Re: [Wikitech-l] Mailman archives broken?
Hi, On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 7:07 PM, Daniel Zahn dz...@wikimedia.org wrote: the last time we had to rebuild archives was about 2 weeks ago. Unfortunately this is a major drawback of removing messages from archives as you pointed out and we are aware of it. We had a thread there though that contained private information and we also did not want to refuse the request of the person affected to remove their data. A subsequent request that followed shortly after was actually rejected for this very reason. In the future such requests will more likely rejected and if unavoidable we will just XXX out information instead of removing complete threads to avoid this from happening again. Everybody on this list please be extra careful about posting private information to a public list you might regret in the future. Sorry for breaking links, we are aware URLs should never change if at all possible. Thank you for the explanation, Daniel. -- Guillaume Paumier ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Mailman archives broken?
On 17 August 2012 02:23, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Daniel Zahn wrote: In this case the request was for a complete thread to be removed. Since many people reply with full quotes it usually repeats the information in almost every message. (TOFU-posting). But you are right, even in these cases we should, and will, just replace content of every message with a deleted message. What is your plan to clean up the mess you made? Rewrite the sucky archiver in Mailman? One thing I would like to see is Google indexing of the WMF archive enabled again. All the third-party archives not under our control are in the search engines, there's not actually any sane reason not to have the official archive indexed - unless it's just to reduce the noise of complaints from people who erroneously think it's possible to remove their own words from the Internet. (We used to substitute it with ht://dig, which was so incredibly awful that nothing at all was a reasonable alternative.) - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Smart machine-learning based anti-spam system (I wish!)
Yeah STiki and more importantly ClueBot NG are what I mean when I say outside of Wikimedia (who already have bots for this). I looked into them a bit and planned to ask to look at some of the code if I went along with the project. -- ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name] On Thu, 16 Aug 2012 14:59:56 -0700, Chris Steipp cste...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi Daniel, A lot of your ideas are covered by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:STiki. Andrew has done a lot of great research, if you haven't read his papers yet that might be a good intro to the type of machine learning approaches that have been used. That being said, I would love to have some system that is constantly learning from the edits that are flagged as spam, that we can query with new edits from AbuseFilter to get a score of how likely it is that this new edit is spam. If you get around to working on your system, it would be great to work out some way to interface. On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 11:16 AM, Daniel Friesen li...@nadir-seen-fire.com wrote: I've had a good idea for an anti-spam system for awhile. Blocks, Captchas, and local filters, all the tricks we've been using end up not working well enough to easily deal with the spam on a lot of wikis. I know this because I've been continually dealing with the spam on a small dead wiki. Simple AntiSpam, AntiBot, Captchas, TorBlock, Abuse Filter... Time after time I expand my filters more and more. But inevitably a few days later spam not covered by my filters comes through and I have to do it again. I ended up having to deal with it more today and then started writing out the details I've had for awhile on a machine-learning based anti-spam system. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Dantman/Anti-spam_system Of course. While I have the whole idea for the ui, backend stuff, how to handle the service, etc... I haven't done the actual machine-learning stuff before. Also naturally just like Gareth, OAuth, and other things this is just another one of my ideas I don't have the time and resources to do and wish I had the financial backing to work on. -- ~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] Smart machine-learning based anti-spam system (I wish!)
On Thu, 16 Aug 2012 16:50:27 -0700, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 17/08/12 04:16, Daniel Friesen wrote: Of course. While I have the whole idea for the ui, backend stuff, how to handle the service, etc... I haven't done the actual machine-learning stuff before. I would think that the actual machine learning stuff would be the hard part. I stopped using Thunderbird's Bayesian spam tagging feature years ago, when it started sorting emails from smart people in with the spam. The computer thought that the smart people were using long words with a similar frequency to the random dictionary words that padded out the spam messages. I haven't worked with machine learning either, but I'm guessing it's not as simple as feeding a pre-tagged data set into a stock Bayesian filter library. -- Tim Starling Yeah, Bayesian is probably too old to use. ClueBot NG appears to be using an Abstract Neural Network [ANN] implementation to do it's spam testing. From the documentation [ClueBot NG] it sounds like one of the trickier parts is understanding the WikiText enough to extract the words needed and whanot out of it. [ANN] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network [ClueBot NG] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ClueBot_NG -- ~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] Mailman archives broken?
I doubt fixing this requires rewriting mailman. It only requires dummy messages to be reinserted where they've been deleted and the archives to be rebuilt after this, just as if the correct procedure had been followed from the start. This, by the way, is by some orders of magnitude easier and quicker than fixing all the thousands of broken links across all the wikis. While we're on it, maybe someone will understand why the August archive is now full with no subject emails which seem to come from other eras and have the most random ids. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-August/thread.html#1052 Nemo ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Mailman archives broken?
David Gerard wrote: On 17 August 2012 02:23, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Daniel Zahn wrote: In this case the request was for a complete thread to be removed. Since many people reply with full quotes it usually repeats the information in almost every message. (TOFU-posting). But you are right, even in these cases we should, and will, just replace content of every message with a deleted message. What is your plan to clean up the mess you made? Rewrite the sucky archiver in Mailman? I always figured it was a feature of Mailman that it's so difficult to modify the archives. They're really not supposed to be tampered with. One thing I would like to see is Google indexing of the WMF archive enabled again. All the third-party archives not under our control are in the search engines, there's not actually any sane reason not to have the official archive indexed - unless it's just to reduce the noise of complaints from people who erroneously think it's possible to remove their own words from the Internet. (We used to substitute it with ht://dig, which was so incredibly awful that nothing at all was a reasonable alternative.) Yes, this probably makes sense. Bugzilla went the same route (excluded from search engines, everyone relied on mirrors of the wikibugs-l mailing list, finally allowed back in to search engine indices). The situation is even more bleak for private lists. With those lists, there's no way to search the lists at all, as they're excluded from external search engines indices and the internal search has been disabled for years. The relevant bug is https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/17390. As MaxSem commented, perhaps Mailman ought to be re-evaluated as the mailing list software, though I've yet to come across (m)any software packages that are better, unfortunately. MZMcBride ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
Brandon Harris wrote: On Aug 16, 2012, at 7:18 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Ryan Lane wrote: What is your plan to clean up the mess you made? I need to call you out on this MZ. This is an incredibly rude way to phrase this. I get that our community tends to accept this kind of behavior, but I think we should really put effort into coming up with some method of discouraging people from acting this way. What would have been a politer way to phrase the question? I originally wrote when are you going to clean up the mess you made?, but I rewrote it. the mess you made. Right there, in that phrase, you have aggressively indicated the following: a) That you believe someone fucked up; b) That you think they're incompetent; c) That you think they're being lazy about it I didn't intend to indicate most of that, of course. That said, system administrators are trusted to not break things and when they do, there's a moral obligation to make a good-faith effort to fix that which was broken by their actions. In this case, the moral culpability equation is enhanced by various factors previously discussed. This communication style typically causes the exact opposite response from what you apparently want to have happen. I can't speak for others, but when someone talks to *me* this way, I start tuning them out. Sure. But to me the tone is mostly irrelevant when you're considering a question of morality and ethics. If I break something, I feel obligated to make a good-faith effort to clean up the mess from my actions. I don't care if I'm the only one who noticed or if fifty people have noticed and are now shouting about it. I'll agree that we can't expect anyone to be able to fully rectify the ripple effects of breaking links like this. Perhaps others don't feel similarly about the level of moral culpability, and I can accept that, I just don't happen to agree that such behavior (making a mess and then simply walking away) is acceptable in this case. (It may seem strange to discuss moral culpability in the context of something seemingly so trivial, but when you consider the weighty issues of manipulating a historical record and the level of access and trust required to do so, it makes sense, in my opinion.) MZMcBride ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
Tyler is right. So let's be positive and read that what's your plan as a generic you, a question to the audience/community, and get the issue fixed all together. I made my proposal/question/suggestion, it's the best I can. Alternatively, of course we could as well spend our energies in throwing policy-bricks to each other; the designated place would probably be https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines (page created after some Internal-l quarrels I believe). Nemo ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Mailman archives broken?
On 17 August 2012 11:46, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: As MaxSem commented, perhaps Mailman ought to be re-evaluated as the mailing list software, though I've yet to come across (m)any software packages that are better, unfortunately. There isn't really anything better. It's ridiculously better than any of its precedessors, which I recall with a shudder. - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
On 17 August 2012 02:42, Ryan Lane rlan...@gmail.com wrote: What is your plan to clean up the mess you made? I need to call you out on this MZ. This is an incredibly rude way to phrase this. I get that our community tends to accept this kind of behavior, but I think we should really put effort into coming up with some method of discouraging people from acting this way. It's a *slightly* rude way to phrase it. It's important not to overreact. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Mailman archives broken?
Guillaume Paumier wrote: I was told yesterday that the mailman/pipermail archives were broken, in that permalinks were no longer linking to the messages they used to link to (therefore not being permalinks at all). This is pretty devastating. It's difficult to overstate the importance of Mailman archives in documenting Wikimedia's history (or even history before Wikimedia was a concept). I've come across links such as the one at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tim_Starling_Day that I can't even find anywhere in the Mailman archives any longer. :-( MZMcBride ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Mailman archives broken?
