Re: [Wikitech-l] Applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled
On 17 November 2013 11:41, Nathan Larson nathanlarson3...@gmail.com wrote: In my experience, spam is pretty easy to spot because the bots aren't very subtle about it. I'm sure spam directed at, say, enwiki, would get very subtle very quickly if spammers thought there was a real chance of it being able to use enwiki's pagerank weight. Don't underestimate spammers' ability to learn and adapt. --HM ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled
On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 3:09 PM, Happy Melon happy.melon.w...@gmail.comwrote: I'm sure spam directed at, say, enwiki, would get very subtle very quickly if spammers thought there was a real chance of it being able to use enwiki's pagerank weight. Don't underestimate spammers' ability to learn and adapt. +1. I think this would be a very bad idea. If we opened up external links to Google, I'm sure it would only be a matter of time before spammers started figuring out how to get revision reviewing rights. It's just a question of economics. Which is cheaper: Paying an SEO company $5000 to improve your pagerank or paying a Wiki-PR editor $100 to do the same (and probably more effectively). Ryan Kaldari ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki to Latex Converter
Why not set it up on Labs? :) On 17 November 2013 20:45, Dirk Hünniger dirk.hunni...@googlemail.comwrote: Hello, I also put up a web version of the mediawiki to latex converter. http://mediawiki2latex.mooo.com/ The machine it is running on is really slow (like an intel atom) Yours Dirk On 12.11.2013 13:09, Fred Bauder wrote: I have a log of what happens on when the commands: sudo apt-get install mediawiki2latex mediawiki2latex -u https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Ries -o AdamRies.pdf are entered on the command line of ubuntu (13.10) Better than TV... Happy to send it to anyone. Fred ___ 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] Applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled
On 11/18/2013 04:39 AM, Happy Melon wrote: I'm sure spam directed at, say, enwiki, would get very subtle very quickly if spammers thought there was a real chance of it being able to use enwiki's pagerank weight. Don't underestimate spammers' ability to learn and adapt. Also +1; pagerank is a valuable thing and Wikipedia has lots of it. Spammers would be quick to find ways to cheat, lie and manipulate their way into tapping into it. Right now, we are plagued with the spammers that are too desperate or stupid to care; if we turned nofollow off, they would all descend upon us like a plague of locusts. -- Marc ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled
I agree. While spammers are so pathetic they will do anything for page views, I have to admire (and detest) their ability to adapt in order to spread their nonsense. Anything that slows them down, even in the slightest degree, is something I support and recommend. Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2013 09:24:54 -0500 From: m...@uberbox.org To: wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled On 11/18/2013 04:39 AM, Happy Melon wrote: I'm sure spam directed at, say, enwiki, would get very subtle very quickly if spammers thought there was a real chance of it being able to use enwiki's pagerank weight. Don't underestimate spammers' ability to learn and adapt. Also +1; pagerank is a valuable thing and Wikipedia has lots of it. Spammers would be quick to find ways to cheat, lie and manipulate their way into tapping into it. Right now, we are plagued with the spammers that are too desperate or stupid to care; if we turned nofollow off, they would all descend upon us like a plague of locusts. -- Marc ___ 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] Applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled
I also agree. Perhaps more importantly, I don't see any actual argument for *not* using nofollow. We're not here to drive pagerank for other websites, and our doing so can be harmful to those sites, or to the article subject. Risker On 18 November 2013 09:44, Arcane 21 arc...@live.com wrote: I agree. While spammers are so pathetic they will do anything for page views, I have to admire (and detest) their ability to adapt in order to spread their nonsense. Anything that slows them down, even in the slightest degree, is something I support and recommend. Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2013 09:24:54 -0500 From: m...@uberbox.org To: wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled On 11/18/2013 04:39 AM, Happy Melon wrote: I'm sure spam directed at, say, enwiki, would get very subtle very quickly if spammers thought there was a real chance of it being able to use enwiki's pagerank weight. Don't underestimate spammers' ability to learn and adapt. Also +1; pagerank is a valuable thing and Wikipedia has lots of it. Spammers would be quick to find ways to cheat, lie and manipulate their way into tapping into it. Right now, we are plagued with the spammers that are too desperate or stupid to care; if we turned nofollow off, they would all descend upon us like a plague of locusts. -- Marc ___ 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] Applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled
On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 11:21 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: Perhaps more importantly, I don't see any actual argument for *not* using nofollow. We're not here to drive pagerank for other websites, and our doing so can be harmful to those sites, or to the article subject. Wikipedia's purpose may not be to drive PageRank, but nonetheless I think the argument for using nofollow is pretty clear. Why would Wikipedia want to purposely make search engine results less useful? The question here is whether spammers are smart enough to get around us and boost their PageRank artifically, which seems to be the case. *-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled
On 11/17/2013 03:41 AM, Nathan Larson wrote: Following the mediawiki-l discussionhttp://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2013-November/042038.htmlabout $wgNoFollowLinks and various other discussions, in which some discontent was expressed with the current two options of either applying or not applying nofollow to all external links, I wanted to see what support there might be for applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled (bug 42599https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42599 ). Google and probably other search engines have a custom rule to ignore rel=nofollow in MediaWiki-powered wikis. It seems that our external links are too high quality to pass up. See https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52617. Gabriel ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Google Code-in starting NOW (important!)
