The argument advanced was always there's too much usage of that ugly stuff to consider Just Not Supporting It and I always asked whether anyone with larger computers than me had ever extracted actual statistics, and no one ever answered. Cheers, -- jra ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