On 17 August 2012 12:17, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 17 August 2012 11:46, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: As MaxSem commented, perhaps Mailman ought to be re-evaluated as the mailing list software, though I've yet to come across (m)any software packages that are better, unfortunately. There isn't really anything better. It's ridiculously better than any of its precedessors, which I recall with a shudder. Lamson/Librelist is pretty good (and a LOT more recent - couple of years old at most). https://github.com/zedshaw/lamson/tree/master/examples/librelist Tom ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 07:05:24AM -0400, MZMcBride wrote: the mess you made. Right there, in that phrase, you have aggressively indicated the following: a) That you believe someone fucked up; b) That you think they're incompetent; c) That you think they're being lazy about it I didn't intend to indicate most of that, of course. That said, system administrators are trusted to not break things and when they do, there's a moral obligation to make a good-faith effort to fix that which was broken by their actions. In this case, the moral culpability equation is enhanced by various factors previously discussed. I've been silent because others seemed to handle it. But I can't anymore. Your initial mail was disturbing enough. Your complete lack of understanding of what multiple people are saying to you and the lack of an apology are even worse. Your words hurt people, created a bad precedent of aggressive behavior and are counter-productive. Please stop this. Regards, Faidon ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Mailman archives broken?
Hi, On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 12:38 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com wrote: I doubt fixing this requires rewriting mailman. It only requires dummy messages to be reinserted where they've been deleted and the archives to be rebuilt after this I've added your suggestion to a new RT ticket to Attempt to fix mailman/pipermail permalinks, and let the list know if it's not possible. -- Guillaume Paumier ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
On 17 August 2012 14:22, Faidon Liambotis fai...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 07:05:24AM -0400, MZMcBride wrote: the mess you made. Right there, in that phrase, you have aggressively indicated the following: I didn't intend to indicate most of that, of course. That said, system I've been silent because others seemed to handle it. But I can't anymore. Your initial mail was disturbing enough. Your complete lack of understanding of what multiple people are saying to you and the lack of an apology are even worse. Your words hurt people, created a bad precedent of aggressive behavior and are counter-productive. Please stop this. I think it's important to keep things in perspective, and not to overreact. What seems to have happened here, is that one action has broken many (all?) links to Mailman archives. That, in my book, is a mess. The question was, to that someone who made the mess, what his plan was to clean it up. What should happen right now is *cleaning up the mess*. The more time is spent in butthurt and drama, the more *new* mess there is to clean up, once the old mess is cleaned up. As far as I can see the easiest wat to go about this, is to dig up backups, salt the messages that originally needed to be deleted with spaces or *** or whatever (and add a note to the effect of this was done because of *reason*), and then rebuild the archives so the permalinks are not broken anymore. And then go in and fix whatever permalinks were fixed in the meantime. This needs to happen fast. Once it's been done, there's all the time in the world for recriminations and drama and new guidelines and rules of conduct and whatnot. Michel ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How to create account by API?
The SignupAPI I developed indeed takes care of everything required and was truly developed to cater to such requirements. It would not be a good idea to rework the same. A lot of brainstorming and architectural discussions were already done while developing this project it received input on several different aspects from the community. I really think that instead of developing something new, Extension:SignupAPI should be given a chance for deployment because it solves several requirements including the tracking of what events are most effective in creating accounts and then having the ability to suggest suitable exit activities. Also, the UI was totally revamped to make it visually appealing. Client side validations for user input have also been implemented including the ability to alert user if his desired username has already been taken while he enters it on the signup form. The extension also does a lot of refactoring of the existing SpecialLoginPage by taking out the account creation logic from it and then putting it in its own API. The extension has also received extensive testing by several developers including Santhosh who tested it out with internationalized usernames suggested relevant bugs which I fixed. Some things came up and I didn't get back to working on SignupAPI, but I'm really keen on helping now wish to work towards deploying the extension. I need a mentor to help me through the process because it seems that many parts of the development process have significantly changed. Thanks Regards Akshay Agarwal Software Developer Directi ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Vitriol on this list
Without calling out anyone specifically, everyone needs to calm down about 6 notches. If people can't talk to one another without hurling insults, then I'll have to start putting people on moderation. Impassioned debate is healthy, but the attacks need to stop. -Chad (wearing my list mod hat) ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How to create account by API?
User account creation is something that is pretty critical to the MediaWiki infrastructure. If we're going to be completely revamping the signup page, it should not be done in an extension. Furthermore, looking at the extension's code now, there are numerous design problems that would need to be fixed if this were to be deployed (primarily the fact that the entire special page looks pretty much like a copy of LoginForm's account creation interface). Not to mention that an account creation API is something that the core needs and site admins should not have to rely on an extension to install it. I'm welcome to a rewrite and refactoring of the LoginForm, if that's a goal we want to aim towards. *--* *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2015 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerro...@gmail.com On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 10:30 AM, Akshay Agarwal akshay.leadin...@gmail.com wrote: The SignupAPI I developed indeed takes care of everything required and was truly developed to cater to such requirements. It would not be a good idea to rework the same. A lot of brainstorming and architectural discussions were already done while developing this project it received input on several different aspects from the community. I really think that instead of developing something new, Extension:SignupAPI should be given a chance for deployment because it solves several requirements including the tracking of what events are most effective in creating accounts and then having the ability to suggest suitable exit activities. Also, the UI was totally revamped to make it visually appealing. Client side validations for user input have also been implemented including the ability to alert user if his desired username has already been taken while he enters it on the signup form. The extension also does a lot of refactoring of the existing SpecialLoginPage by taking out the account creation logic from it and then putting it in its own API. The extension has also received extensive testing by several developers including Santhosh who tested it out with internationalized usernames suggested relevant bugs which I fixed. Some things came up and I didn't get back to working on SignupAPI, but I'm really keen on helping now wish to work towards deploying the extension. I need a mentor to help me through the process because it seems that many parts of the development process have significantly changed. Thanks Regards Akshay Agarwal Software Developer Directi ___ 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] How to create account by API?
User account creation is something that is pretty critical to the MediaWiki infrastructure. If we're going to be completely revamping the signup page, it should not be done in an extension. Furthermore, looking at the extension's code now, there are numerous design problems that would need to be fixed if this were to be deployed (primarily the fact that the entire special page looks pretty much like a copy of LoginForm's account creation interface). Not to mention that an account creation API is something that the core needs and site admins should not have to rely on an extension to install it. I'm welcome to a rewrite and refactoring of the LoginForm, if that's a goal we want to aim towards. Still we should take note of the lessons he learned when he made his extension and apply them to development of a API in the core, should we go that route. I agree that this should be a core feature and not an extension. This seems like the sort of thing that many Wikis will need and I'm somewhat surprised the request for someone to make it doesn't come up more often. Thank you, Derric Atzrott ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Mailman archives broken?
On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 4:26 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Guillaume Paumier wrote: I was told yesterday that the mailman/pipermail archives were broken, in that permalinks were no longer linking to the messages they used to link to (therefore not being permalinks at all). This is pretty devastating. It's difficult to overstate the importance of Mailman archives in documenting Wikimedia's history (or even history before Wikimedia was a concept). I've come across links such as the one at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tim_Starling_Day that I can't even find anywhere in the Mailman archives any longer. :-( MZMcBride Many historical Signpost articles are affected as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearchsearch=pipermail+wikitech+prefix%3AWikipedia%3AWikipedia+Signpost%2F2 BTW, here's Brion dreaming about a stable archiving system in 2007 ... http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/28993 In the same year, the lead developer of Mailman said that fixing this problem of breaking URLs was absolutely critical (http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2007-July/019632.html ) and some ideas were thrown around (http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Stable+URLs ), but apparently this huge data integrity problem still hasn't been solved. -- Tilman Bayer Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications) Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Add an article to a category
Hi, I´m developing a extension and I need to add an article to a category. I only get the title of the article, so I try this: $articleToAdd = new Article($title); $context = $articleToAdd-getContext(); $resArticle = MediaWiki::articleFromTitle($title, $context); $linksupdate = new LinksUpdate($resArticle-getTitle(), $resArticle-getParserOutput(), $f); $ps = $linksupdate-getParserOutput(); $categoriesLinks = $ps-getCategoryLinks(); ..so I get all the categories for the article, but I need to add and remove a category. How can I do that ? Thanks! Maurice.- ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] How to create account by API?
Agreed. However, it should be noted that an account creation API has already been created (and approved), and is currently waiting on dependencies to be merged. https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/18127 *--* *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2015 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerro...@gmail.com On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 10:57 AM, Derric Atzrott datzr...@alizeepathology.com wrote: User account creation is something that is pretty critical to the MediaWiki infrastructure. If we're going to be completely revamping the signup page, it should not be done in an extension. Furthermore, looking at the extension's code now, there are numerous design problems that would need to be fixed if this were to be deployed (primarily the fact that the entire special page looks pretty much like a copy of LoginForm's account creation interface). Not to mention that an account creation API is something that the core needs and site admins should not have to rely on an extension to install it. I'm welcome to a rewrite and refactoring of the LoginForm, if that's a goal we want to aim towards. Still we should take note of the lessons he learned when he made his extension and apply them to development of a API in the core, should we go that route. I agree that this should be a core feature and not an extension. This seems like the sort of thing that many Wikis will need and I'm somewhat surprised the request for someone to make it doesn't come up more often. Thank you, Derric Atzrott ___ 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] How to create account by API?