Hi, Google Code-in is about to start: http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2013 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-In We have currently 72 tasks published and 13 mentors. We are still looking for more mentors and tasks. If you are interested, contact me. This is the first time Wikimedia participates in this program and the only certain prediction at this point is that we all will learn a lot. We have been warned that especially the first two weeks will be quite messy, with many impatient newcomers landing in our community channels and asking for help / feedback / review. Please be kind with them. Things will eventually settle down, partially because our documentation will be better, partially because the students interested in Wikimedia will be familiar with the basics and will know where/how to ask. Ideally https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-In should contain answers and links to answers for the frequently asked questions. Try to answer GCI students with links to the appropriate pages, and try to assure that such links are available at our GCI wiki page. Thank you for your patience. I have no doubt that your direct or indirect help will pay off with better documentation for all kinds of newcomers interested in many areas of contribution. /me goes to prepare a hot beverage. It is going to be fun. -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Google Code-in starting NOW (important!)
On 11/18/2013 08:52 AM, Quim Gil wrote: Hi, Google Code-in is about to start: http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2013 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-In You can see all our open tasks at http://www.google-melange.com/gci/org/google/gci2013/wikimedia -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Google Code-in starting NOW (important!)
On 2013-11-18 12:52 PM, Quim Gil q...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi, Google Code-in is about to start: http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2013 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-In We have currently 72 tasks published and 13 mentors. We are still looking for more mentors and tasks. If you are interested, contact me. This is the first time Wikimedia participates in this program and the only certain prediction at this point is that we all will learn a lot. We have been warned that especially the first two weeks will be quite messy, with many impatient newcomers landing in our community channels and asking for help / feedback / review. Please be kind with them. Things will eventually settle down, partially because our documentation will be better, partially because the students interested in Wikimedia will be familiar with the basics and will know where/how to ask. Ideally https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-In should contain answers and links to answers for the frequently asked questions. Try to answer GCI students with links to the appropriate pages, and try to assure that such links are available at our GCI wiki page. Thank you for your patience. I have no doubt that your direct or indirect help will pay off with better documentation for all kinds of newcomers interested in many areas of contribution. /me goes to prepare a hot beverage. It is going to be fun. -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l So just to clarify, for those of us who are non-mentors, we can treat the gci students just like normal people (by which I mean, if they ask for help, help them. If they submit code review it, etc. I wouldn't have to record or do anything special if I am reviewing code and I just happen to review a patch submitted by a gci student?) -bawolff ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Google Code-in starting NOW (important!)