I am not sure how stuff works now but at the time I was working on this project, any features missing in the MediaWiki codebase were first developed as an extension, reviewed, tested and then integrated in the core. The current version of the SpecialPage looks similar to LoginForm because it was indeed derived from there one of the main goals for this project was to remove the account creation code from SpecialUserLogin put it inside its own SpecialPage. I do realize that some refactoring might still be needed but I definitely can say that the efforts to do that would be much lesser than rewriting the entire module because the new module would again have to go through similar iterations through which SignupAPI already went. Tyler, I really appreciate your efforts in developing a new API I would encourage you to contribute with all the learning that you have had in this project to getting SignupAPI deployed because the project involves many more things than just an additional API, many of which I have conveyed in my previous mail. On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 8:27 PM, Derric Atzrott datzr...@alizeepathology.com wrote: User account creation is something that is pretty critical to the MediaWiki infrastructure. If we're going to be completely revamping the signup page, it should not be done in an extension. Furthermore, looking at the extension's code now, there are numerous design problems that would need to be fixed if this were to be deployed (primarily the fact that the entire special page looks pretty much like a copy of LoginForm's account creation interface). Not to mention that an account creation API is something that the core needs and site admins should not have to rely on an extension to install it. I'm welcome to a rewrite and refactoring of the LoginForm, if that's a goal we want to aim towards. Still we should take note of the lessons he learned when he made his extension and apply them to development of a API in the core, should we go that route. I agree that this should be a core feature and not an extension. This seems like the sort of thing that many Wikis will need and I'm somewhat surprised the request for someone to make it doesn't come up more often. Thank you, Derric Atzrott ___ 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] How to create account by API?
With items like SpecialPages and API classes, it is indeed a possibility to first make it an extension and then integrate it, primarily because there is little difference in how a core SpecialPage/APIBase is implemented and how an extension is implemented. However, this workflow is not required. The problem is that the LoginForm class is old and run-down, and we shouldn't really be basing code off of it. A better way to go about it would be to make use of the newer MW infrastructures like FormSpecialPage and Status to make a cleaner implementation. The account creation API currently in Gerrit is actually a bit of a hack (as is the Login API and many other similar modules) because of the fact that there is not a good separation between application logic and UI in many core features of MW. It would be much preferred to fix this then to pile on top of the current way things are implemented. *--* *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2015 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerro...@gmail.com On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 11:09 AM, Akshay Agarwal akshay.leadin...@gmail.com wrote: I am not sure how stuff works now but at the time I was working on this project, any features missing in the MediaWiki codebase were first developed as an extension, reviewed, tested and then integrated in the core. The current version of the SpecialPage looks similar to LoginForm because it was indeed derived from there one of the main goals for this project was to remove the account creation code from SpecialUserLogin put it inside its own SpecialPage. I do realize that some refactoring might still be needed but I definitely can say that the efforts to do that would be much lesser than rewriting the entire module because the new module would again have to go through similar iterations through which SignupAPI already went. Tyler, I really appreciate your efforts in developing a new API I would encourage you to contribute with all the learning that you have had in this project to getting SignupAPI deployed because the project involves many more things than just an additional API, many of which I have conveyed in my previous mail. On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 8:27 PM, Derric Atzrott datzr...@alizeepathology.com wrote: User account creation is something that is pretty critical to the MediaWiki infrastructure. If we're going to be completely revamping the signup page, it should not be done in an extension. Furthermore, looking at the extension's code now, there are numerous design problems that would need to be fixed if this were to be deployed (primarily the fact that the entire special page looks pretty much like a copy of LoginForm's account creation interface). Not to mention that an account creation API is something that the core needs and site admins should not have to rely on an extension to install it. I'm welcome to a rewrite and refactoring of the LoginForm, if that's a goal we want to aim towards. Still we should take note of the lessons he learned when he made his extension and apply them to development of a API in the core, should we go that route. I agree that this should be a core feature and not an extension. This seems like the sort of thing that many Wikis will need and I'm somewhat surprised the request for someone to make it doesn't come up more often. Thank you, Derric Atzrott ___ 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 ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Mailman archives broken?
On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 7:17 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 17 August 2012 11:46, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: As MaxSem commented, perhaps Mailman ought to be re-evaluated as the mailing list software, though I've yet to come across (m)any software packages that are better, unfortunately. There isn't really anything better. It's ridiculously better than any of its precedessors, which I recall with a shudder. I think none of our problems (that i've seen mentioned here so far at least) will be fixed in Mailman 2 releases; OTOH, Mailman 3 isn't that far away IIRC. (but I don't know the timeline exactly) -Jeremy ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Add an article to a category
On Fri, 17 Aug 2012 08:02:23 -0700, Mauricio Etchevest maurici...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I´m developing a extension and I need to add an article to a category. I only get the title of the article, so I try this: $articleToAdd = new Article($title); $context = $articleToAdd-getContext(); $resArticle = MediaWiki::articleFromTitle($title, $context); $linksupdate = new LinksUpdate($resArticle-getTitle(), $resArticle-getParserOutput(), $f); $ps = $linksupdate-getParserOutput(); $categoriesLinks = $ps-getCategoryLinks(); ..so I get all the categories for the article, but I need to add and remove a category. How can I do that ? Thanks! Maurice.- Firstly, don't use Article, use WikiPage. We don't have an API to add/remove categories. So adding a category is nothing but appending category WikiText to the end of the page. And removing one is an ugly mess of using regexps to find some WikiText that looks like the category link you're looking for and erasing it. On the other hand we DO have an api for things hooked into the parser to add categories that aren't marked up in the page (maintenance categories from tag extensions, etc...) -- ~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] Smart machine-learning based anti-spam system (I wish!)
Note that before training any intelligent system, be that Bayesian, Neural Networks, or other, you need a good corpus of good and bad editions, to train with... ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Add an article to a category
What exactly is the difference between Article and WikiPage? It seems like one is just an encapsulation of the other. *--* *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2015 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerro...@gmail.com On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 12:03 PM, Daniel Friesen li...@nadir-seen-fire.comwrote: On Fri, 17 Aug 2012 08:02:23 -0700, Mauricio Etchevest maurici...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I´m developing a extension and I need to add an article to a category. I only get the title of the article, so I try this: $articleToAdd = new Article($title); $context = $articleToAdd-getContext(); $resArticle = MediaWiki::articleFromTitle($**title, $context); $linksupdate = new LinksUpdate($resArticle-**getTitle(), $resArticle-getParserOutput()**, $f); $ps = $linksupdate-getParserOutput(**); $categoriesLinks = $ps-getCategoryLinks(); ..so I get all the categories for the article, but I need to add and remove a category. How can I do that ? Thanks! Maurice.- Firstly, don't use Article, use WikiPage. We don't have an API to add/remove categories. So adding a category is nothing but appending category WikiText to the end of the page. And removing one is an ugly mess of using regexps to find some WikiText that looks like the category link you're looking for and erasing it. On the other hand we DO have an api for things hooked into the parser to add categories that aren't marked up in the page (maintenance categories from tag extensions, etc...) -- ~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-lhttps://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] Add an article to a category
Article is an ancient evil. A class in charge of the presentational logic to view a page from the front-end (and I'm not even sure it's ideal for that). Endowed with a public interface to act as a model for pages. It's PURE EVIL!!! WikiPage the actual model for pages. Article inherits some WikiPage stuff for backwards compatibility but should never be used for that purpose. Ideally one day we'll have a better system for outputting pages, actions, and special pages to the front-end and we'll eliminate the Article class in it's entirety. -- ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name] On Fri, 17 Aug 2012 09:35:02 -0700, Tyler Romeo tylerro...@gmail.com wrote: What exactly is the difference between Article and WikiPage? It seems like one is just an encapsulation of the other. *--* *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2015 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerro...@gmail.com On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 12:03 PM, Daniel Friesen li...@nadir-seen-fire.comwrote: On Fri, 17 Aug 2012 08:02:23 -0700, Mauricio Etchevest maurici...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I´m developing a extension and I need to add an article to a category. I only get the title of the article, so I try this: $articleToAdd = new Article($title); $context = $articleToAdd-getContext(); $resArticle = MediaWiki::articleFromTitle($**title, $context); $linksupdate = new LinksUpdate($resArticle-**getTitle(), $resArticle-getParserOutput()**, $f); $ps = $linksupdate-getParserOutput(**); $categoriesLinks = $ps-getCategoryLinks(); ..so I get all the categories for the article, but I need to add and remove a category. How can I do that ? Thanks! Maurice.- Firstly, don't use Article, use WikiPage. We don't have an API to add/remove categories. So adding a category is nothing but appending category WikiText to the end of the page. And removing one is an ugly mess of using regexps to find some WikiText that looks like the category link you're looking for and erasing it. On the other hand we DO have an api for things hooked into the parser to add categories that aren't marked up in the page (maintenance categories from tag extensions, etc...) -- ~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] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 4:05 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: that, I just don't happen to agree that such behavior (making a mess and then simply walking away) is acceptable in this case. - I already apologized for breaking links and yes, it was a mistake to not just replace ALL messages in that thread with XXXs - It's not like i just wanted to mess with archives for fun, there have been serious requests by others do remove stuff. - I warned about broken links myself before, there is a trail for this on RT - I did not simply walk away unless you are expecting me to work in the middle of the night. I just got to read all your replies and the suggestion to reinsert messages and i am looking at it right now. - I have never been declared the mailman-guy, i simply picked up tickets nobody else had taken trying to help. -- Daniel Zahn dz...@wikimedia.org Operations Engineer ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
- I warned about broken links myself before, there is a trail for this on RT All other opinions aside, this isn't good enough for a public list--RT tickets aren't public. I don't even have an account there. Some public posting (to the list, on a wiki somewhere) would be much better. That said, I'm not overly irritated. There are a few links I need to update, but that's doable. Thanks for handling this issue, and for being responsive to the concerns raised. -- Mark Holmquist Contractor, Wikimedia Foundation mtrac...@member.fsf.org http://marktraceur.info ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Add an article to a category
Lol, good to know. I've wondered for the longest time what the difference. *--* *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2015 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerro...@gmail.com On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 12:44 PM, Daniel Friesen li...@nadir-seen-fire.comwrote: Article is an ancient evil. A class in charge of the presentational logic to view a page from the front-end (and I'm not even sure it's ideal for that). Endowed with a public interface to act as a model for pages. It's PURE EVIL!!! WikiPage the actual model for pages. Article inherits some WikiPage stuff for backwards compatibility but should never be used for that purpose. Ideally one day we'll have a better system for outputting pages, actions, and special pages to the front-end and we'll eliminate the Article class in it's entirety. -- ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name] On Fri, 17 Aug 2012 09:35:02 -0700, Tyler Romeo tylerro...@gmail.com wrote: What exactly is the difference between Article and WikiPage? It seems like one is just an encapsulation of the other. *--* *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2015 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerro...@gmail.com On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 12:03 PM, Daniel Friesen li...@nadir-seen-fire.com**wrote: On Fri, 17 Aug 2012 08:02:23 -0700, Mauricio Etchevest maurici...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I´m developing a extension and I need to add an article to a category. I only get the title of the article, so I try this: $articleToAdd = new Article($title); $context = $articleToAdd-getContext(); $resArticle = MediaWiki::articleFromTitle($title, $context); $linksupdate = new LinksUpdate($resArticle-getTitle(), $resArticle-getParserOutput(), $f); $ps = $linksupdate-getParserOutput(); $categoriesLinks = $ps-getCategoryLinks(); ..so I get all the categories for the article, but I need to add and remove a category. How can I do that ? Thanks! Maurice.- Firstly, don't use Article, use WikiPage. We don't have an API to add/remove categories. So adding a category is nothing but appending category WikiText to the end of the page. And removing one is an ugly mess of using regexps to find some WikiText that looks like the category link you're looking for and erasing it. On the other hand we DO have an api for things hooked into the parser to add categories that aren't marked up in the page (maintenance categories from tag extensions, etc...) -- ~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-lhttps://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] How to create account by API?
This is a long thread that I just caught wind of, but I thought I'd interject with a few notes. The E3 team is going to start doing experiments on the account creation process, starting with the signup page. The front-end is going to be reworked to conform to the design team's new Agora standards, like so: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Account_creation_user_experience As for the API: we are going to make some improvements to it as part of our first experiment. Yes, it is functional now, but we need to do a bit of hacking to support our proposed UX improvements, as well as make it more consistent with WMF JavaScript guidelines. If someone wants to improve the signup template in core, that would be excellent - but since our team needs to move quickly, we're likely going to just going to make our own fork of the extension and display the proposed template for users in a small experimental bucket. Feel free to email me if you have questions. :-) Cheers, Munaf On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 8:30 AM, Tyler Romeo tylerro...@gmail.com wrote: With items like SpecialPages and API classes, it is indeed a possibility to first make it an extension and then integrate it, primarily because there is little difference in how a core SpecialPage/APIBase is implemented and how an extension is implemented. However, this workflow is not required. The problem is that the LoginForm class is old and run-down, and we shouldn't really be basing code off of it. A better way to go about it would be to make use of the newer MW infrastructures like FormSpecialPage and Status to make a cleaner implementation. The account creation API currently in Gerrit is actually a bit of a hack (as is the Login API and many other similar modules) because of the fact that there is not a good separation between application logic and UI in many core features of MW. It would be much preferred to fix this then to pile on top of the current way things are implemented. *--* *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2015 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerro...@gmail.com On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 11:09 AM, Akshay Agarwal akshay.leadin...@gmail.com wrote: I am not sure how stuff works now but at the time I was working on this project, any features missing in the MediaWiki codebase were first developed as an extension, reviewed, tested and then integrated in the core. The current version of the SpecialPage looks similar to LoginForm because it was indeed derived from there one of the main goals for this project was to remove the account creation code from SpecialUserLogin put it inside its own SpecialPage. I do realize that some refactoring might still be needed but I definitely can say that the efforts to do that would be much lesser than rewriting the entire module because the new module would again have to go through similar iterations through which SignupAPI already went. Tyler, I really appreciate your efforts in developing a new API I would encourage you to contribute with all the learning that you have had in this project to getting SignupAPI deployed because the project involves many more things than just an additional API, many of which I have conveyed in my previous mail. On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 8:27 PM, Derric Atzrott datzr...@alizeepathology.com wrote: User account creation is something that is pretty critical to the MediaWiki infrastructure. If we're going to be completely revamping the signup page, it should not be done in an extension. Furthermore, looking at the extension's code now, there are numerous design problems that would need to be fixed if this were to be deployed (primarily the fact that the entire special page looks pretty much like a copy of LoginForm's account creation interface). Not to mention that an account creation API is something that the core needs and site admins should not have to rely on an extension to install it. I'm welcome to a rewrite and refactoring of the LoginForm, if that's a goal we want to aim towards. Still we should take note of the lessons he learned when he made his extension and apply them to development of a API in the core, should we go that route. I agree that this should be a core feature and not an extension. This seems like the sort of thing that many Wikis will need and I'm somewhat surprised the request for someone to make it doesn't come up more often. Thank you, Derric Atzrott ___ 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] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
I think it's important to keep things in perspective, and not to overreact. If you were treated this way consistently by someone, and the community defended that person rather than calling them out on their poor behavior, would you continue to volunteer? Do you expect staff to continue working under the same conditions? Best case you'll get is staff members that tune out the jerks. Of course, when the prevailing culture breeds this type of behavior, you'll get lots of staff tuning out lots of jerks. It isn't a viable community. What seems to have happened here, is that one action has broken many (all?) links to Mailman archives. That, in my book, is a mess. The question was, to that someone who made the mess, what his plan was to clean it up. Again with the phrasing. Cut it out. You realize that Daniel is the only person who's deleted posts that has even given the slightest care to the fact that the links break, right? This happens all the time and until today we just broke the links. If you really want to fix this problem, fix mailman, or write a sane system. What should happen right now is *cleaning up the mess*. The more time is spent in butthurt and drama, the more *new* mess there is to clean up, once the old mess is cleaned up. This thread is about the culture of aggressive behavior that we breed and accept. I'm tired of accepting it. As I called out MZ, I'm going to call you out too. Your behavior in this post is unacceptable. As far as I can see the easiest wat to go about this, is to dig up backups, salt the messages that originally needed to be deleted with spaces or *** or whatever (and add a note to the effect of this was done because of *reason*), and then rebuild the archives so the permalinks are not broken anymore. And then go in and fix whatever permalinks were fixed in the meantime. This needs to happen fast. Once it's been done, there's all the time in the world for recriminations and drama and new guidelines and rules of conduct and whatnot. Why does this matter so much? This is like the 27637862487 time that links have been broken due to the exact same action. It isn't the end of the world. It would be ideal if it was repaired, but it's not a dire emergency. - Ryan ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
Comments inline. I think it's important to keep things in perspective, and not to overreact. If you were treated this way consistently by someone, and the community defended that person rather than calling them out on their poor behavior, would you continue to volunteer? Do you expect staff to continue working under the same conditions? Best case you'll get is staff members that tune out the jerks. Of course, when the prevailing culture breeds this type of behavior, you'll get lots of staff tuning out lots of jerks. It isn't a viable community. Before I begin with anything else, let me say that I am not defending anyone here. This message is meant to state an honest opinion on a matter that will likely affect all of us on this mailing list due to its nature, and the nature of this discussion. With that in mind. I do agree that this entire thing has gotten out of perspective. While I don't agree with the actions that prompted this (sorry MZ I can't back you up here, although I do get where you're coming from), I also think that the fact that I even felt the need to write this email, or for that matter write this email in the careful fashion I am doing it in, shows that the situation has been blown out of perspective. What seems to have happened here, is that one action has broken many (all?) links to Mailman archives. That, in my book, is a mess. The question was, to that someone who made the mess, what his plan was to clean it up. Again with the phrasing. Cut it out. Agreed. I'm not sure if anyone else read the previously linked to article on not being a dick, but it actually talks about this. Just because something is right, does not make it not dickish. Quick Note: I've not been on the list for long enough to know whether or not MZ is consistantly a dick, but I tend to assume good faith in that he was probably just being a dick this time. Same thing with Michel, who for the most part did not post a dickish message and in fact I would go so far as to say that Michel probably would rather see this whole discussion done and overwith so we can get back to the good stuff than anything else. I could be wrong, but that was the impression his email gave me at least. You realize that Daniel is the only person who's deleted posts that has even given the slightest care to the fact that the links break, right? This happens all the time and until today we just broke the links. If you really want to fix this problem, fix mailman, or write a sane system. Although I agree that this is probably the direction we need to head, right now our problem is the links as they are. When your car breaks down you don't say, If you really want to fix this problem, design a new car. Instead you go to the repair shop, get your car fixed so you can move on with your life, and if the car has been consistantly an issue for a while now, after it is fixed you go about designing a new