On 11/18/2013 09:36 AM, Brian Wolff wrote: So just to clarify, for those of us who are non-mentors, we can treat the gci students just like normal people (by which I mean, if they ask for help, help them. If they submit code review it, etc. I wouldn't have to record or do anything special if I am reviewing code and I just happen to review a patch submitted by a gci student?) Exactly. The point of this program is to show GCI how open source projects work. Just treat them like regular new contributors. The mentors of their task and the GCI org admins will do the rest. Thank you! -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled
To aggregate some of the arguments and counter-arguments, I posted https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/The_dofollow_FAQ and https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Costs_and_benefits_of_using_nofollow. It does seem, from my googling of what the owners of smaller wikis have to say about it, that nofollow is less popular outside of WMF with many of those wiki owners who have taken the time to analyze the issue. On the other hand, it could be that people who were happy with the default felt less dissatisfied with MediaWiki devs' decision and therefore didn't feel as much need to voice their opinions, since they had already gotten their way and didn't have to take any measures to override the default. I do think the implications of changing how nofollow is applied are very different on, say, Wikipedia than they would be on a small or even medium-sized wiki where the average user watches RecentChanges instead of a watchlist. In a small town, you can leave your doors unlocked and get away with it because you don't have as much traffic coming through and the neighbors would notice and care about (for curiosity, if no other reason) the presence of anyone who seemed out of place. It's the same way on these small wikis; it's rare than anyone comes along to try to subtly add a spam link, and when they do, it's noticed. Likewise, if someone starts marking spammy edits as patrolled, that gets noticed. Spambots are not able yet to be subtle, and the labor required to get accustomed to the norms of a wiki and to become fluent enough in the native language to fit in require a skilled labor that is more expensive than that required to simply pass a CAPTCHA. So, I think that putting dofollow on patrolled external links would be okay especially on smaller wikis, as the patrol would stop the spambots from getting a pagerank boost and the labor costs would deter the subtler ones. Even on Wikipedia, those fighting spam can take advantage of the same economies of scale as those adding spam, such as using pattern recognition on the entire wiki to catch people, or blacklisting individual spammers and taking measures to keep them out (on the smaller wikis, a person caught spamming can just go to another wiki, but if you're caught spamming on Wikipedia, there isn't another site of Wikipedia's size and scope you can go to.) To say that patrolling wouldn't do enough to keep spam out is basically to say, at least to some extent, that patrolling is not a very effective system and that the wiki way doesn't work very well. If Google agrees, they can stop giving wikis in general, or certain wikis, such influence over pagerank. The spammers have market incentives to become more sophisticated, but so does Google, since their earnings depend on keeping their search results relevant and useful, so that people don't switch to competitors that do a better job. The question of what the default configuration should be, or what configuration should be used on WMF sites, can be addressed in other bugs besides this one. It doesn't take much coding to change a default setting from true to false. For now, I would just like to implement the feature and make it available for those wikis who want to use it. So, is there support for putting this in the core as an optional feature, and is there anyone who will do the code review if I write this? ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled
On 11/18/2013 09:46 AM, Nathan Larson wrote: I do think the implications of changing how nofollow is applied are very different on, say, Wikipedia than they would be on a small or even medium-sized wiki As I said, at least for Google there should be no difference as it ignores rel=nofollow on MediaWiki-powered sites anyway. See https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52617. Gabriel ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled
On 18 November 2013 17:46, Nathan Larson nathanlarson3...@gmail.com wrote: If Google agrees, they can stop giving wikis in general, or certain wikis, such influence over pagerank. The spammers have market incentives to become more sophisticated, but so does Google, since their earnings depend on keeping their search results relevant and useful, so that people don't switch to competitors that do a better job. Market forces are not our friend. Google's incentive is to *ignore* spammy links, not to stop them existing; spammers' incentive is to get their links wherever they possibly can, and particularly in the places where they're effective, not to avoid putting links where they're not effective. Pure market forces would leave wikis (large and small) attacked by progressively more sophisticated spam, search engines being progressively smarter about ignoring the spam, and wikis *still being served with as much spam as before* (and it being progressively harder to identify and remove). Wikis can only participate in the arms race by exposing publicly the *extent* to which spamming is pointless. Google publicising the fact that nofollow is ignored (and hence spamming is pointful) is actually a really unhelpful thing for them to do. If they really have taken the nofollow weapon away from wikis altogether, then we need to find a way to get it back. --HM ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled
I do think the implications of changing how nofollow is applied are very different on, say, Wikipedia than they would be on a small or even medium-sized wiki where the average user watches RecentChanges instead of a watchlist. In a small town, you can leave your doors unlocked and get away with it because you don't have as much traffic coming through and the neighbors would notice and care about (for curiosity, if no other reason) the presence of anyone who seemed out of place. It's the same way on these small wikis; it's rare than anyone comes along to try to subtly add a spam link, and when they do, it's noticed. Likewise, if someone starts marking spammy edits as patrolled, that gets noticed. That's actually the opposite of what I expect. Small wikis have much less resources to deal with spam, so the per capita spam is significantly larger (imho) The question of what the default configuration should be, or what configuration should be used on WMF sites, can be addressed in other bugs besides this one. It doesn't take much coding to change a default setting from true to false. For now, I would just like to implement the feature and make it available for those wikis who want to use it. So, is there support for putting this in the core as an optional feature, and is there anyone who will do the code review if I write this? If there reasonably conceivable exists 3rd party users who want such a feature, I (speaking just for myself) see no problem with having it as an off by default, feature in core. -bawolff ___ 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] Applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled
On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 12:58 PM, Gabriel Wicke gwi...@wikimedia.orgwrote: On 11/18/2013 09:46 AM, Nathan Larson wrote: I do think the implications of changing how nofollow is applied are very different on, say, Wikipedia than they would be on a small or even medium-sized wiki As I said, at least for Google there should be no difference as it ignores rel=nofollow on MediaWiki-powered sites anyway. See https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52617. Gabriel Do we have any way of knowing that Yong-Gang Wang of Google is correct about this? I sent a message to this individualhttps://plus.google.com/105349418663822362024/about(hopefully it's the same guy) asking for more information. It seems like a pretty major departure from past Google policy/practice. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled
On 11/18/2013 10:11 AM, Nathan Larson wrote: Do we have any way of knowing that Yong-Gang Wang of Google is correct about this? I sent a message to this individualhttps://plus.google.com/105349418663822362024/about(hopefully it's the same guy) asking for more information. It seems like a pretty major departure from past Google policy/practice. I think it is highly likely that he is correct about this. Professional spammers will likely monitor the effect of their campaigns closely, so would know about this first. I would expect less wiki spam if rel=nofollow was actually honored. Especially hidden (unclickable) links don't have much value apart from page rank. Gabriel ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled
On 2013-11-18 2:19 PM, Gabriel Wicke gwi...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 11/18/2013 10:11 AM, Nathan Larson wrote: Do we have any way of knowing that Yong-Gang Wang of Google is correct about this? I sent a message to this individualhttps://plus.google.com/105349418663822362024/about (hopefully it's the same guy) asking for more information. It seems like a pretty major departure from past Google policy/practice. I think it is highly likely that he is correct about this. Professional spammers will likely monitor the effect of their campaigns closely, so would know about this first. I would expect less wiki spam if rel=nofollow was actually honored. Especially hidden (unclickable) links don't have much value apart from page rank. Gabriel ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l That certainly sounds logical for wikipedia and friends. However it sounds kind of odd for mediawiki in general. There exists many unmaintained mw installs just collecting spam. It would also be interesting to know if other search engines do something similar. -bawolff ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] OPW Proposal
Hi! I'm applying to the OPWhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_Program_for_Women(FOSS Outreach Program for Women) internship program to work on a Wikimedia project, and am told it's a good idea to announce my project proposal on this list; so here it is: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:5xbe/Proposal Thanks, Be ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled
On 18 November 2013 11:47, Gabriel Wicke gwi...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 11/17/2013 03:41 AM, Nathan Larson wrote: Following the mediawiki-l discussion http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2013-November/042038.html about $wgNoFollowLinks and various other discussions, in which some discontent was expressed with the current two options of either applying or not applying nofollow to all external links, I wanted to see what support there might be for applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled (bug 42599https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42599 ). Google and probably other search engines have a custom rule to ignore rel=nofollow in MediaWiki-powered wikis. It seems that our external links are too high quality to pass up. See https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52617. Oh dear. This becomes a philosophical versus practical discussion. Practically, we have nowhere near enough spam-fighters to keep just the obvious spam off our projects, let alone the not-as-obvious spam. People keep mixing up English Wikipedia (with thousands of active editors, many of whom do nothing but page patrolling) with the rest of the Wikimedia projects, many of which have only a handful of active editors, who then get stuck having to choose between spam-fighting or adding content. Software decisions should not be made based on the assumption that some editor somewhere will clean up the problems. Given the ease by which all Mediawiki wikis can be infiltrated by useless and spam links, and the particular ease by which most Wikimedia wikis can be infiltrated, Google's pretty badly polluting their pageranks if they're given links to Wikimedia projects any significant rank. To be honest, I suspect if the Google fellow said anything like this, it was that they might ignore nofollow on Wikimedia wikis, but I'm pretty certain that he didn't say Mediawiki wikis. There are thousands and thousands of them out there that have been completely abandoned to spam. Risker ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled
On 11/18/2013 12:27 PM, Risker wrote: To be honest, I suspect if the Google fellow said anything like this, it was that they might ignore nofollow on Wikimedia wikis, but I'm pretty certain that he didn't say Mediawiki wikis. I remember being surprised too that it applied to all MediaWiki installations rather than just Wikimedia sites. I have pinged him about it. Gabriel ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Applying nofollow only to external links added in revisions that are still unpatrolled
On 18 November 2013 21:59, Gabriel Wicke gwi...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 11/18/2013 12:27 PM, Risker wrote: To be honest, I suspect if the Google fellow said anything like this, it was that they might ignore nofollow on Wikimedia wikis, but I'm pretty certain that he didn't say Mediawiki wikis. I remember being surprised too that it applied to all MediaWiki installations rather than just Wikimedia sites. I have pinged him about it. I run a small but public MW installation and I've seen others overrun by spam. I appreciate the noble intent in removing nofollow by default, but as one of those third-party users, I'd still rather it didn't change. If your intent is to change it on en:wp, that's a local config switch. - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Welcome, Aaron Arcos (volunteer!)