car (assuming you have the skill set required to do so). With that in mind. I agree that Daniel should be commended for his work. I also think that a mess was made and needs cleaned up. I ''also'' think that a better system needs to be implemented or designed to keep this from happening again. So in this regard I think everyone is right. What should happen right now is *cleaning up the mess*. The more time is spent in butthurt and drama, the more *new* mess there is to clean up, once the old mess is cleaned up. This thread is about the culture of aggressive behavior that we breed and accept. I'm tired of accepting it. As I called out MZ, I'm going to call you out too. Your behavior in this post is unacceptable. I've no comment here. That is your personal opinion and I have no place intruding on it. As far as I can see the easiest wat to go about this, is to dig up backups, salt the messages that originally needed to be deleted with spaces or *** or whatever (and add a note to the effect of this was done because of *reason*), and then rebuild the archives so the permalinks are not broken anymore. And then go in and fix whatever permalinks were fixed in the meantime. This needs to happen fast. Once it's been done, there's all the time in the world for recriminations and drama and new guidelines and rules of conduct and whatnot. Why does this matter so much? This is like the 27637862487 time that links have been broken due to the exact same action. It isn't the end of the world. It would be ideal if it was repaired, but it's not a dire emergency. - Ryan Agreed. The issue is not time senstative, although it would be better to be fixed sooner than later. Its more like you lost your favourite book than you lost your rent money. The world won't end from this problem, but it will make things inconvient for others down the line. Would a medium priority perhaps be a good compromise? Also I think that Michel's solution to fix the problem is a
[Wikitech-l] Meta: Inproper Line Breaks
I get the feeling sometimes that either mailman or Outlook completely ignores where I am putting my line breaks and put them wherever it pleases. The last email I sent I started a line with defended which when I received the email from the list had instead community defended with some rather strange looking mid-sentence, nowhere close to 100 char, line breaks. Do my emails look terrible to anyone else? Has anyone else had this problem before? Do anyone know the solution? I know that this sort of thing is usually out of scope on this list, but I felt it was appropriate here because if my emails look just as bad to all of you, then it is probably terribly annoying. Thank you, Derric Atzrott Computer Specialist Alizee Pathology ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Meta: Inproper Line Breaks
Do my emails look terrible to anyone else? Yes! They do. Do anyone know the solution? My first instinct is don't use Outlook, but I'm guessing you have some reason you need to. In that case, I'm sure there's some manual on Outlook, or some other user group, that has the solution Maybe you have HTML emails turned on by default, and mailman is trashing your line breaks because they're HTML br tags or something crazy like that. Try turning off HTML composition, and see if that's helpful. Cheers, -- Mark Holmquist Contractor, Wikimedia Foundation mtrac...@member.fsf.org http://marktraceur.info ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
That said, I'm not overly irritated. There are a few links I need to update, but that's doable. Thanks for handling this issue, and for being responsive to the concerns raised. While there's 475 links to wikitech-l archives on en wikipedia. That's more than a few imo. The real concern here is that many of those links will never be fixed, and people looking in the obscure talk page archives of wikipedia, will never be able to find the relavent mailing posts. This makes it much harder to look into the history of certain things. I'm aware similar incidents have happened in the past - that does not make future incidents ok. Secondly, I'd just like to extend a giant *hug* to Daniel Zahn, who from the sounds of it did not expect this to be such a controversial issue. Third, I'd like to reiterate what others said about folks taking a chill pill. Additionally I'd like to add that mistakes happen, we all make them. The important thing is to realize we've made a mistake, mitigate the affect of the mistake, and document the mistakes so that others don't make them. Yelling and screaming about mistakes doesn't really help anything. --bawolff ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Meta: Inproper Line Breaks
Do my emails look terrible to anyone else? Yes! They do. Do anyone know the solution? My first instinct is don't use Outlook, but I'm guessing you have some reason you need to. In that case, I'm sure there's some manual on Outlook, or some other user group, that has the solution Maybe you have HTML emails turned on by default, and mailman is trashing your line breaks because they're HTML br tags or something crazy like that. Try turning off HTML composition, and see if that's helpful. It is what I use when I am at work. I honestly have no real reason for using it other than that it is what the rest of the company uses so I have to make sure that I know it well being their IT guy. Oddly enough, I actually have HTML turned off. These should be just plain text messages. I'll Google around and do some searching for a solution, I just needed to make sure it wasn't Outlook trashing the emails on my end when they came in and that they indeed look terrible for all of you as well. Thank you, Derric Atzrott ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 11:07 AM, bawolff bawolff...@gmail.com wrote: That said, I'm not overly irritated. There are a few links I need to update, but that's doable. Thanks for handling this issue, and for being responsive to the concerns raised. While there's 475 links to wikitech-l archives on en wikipedia. That's more than a few imo. The real concern here is that many of those links will never be fixed, and people looking in the obscure talk page archives of wikipedia, will never be able to find the relavent mailing posts. This makes it much harder to look into the history of certain things. I'm aware similar incidents have happened in the past - that does not make future incidents ok. Indeed. Sorry if I implied that. I think the proper way forward is to: 1. Adjust our procedures for thread deletion so that this situation doesn't occur again. 2. Fix the links, if the effort level isn't insane. Secondly, I'd just like to extend a giant *hug* to Daniel Zahn, who from the sounds of it did not expect this to be such a controversial issue. Third, I'd like to reiterate what others said about folks taking a chill pill. Additionally I'd like to add that mistakes happen, we all make them. The important thing is to realize we've made a mistake, mitigate the affect of the mistake, and document the mistakes so that others don't make them. Yelling and screaming about mistakes doesn't really help anything. +1 Things break, mistakes get made, etc. It's a normal part of life, and a very normal part of ops. It makes for a much nicer environment when people point out issues in a calm and polite fashion. - Ryan ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] mail archive permalinks [was Re: Mailman archives broken?]
Tilman, thanks for those links. I thought the base-32 encoded hash of Message-Id discussed in [http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Stable+URLs] gives us a straightforward and effective solution to the problem. Ten characters or so should be plenty. This would produce URLs like, [http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-August/OHRDQGOX35.html] We could prefix these with a parent directory that serves as a versioning scheme for our hash, allowing us to create forwarding rules if the permalink rules change in the future. For example (and I have no experience, this might not work), we can generate an .htaccess at the root of old archive directories, which redirects each of the old sequential URLs to the new, hashed location. -Adam On 08/17/2012 08:00 AM, Tilman Bayer wrote: On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 4:26 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Guillaume Paumier wrote: I was told yesterday that the mailman/pipermail archives were broken, in that permalinks were no longer linking to the messages they used to link to (therefore not being permalinks at all). This is pretty devastating. It's difficult to overstate the importance of Mailman archives in documenting Wikimedia's history (or even history before Wikimedia was a concept). I've come across links such as the one at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tim_Starling_Day that I can't even find anywhere in the Mailman archives any longer. :-( MZMcBride Many historical Signpost articles are affected as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearchsearch=pipermail+wikitech+prefix%3AWikipedia%3AWikipedia+Signpost%2F2 BTW, here's Brion dreaming about a stable archiving system in 2007 ... http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/28993 In the same year, the lead developer of Mailman said that fixing this problem of breaking URLs was absolutely critical (http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2007-July/019632.html ) and some ideas were thrown around (http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Stable+URLs ), but apparently this huge data integrity problem still hasn't been solved. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] mail archive permalinks [was Re: Mailman archives broken?]
Mailman 3 already has code to add this X-Message-ID-Hash header, and integrate with mail archiving tools. -Adam On 08/17/2012 11:32 AM, Adam Wight wrote: Tilman, thanks for those links. I thought the base-32 encoded hash of Message-Id discussed in [http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Stable+URLs] gives us a straightforward and effective solution to the problem. Ten characters or so should be plenty. This would produce URLs like, [http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-August/OHRDQGOX35.html] We could prefix these with a parent directory that serves as a versioning scheme for our hash, allowing us to create forwarding rules if the permalink rules change in the future. For example (and I have no experience, this might not work), we can generate an .htaccess at the root of old archive directories, which redirects each of the old sequential URLs to the new, hashed location. -Adam On 08/17/2012 08:00 AM, Tilman Bayer wrote: On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 4:26 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Guillaume Paumier wrote: I was told yesterday that the mailman/pipermail archives were broken, in that permalinks were no longer linking to the messages they used to link to (therefore not being permalinks at all). This is pretty devastating. It's difficult to overstate the importance of Mailman archives in documenting Wikimedia's history (or even history before Wikimedia was a concept). I've come across links such as the one at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tim_Starling_Day that I can't even find anywhere in the Mailman archives any longer. :-( MZMcBride Many historical Signpost articles are affected as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearchsearch=pipermail+wikitech+prefix%3AWikipedia%3AWikipedia+Signpost%2F2 BTW, here's Brion dreaming about a stable archiving system in 2007 ... http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/28993 In the same year, the lead developer of Mailman said that fixing this problem of breaking URLs was absolutely critical (http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2007-July/019632.html ) and some ideas were thrown around (http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Stable+URLs ), but apparently this huge data integrity problem still hasn't been solved. ___ 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] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 11:20 AM, Ryan Lane rlan...@gmail.com wrote: 1. Adjust our procedures for thread deletion so that this situation doesn't occur again. 2. Fix the links, if the effort level isn't insane. I said this on IRC in some form, but I'll repeat it here on the (hopefully permalinked ;) ) record: I think the concern MZ was raising is that initially (for quite a long time actually), there was total silence on #2. Daniel and other ops people posted to the list, but made no mention of attempts to fix the links or the feasibility thereof, it was all focused on #1 (here's how we'll prevent this in the future, and BTW, mailman sucks). While #1 is important (and bashing mailman for this is deserved), #2 was being completely ignored. Instead, everyone focused on how MZ's phrasing was hostile (which is fair enough, if people feel someone is behaving in an offensive manner, they should call that person out on it). Specifically, in the thread where Ryan called out MZ, the question but what are you doing to fix this? was repeated in some form or other in three posts (2 by MZ, one by Michel) before Daniel said he was working on it and Ryan posted the above. On the original thread, there were suggestions as to how the links could be fixed, but no one in ops responded to those posts, or acknowledged them, or even acknowledged that it's something that should be worked on until Daniel and Ryan did that just now. MZ's post complained about a lack of communication from ops about issue #2, and the response to it was a more active lack of communication from ops about issue #2. Hostile behavior has no place on this list and calling it out is a good thing. But what happened here is an anti-pattern that I've seen around here before: when someone says something in an inappropriate way, people call them out on it (which is good), but subsequently refuse to discuss the substance of what was said, to the point where whenever it's brought up it's either ignored or the conversation is steered back to the inappropriate behavior. In this case it was eventually addressed after repeated questions from multiple people, but that hasn't always happened. I've been in a situation where I wrote overly aggressive criticism and got called out on it, which is fair, but the substance of the criticism was never addressed and because the subject is apparently tainted, reviving the discussion is futile. I tried, and it went straight back to everyone piling on me for how hostile I'd been, so I gave up. I'm not complaining about being called out or even bashed for writing overly hostile posts. I've done that a few times and I hate it when I slip up and do it. If I get called out or bashed over that, I've deserved it, and I'll take it. But what pisses me off is that it's apparently impossible to get people to discuss real issues once they're tainted with inappropriate communication. That's unhealthy and needs to stop. So by all means, call people out on hostility. But don't ignore stifle discussion about real problems. Roan ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Use cases for Sites handling change (Re: Wikidata blockers weekly update)
Hi all, thanks to Daniel (F.) for structuring the discussion. The discussion is currently ongoing here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/New_sites_system I hope that the requirements and use cases section is complete. If not, please tune in now. We will build on the use cases and their discussion there. I also created a first draft based for a schema, which was very quickly completely ripped apart, and replaced by a much better one on the discussion page. There are also other discussions going on there. Please tune in if you are interested in the Sites table, in order to achieve consensus on the topic. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Requests_for_comment/New_sites_system#Database_schema_proposal_18334 Furthermore, I want to address the unanswered questions Rob raised: * Re Tim's July 18th comment and Rob's following comment: where is the calling code? The code calling the sitetables is in the Wikibase Library, basically all the files starting with Site*: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase.git;a=tree;f=lib/includes;h=7debe083be74ad42028f37e17e26ce9a419bf7ab;hb=HEAD But since they are part of the patchset, you probably seen them. The Sites info is being used in: * most importantly Wikibase/lib/includes/SiteLink.php, where the site link (e.g. the link from a Wikidata item to a Wikipedia article) is defined using the Sites data. The Sitelinks are the most prominent object depending on the data, and are used basically everywhere on the repository. Wikibase/repo/includes/api/ApiSetSiteLink.php offers a good example of that. * some utils in Wikibase/lib/includes/Utils.php * further, a few places on the client, like LangLinkHandler and the hooks * Questions by Bawulff I redacted from my answer (because I was focusing on other stuff): First and foremost, I'm a little confused as to what the actual use cases here are. Could we get a short summary for those who aren't entirely following how wikidata will work, why the current interwiki situation is insufficient? Most of all, we need global identifiers for the different wikis. We could add a table which only contains mapping of the local prefixes to global identifiers, but we think that the current interwiki table could use some love anyway, and thus we decided to restructure it as a whole. This now has lead to the above mentioned RFC, but the original blocker is: for providing language links form a central source -- Wikidata -- we need to have global wiki identifiers. * Site definitions can exist that are not used as interlanguage link and not used as interwiki link And if we put one of those on a talk page, what would happen? Or if foo was one such link, doing [[:foo:some page]] (Current behaviour is it becomes an interwiki). I probably misunderstand. If currently something is not set up as an interlanguage link and neither as an interwiki link, it will become a normal link, not an interwiki link (i.e. it will point to the local page foo:some page in the main namespace). Did you mean something else? Although to be fair, I do see how the current way we distinguish between interwiki and interlang links is a bit hacky. Agreed, the way it is currently done in core is a bit hacky. And in fact we are making this more flexible by having the type system. The MediaWiki site type could for instance be able to form both nice urls and index.php ones. Or a gerrit type could have the logic to distinguish between the gerrit commit number and a sha1 hash. I must admit I do like this this idea. In particular the current situation where we treat the value of an interwiki link as a title (aka spaces - underscores etc) even for sites that do not use such conventions, has always bothered me. Having interwikis that support url re-writing based on the value does sound cool, but I certainly wouldn't want said code in a db blob (and just using an integer site_type identifier is quite far away from giving us that, but its still a step in a positive direction), which raises the question of where would such rewriting code go. A handler class for each type of site, that would construct links to that type of side based on the data about this site. The issue I was trying to deal with was storage. Currently we 100% assume that the interwiki list is a table and there will only ever be one of them. Do we really assume that? Certainly that's the default config, but I don't think that is the config used on WMF. As far as I'm aware, Wikimedia uses a cdb database file (via $wgInterwikiCache), which contains all the interwikis for all sites. From what I understand, it supports doing various scope levels of interwikis, including per db, per site (Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc), or global interwikis that act on all sites. We did not know about that database. Who can tell us more about it? This would be very interesting to get our synching code optimized. It still wouldn't help us with the global
Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
Hi all, Roan, thanks for the even-handed treatment on this subject. More inline: On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 12:45 PM, Roan Kattouw roan.katt...@gmail.com wrote: Specifically, in the thread where Ryan called out MZ, the question but what are you doing to fix this? was repeated in some form or other in three posts (2 by MZ, one by Michel) before Daniel said he was working on it and Ryan posted the above. On the original thread, there were suggestions as to how the links could be fixed, but no one in ops responded to those posts, or acknowledged them, or even acknowledged that it's something that should be worked on until Daniel and Ryan did that just now. MZ's post complained about a lack of communication from ops about issue #2, and the response to it was a more active lack of communication from ops about issue #2. When the question shouldn't someone being doing something about X? comes up on this mailing list, where X is a well-defined bug or problem with our infrastructure, it should go into Bugzilla (even if it also exists in RT, which people outside of WMF should feel free to pretend doesn't exist). Hostile behavior has no place on this list and calling it out is a good thing. We should be thoughtful about how we call people out, and lead by example. We shouldn't fight fire with fire. But what happened here is an anti-pattern that I've seen around here before: when someone says something in an inappropriate way, people call them out on it (which is good), but subsequently refuse to discuss the substance of what was said, to the point where whenever it's brought up it's either ignored or the conversation is steered back to the inappropriate behavior. I'm not sure you've identified which part is the anti-pattern. The anti-pattern is ignoring the polite requests to fix things, and having an all-hands-on-deck response when someone lobs a grenade. I'm not terribly motivated to tease out the real issue when someone lobs a grenade, and I suspect other people are the same. Now, when someone lobs a grenade after several polite requests, and it looks like yeah, we should have dealt with that, at a minimum, go back and find the polite request, and respond to *that*. That's still rewarding the grenade lobber a little bit, but acknowledging the way we prefer to get requests. In this case it was eventually addressed after repeated questions from multiple people, but that hasn't always happened. I've been in a situation where I wrote overly aggressive criticism and got called out on it, which is fair, but the substance of the criticism was never addressed and because the subject is apparently tainted, reviving the discussion is futile. I tried, and it went straight back to everyone piling on me for how hostile I'd been, so I gave up. I think there's a pretty big difference if the person apologizes or digs their heels in about the original rudeness. If the person apologizes, drop it already. If someone else who hasn't been rude raises it, respond. In the case of a poisoned thread, just start a new thread politely. In this case, Brian *almost* pulled it off with his incredibly constructive message. If he had changed the subject line, I could have jumped all over you for threadjacking. ;-) But what pisses me off is that it's apparently impossible to get people to discuss real issues once they're tainted with inappropriate communication. That's unhealthy and needs to stop. So by all means, call people out on hostility. But don't ignore stifle discussion about real problems. I don't think the ends justify the means in the vast majority of poisoned threads. I think this thread (Can we make an acceptable behavior policy?) is poisoned by the fact that MZ was specifically called out here, especially because I think this particular offense here was relatively mild. So I'd prefer to just chill on this for a while. However, I think it would be a good idea for us to discuss this topic later on when we have some distance from this thread. Rob ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