Hi everyone, I'm thrilled to announce that Aaron Arcos has agreed to volunteer for the Wikimedia Foundation as a developer with our Multimedia team through May. Aaron most recently worked at Google Switzerland (from 2005 until August 2013), where he was a frontend software engineer and UX designer on several projects such as AdWords Template Center, SafeSearchLock, GMail Themes and the recent GCalendar redesign. He also served as a process and release master, in charge of defining, improving and enforcing their development, testing and release processes, and taught classes at Google about project management, user experience and Google culture. He decided to leave Google, and to give back to the community in a number of ways, working for free for projects that do good for humanity (like us!) His first stop was at nairobits.com, a project that provides the economically-disadvantaged youth in Nairobi with web design and programming skills, teaching PHP and Javascript. He plans to return there in May. After that, he has other organizations that he'd like to work with. Prior to Google, Aaron worked at IMTF.com in Switzerland, Techasi Ingénierie in Paris, Yahoo! and Electronics for Imaging in the Bay Area. He earned his Masters in Computer Engineering at University of Washington and has a BS in Computer Engineering from UNAM in Mexico City. Aaron will be visiting the San Francisco office while he's volunteering for us. He's aarcos on Freenode (and will often be on #wikimedia-multimedia), and his email address is aarcos.w...@gmail.com. Welcome Aaron! Rob ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Update to Echo api
Hello, We made some change to Echo api recently. The api ApiEchoNotifications mixed both read and write actions, we have migrated the 'markasread' action to its own api module - ApiEchoMarkRead. The 'markasread' function still works in ApiEchoNotifications but it will be removed once all external api calls have been migrated to the new API. Example about how to use the new API is in here: https://git.wikimedia.org/blob/mediawiki%2Fextensions%2FEcho.git/40ea204cdc64e4e6f4d3589e261baa5476e420e0/api%2FApiEchoMarkRead.php Thanks, ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Facebook Open Academy
On 11/14/2013 12:57 PM, Mark Holmquist wrote: On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 07:21:01PM -0500, Tyler Romeo wrote: MediaWiki participates in a number of student competitions and programs as an open source mentor (such as GSoC, Code-In, etc.). Today I ran into another one: Facebook's Open Academy Program. https://www.facebook.com/OpenAcademyProgram Where is this being actually organized? The only thing I see is a page and a half at that URL, a blog post from Facebook engineering, and one email address. I don't know what software they use. However, they explicitly mention participating in online forum and mailing list discussions, conducting or participating in online meetings through video conferencing and chat, helping developers find and understand tasks, reviewing code contributions and helping to coordinate work through issue tracking systems. In other words it sounds like once the student is in the thick of it, they would use MediaWiki's normal technical tools (Gerrit, Bugzilla, IRC, mailing lists, etc.). This seems pretty similar to GSOC (which I was a mentor for this past summer). They have their own system, Melange. That is open source, but I don't think there are a significant number of third party users outside of Google. More importantly, as a mentor, Melange had 0 impact on me and my mentees once the work started. We worked in Gerrit, Bugzilla, and IRC. If Facebook expects us to do code review or something in their proprietary system, that should be a non-starter. But if it's only used for student application and registration, it may not be a deal breaker. The lack of buzz around other official fora makes me worry that the organizing software will be Facebook itself. That may be because they are gradually ramping it up. They mention only a dozen universities for 2013 and 9 open source projects. The fact that it only applies to certain universities definitely makes it different in nature from e.g. GSOC. Matt Flaschen ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