I'm not complaining about being called out or even bashed for writing overly hostile posts. I've done that a few times and I hate it when I slip up and do it. If I get called out or bashed over that, I've deserved it, and I'll take it. But what pisses me off is that it's apparently impossible to get people to discuss real issues once they're tainted with inappropriate communication. That's unhealthy and needs to stop. So by all means, call people out on hostility. But don't ignore stifle discussion about real problems. Well, this is one more reason as to why hostile behavior should not be tolerated. It has the opposite effect as intended. Even when people don't get called out on bad behavior in a hostile post, the hostility itself tends to put everyone on the defensive, which makes solving the underlying issue much more difficult. In fact, in many cases threads tend to die out simply because they are hostile and the people who would do the work are tired of dealing with the drama involved and ignore the thread. - Ryan ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
«This is like the 27637862487 time that links have been broken due to the exact same action.» I can bear hyperboles but this is a bit excessive, and looks like just another attempt to make this flame bigger: I hope the reality is closer to two or three times in the past couple of years, and that in any case list owners have been warned. In fact, to compensate such hyperboles, I can't help noting that https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Remove_a_message_from_mailing_list_archive, which I already linked, exists since 2005 and that I assume it's not completely out of everyone's radar. Adding to what has been said elsewhere in this thread, what needs fixing is this section: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Remove_a_message_from_mailing_list_archive#Considerations_for_requesters. We should have clear rules (you could just make that advice policy maybe?) and someone responsible for the process. It's obviously not fair to expect someone to pick up these tasks in their overtime, if one wants the process to be reliable (ie timely, policy-compliant and technically correct/non-disruptive). Nemo ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
Daniel Zahn wrote: On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 4:05 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: that, I just don't happen to agree that such behavior (making a mess and then simply walking away) is acceptable in this case. - I already apologized for breaking links and yes, it was a mistake to not just replace ALL messages in that thread with XXXs - It's not like i just wanted to mess with archives for fun, there have been serious requests by others do remove stuff. - I warned about broken links myself before, there is a trail for this on RT - I did not simply walk away unless you are expecting me to work in the middle of the night. I just got to read all your replies and the suggestion to reinsert messages and i am looking at it right now. Hi. I've always found you to be incredibly helpful on IRC, on the mailing lists, and elsewhere and I've always appreciated having you around. I apologize if my initial message suggested otherwise. I read your reply to Guillom's post as shit happens. And it most certainly does. But you said that the archives were last rebuilt two weeks ago, which is where the timeline kind of fell apart in my head. There was no communication to the list and its members and the archive being rebuilt two weeks ago and the consequences of doing so. It took several people noticing and then someone sending a message to the list to get an acknowledgement that the archive rebuild had even taken place. I found this very off-putting. Mailing lists are _hugely important_ to the Wikimedia community. I hate Mailman as much as anyone, but for historical, technical, and privacy reasons, mailing lists continue to be _hugely important_. With wikitech-l in particular, Gerrit, CodeReview, Bugzilla, wikitech.wikimedia.org, and hundreds of wikis all rely on a somewhat sane and stable system for linking to particular messages in the wikitech-l archive. I personally consult the wikitech-l archives regularly as do many others. The link breakage sucks, but it's not my primary concern at this point. My primary concern is that the archive now appears to be corrupt. Messages have apparently gone missing from years ago (e.g., the Tim Starling Day announcement from October 31, 2003) and there are artifacts of messages now erroneously appearing in the August 2012 archive (31 messages with the subject line No subject). Is it possible for someone to take a look at this corruption and assess what can be done to fix it? MZMcBride ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Meta: Inproper Line Breaks
On 17/08/12 20:12, Derric Atzrott wrote: Do my emails look terrible to anyone else? Yes! They do. Do anyone know the solution? My first instinct is don't use Outlook, but I'm guessing you have some reason you need to. In that case, I'm sure there's some manual on Outlook, or some other user group, that has the solution Maybe you have HTML emails turned on by default, and mailman is trashing your line breaks because they're HTML br tags or something crazy like that. Try turning off HTML composition, and see if that's helpful. It is what I use when I am at work. I honestly have no real reason for using it other than that it is what the rest of the company uses so I have to make sure that I know it well being their IT guy. Oddly enough, I actually have HTML turned off. These should be just plain text messages. I'll Google around and do some searching for a solution, I just needed to make sure it wasn't Outlook trashing the emails on my end when they came in and that they indeed look terrible for all of you as well. Thank you, Derric Atzrott You seem to be writing the messages for cutting at 80 characters per line, but be actually sent cutting at 74 or so. The first are treated as hard breaks, so there are two breaks, one at 74 characters and another one at what would have been 80, thus producing lonely words. I also suspect of Outlook for causing hthis, but know little on how to fix. See if you have some option to reduce the line length. Usage of flowed text can also help. Regards ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 1:52 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com wrote: «This is like the 27637862487 time that links have been broken due to the exact same action.» I can bear hyperboles but this is a bit excessive, and looks like just another attempt to make this flame bigger: I hope the reality is closer to two or three times in the past couple of years, and that in any case list owners have been warned. In fact, to compensate such hyperboles, I can't help noting that https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Remove_a_message_from_mailing_list_archive, which I already linked, exists since 2005 and that I assume it's not completely out of everyone's radar. It was meant to be an exaggeration. It has happened a number of times in the past. It may happen again in the future. Mistakes happen and they are especially noticeable when it's ops that makes the mistake. Adding to what has been said elsewhere in this thread, what needs fixing is this section: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Remove_a_message_from_mailing_list_archive#Considerations_for_requesters. We should have clear rules (you could just make that advice policy maybe?) and someone responsible for the process. It's obviously not fair to expect someone to pick up these tasks in their overtime, if one wants the process to be reliable (ie timely, policy-compliant and technically correct/non-disruptive). Yep. As mentioned, we're going to make the procedures clearer to avoid this situation in the future. Having someone responsible for the process is unlikely. I'd be surprised if anyone on the ops team works less than 60 hours a week. No matter who does this, it's going to be as a side-task to their normal responsibilities. That's unavoidable. - Ryan ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Fixing the archives (was: Re: Can we make an acceptable behavior policy?)
The link breakage sucks, but it's not my primary concern at this point. My primary concern is that the archive now appears to be corrupt. Messages have apparently gone missing from years ago (e.g., the Tim Starling Day announcement from October 31, 2003) and there are artifacts of messages now erroneously appearing in the August 2012 archive (31 messages with the subject line No subject). Is it possible for someone to take a look at this corruption and assess what can be done to fix it? A lot of these have been broken for ages, due to the same problem as now. Were these links working prior to this latest breakage? - Ryan ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
Ryan Lane wrote: What seems to have happened here, is that one action has broken many (all?) links to Mailman archives. That, in my book, is a mess. The question was, to that someone who made the mess, what his plan was to clean it up. Again with the phrasing. Cut it out. Sincerely, I'm still a little unclear what phrasing you object to here. Just to be perfectly clear, it's the use of the word mess, right? If so, I can make note not to use that word going forward on this list. It may be a regional thing, but where I'm from, when a lot of things get broken, it's considered a mess. In this case, a lot of links were broken, so I described the situation as a mess. If there are better words to use to describe the situation or words you'd prefer I use, please let me know. You realize that Daniel is the only person who's deleted posts that has even given the slightest care to the fact that the links break, right? This happens all the time and until today we just broke the links. I don't believe this is true. As Guillaume said in the opening post, these links have been stable for years. Can you provide links or some other kind of evidence that the archive links breaking in this way is a regular occurrence? I know of one other time that this has happened, but you're suggesting that it happens frequently. I don't believe there is any evidence to support this claim. This thread is about the culture of aggressive behavior that we breed and accept. I'm tired of accepting it. Can you elaborate on this? Why does this matter so much? This is like the 27637862487 time that links have been broken due to the exact same action. It isn't the end of the world. It would be ideal if it was repaired, but it's not a dire emergency. It matters because mailing lists are _hugely important_ to the Wikimedia community and its operations. And again, I don't believe this has happened a number of times previously. I know of it happening once before. The links breaking sucks, but you're absolutely right that it isn't the end of the world (and I don't think anyone has suggested it is). To me, the apparent corruption of the archives is a much higher priority issue. MZMcBride ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
Ryan Lane wrote: Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? [...] I get that our community tends to accept this kind of behavior, but I think we should really put effort into coming up with some method of discouraging people from acting this way. I've long advocated for adopting toolserver-l's mailing list etiquette guideline on all Wikimedia mailing lists. It's available here: https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Mailing_list_etiquette. MZMcBride ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Mailman archives broken?
On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 8:00 AM, Tilman Bayer tba...@wikimedia.org wrote: Many historical Signpost articles are affected as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearchsearch=pipermail+wikitech+prefix%3AWikipedia%3AWikipedia+Signpost%2F2 All messages i removed on August 2nd have been posted in April 2012 (9th and 10th). Since the message numbering is just counting up by date, i don't see how this would have influenced historical posts before that currently. (see the date view vs. thread view https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/private/wmfall/2012-April/date.html#start) -- Daniel Zahn dz...@wikimedia.org Operations Engineer ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy?
MZMcBride wrote: Ryan Lane wrote: Again with the phrasing. Cut it out. Sincerely, I'm still a little unclear what phrasing you object to here. Just to be perfectly clear, it's the use of the word mess, right? If so, I can make note not to use that word going forward on this list. It may be a regional thing... I think it's more of a cultural thing. You've displayed two traits that I'd tend to associate with the old Usenet culture: 1. A near-absolute reverence for doing things Right. In the case of system administrative tasks, that means, Never Fuck Up the Data in a Lossy Way. If you have to stay up all night to fix it, you stay up all night. 2. A willingness to avoid issues of delivery in communication, a predilection for calling a spade a spade. If someone gets their feelings hurt by that kind of directness, it's their problem. As someone who harbors both these traits myself, you have all my sympathy. But as someone who has badly insulted others, and who has been badly insulted by others, the others in this thread have all my sympathy, too. (How's that for fence-sitting?) ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Mailman archives broken?
Currently you will get Private archive file not found when trying to look at the wikitech-l archives. This is because the rebuilding process is running. Currently it is working on the year 2010.. Also i made a backup of the .mbox file before editing of course. -- Daniel Zahn dz...@wikimedia.org Operations Engineer ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
Sincerely, I'm still a little unclear what phrasing you object to here. Just to be perfectly clear, it's the use of the word mess, right? If so, I can make note not to use that word going forward on this list. It may be a regional thing, but where I'm from, when a lot of things get broken, it's considered a mess. In this case, a lot of links were broken, so I described the situation as a mess. If there are better words to use to describe the situation or words you'd prefer I use, please let me know. It's not the words. It's the phrasing, tone, and implication behind the statement. It's basically shaming someone for making a mistake and telling them you need to fix this. now. You realize that Daniel is the only person who's deleted posts that has even given the slightest care to the fact that the links break, right? This happens all the time and until today we just broke the links. I don't believe this is true. As Guillaume said in the opening post, these links have been stable for years. Can you provide links or some other kind of evidence that the archive links breaking in this way is a regular occurrence? I know of one other time that this has happened, but you're suggesting that it happens frequently. I don't believe there is any evidence to support this claim. I really don't feel like going back and searching for the other cases. It's happened quite a few times in the past on multiple mailing lists. This thread is about the culture of aggressive behavior that we breed and accept. I'm tired of accepting it. Can you elaborate on this? The tone of most of our mailing lists is hostile. It discourages new contributors, it encourages staff to quit, and it encourages volunteers to stop contributing. There's been a few threads just this week that have been overly hostile. Why does this matter so much? This is like the 27637862487 time that links have been broken due to the exact same action. It isn't the end of the world. It would be ideal if it was repaired, but it's not a dire emergency. It matters because mailing lists are _hugely important_ to the Wikimedia community and its operations. And again, I don't believe this has happened a number of times previously. I know of it happening once before. The links breaking sucks, but you're absolutely right that it isn't the end of the world (and I don't think anyone has suggested it is). To me, the apparent corruption of the archives is a much higher priority issue. As I asked previously, is this a new occurrence? I believe it was already corrupted from the last few times this has occurred. This is definitely a problem. It's something we should try to fix now, and something we should try to avoid in the future. It's great that you pointed out the problem. I'd really prefer that you point out problems in such a way that isn't hostile, though. - Ryan ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Mailman archives broken?
On 12-08-16 02:00 AM, Guillaume Paumier wrote: I was told yesterday that the mailman/pipermail archives were broken, in that permalinks were no longer linking to the messages they used to link to (therefore not being permalinks at all). Is the current state of the archives related to these events? It appears to be only text files, with no indices, and improper sortingwhat's going on!? Maybe someone is rebuilding the archives? Could we have gotten notice about that? -- Mark Holmquist Contractor, Wikimedia Foundation mtrac...@member.fsf.org http://marktraceur.info ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Fixing the archives (was: Re: Can we make an acceptable behavior policy?)
David Gerard wrote: On 17 August 2012 22:08, Ryan Lane rlan...@gmail.com wrote: The link breakage sucks, but it's not my primary concern at this point. My primary concern is that the archive now appears to be corrupt. Messages have apparently gone missing from years ago (e.g., the Tim Starling Day announcement from October 31, 2003) and there are artifacts of messages now erroneously appearing in the August 2012 archive (31 messages with the subject line No subject). Is it possible for someone to take a look at this corruption and assess what can be done to fix it? A lot of these have been broken for ages, due to the same problem as now. Were these links working prior to this latest breakage? No, there's also a pile of past corruption in the archives. I wonder if it makes sense to post the mailing list archives to Meta-Wiki or some other wiki. It seems to have a number of advantages over the use of pipermail: * built-in search via Lucene; * control over the content (including the ability to suppress posts); * doesn't require rebuilding an archive ever again; and * it would bypass some of Mailman/pipermail's bugs, such as messages being truncated if they happen to contain a line that starts with From. I'm sure there are other advantages and disadvantages, but it probably wouldn't be too difficult to set up with a bot or script of some kind. You could put the archives on Meta-Wiki in its own namespace or put it on a separate wiki, even. Maybe you could post the raw message source (headers and all) and then an extension or JavaScript could clean it up for human readability? Just tossing the idea out there. I'm looking for ways to prevent this from ever being an issue again. Eliminating the use of pipermail seems like the most straightforward way. MZMcBride ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make an acceptable behavior policy? (was: Re: Mailman archives broken?)
I get that our community tends to accept this kind of behavior, but I think we should really put effort into coming up with some method of discouraging people from acting this way. I've long advocated for adopting toolserver-l's mailing list etiquette guideline on all Wikimedia mailing lists. It's available here: https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Mailing_list_etiquette. That guideline basically just says don't top post. It doesn't really address aggressive, offensive or hostile behavior, which is something we actually have a problem with. We have this problem on basically all of our lists, so I'm not saying it's limited to this one. - Ryan ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Mailman archives broken?
On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 3:38 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com wrote: I doubt fixing this requires rewriting mailman. It only requires dummy messages to be reinserted where they've been deleted and the archives to be rebuilt after this, just as if the correct procedure had been followed from the start. 7 messages have been deleted. 4 have been between the messages Code review backlog.. by Jeroen and Daring to consider .. by Roan. 3 have been between Code review backlog .. by Daniel Friesen and Save to userspace.. by PetrB. I have inserted 7 fake messages in exactly these places, keeping the original message IDs, in-reply-to and timestamps. I am rebuilding the archives again right now but it takes a while. I really hope this fixes it now. -- Daniel Zahn dz...@wikimedia.org Operations Engineer ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Mailman archives broken?
On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 2:55 PM, Mark Holmquist mtrac...@member.fsf.org wrote: Maybe someone is rebuilding the archives? Could we have gotten notice about that? Ohh.. yes, absolutely, i sent messages about it, yet they did not arrive on the list until just now since the mailbox is locked during the rebuilding process :/ The rebuilding is now done. I inserted 7 messages you can see as from mailman root at wikimedia.org, like here: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/private/wikitech-l/2012-April/059880.html -- Daniel Zahn dz...@wikimedia.org Operations Engineer ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Mailman archives broken?
Alright, so inserted the exact number of messages i deleted on Aug. 2 in the same places/dates, that should bring message numbering and links back to the same state before i deleted that thread. As others have mentioned before there have been other inconsistencies in it before though, so you can most likely still find other issues but to the best of my knowledge they should be unrelated. Especially anything that is older than April 2012 should not have been affected by my recent change. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Fixing the archives (was: Re: Can we make an acceptable behavior policy?)
On Sat, Aug 18, 2012 at 8:10 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: I wonder if it makes sense to post the mailing list archives to Meta-Wiki or some other wiki. It seems to have a number of advantages over the use of pipermail: * built-in search via Lucene; * control over the content (including the ability to suppress posts); * doesn't require rebuilding an archive ever again; and * it would bypass some of Mailman/pipermail's bugs, such as messages being truncated if they happen to contain a line that starts with From. I see that as kinda pointless (for the reduction dot point), as Mailman sends these out almost instantly (unless that has been changed?) to many hundreds of email subscribers (and the subsequent mirrors), I thought (/have vague memories but possibly getting confused with something) there had already been a discussion within the WMF w/ the older legal counsel about the reductions and that they weren't going to happen for that very reason. As for the from truncation bug, that has been fixed for ages in Mailman from what I hear... It just needed a update (which I have vague memories of us doing) and the archives being rebuilt. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Meta: Inproper Line Breaks
This may help: http://www.fix-outlook-line-breaks.com/ ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Mailman archives broken?
On 18/08/12 00:42, Daniel Zahn wrote: Alright, so inserted the exact number of messages i deleted on Aug. 2 in the same places/dates, that should bring message numbering and links back to the same state before i deleted that thread. As others have mentioned before there have been other inconsistencies in it before though, so you can most likely still find other issues but to the best of my knowledge they should be unrelated. Especially anything that is older than April 2012 should not have been affected by my recent change. Thanks Daniel, I hope the original sender, as well as people sending those mails, handle them more carefully in the future, to avoid this. I don't see anything obviously bad there, but if it was to the claiming person, all's good to me. Regards ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Wiki Loves Monuments Android App v1.1beta2
Greetings WLM testers, Below you'll find a new beta of our android app that's very close to being feature complete. As before, make sure to have Unknown sources in Settings = Applications turned on. Uploads will go to test wiki so feel free to upload whatever you like. Download: http://dumps.wikimedia.org/android/WLM-v1.1beta2.apk Feedback: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Monuments_mobile_application/Feedback Please try the following: * Browse by campaign and drill down to the desired region's monuments * Sort the list by name and address * Search with a search term * Open a monument, click on Get directions * Click on add a photo * Login or create a Commons account * Choose from gallery or take a photo * Choose Save for Later on the Confirm Upload screen * Go back to the opening screen * Click on Use my current location * Move around the map, open a cluster (a group of monuments close together) * Click on a pin, open the monument * Add a photo (login should be retained) * Choose Save for Later on the Confirm Upload screen * Click OK and choose or take another photo * Go to Uploads and see the uploads saved for later Let us know what you think! Known issues: * Browse by country shows coded region names in some places * Incomplete/Completed Uploads tab is buggy * Upload of incomplete uploads not yet functional * Some back behavior is inconsistent * Sort by distance appears when browsing by country * List view should have a more link when lists exceed 100 monuments Please forward this email as appropriate. -- Phil Inje Chang Product Manager, Mobile Wikimedia Foundation 415-812-0854 m 415-882-7982 x 6810 -- Phil Inje Chang Product Manager, Mobile Wikimedia Foundation 415-812-0854 m 415-882-7982 x 6810 ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
