Hi all,
I was happy to be invited by the Wikimedia Foundation to the Wikimedia
Technical Conference 2019 in Atlanta~[1]. At this conference, I represented
the technical needs of the mathematical community~[2]. Apart from a lot of
great achievements for the whole Wikimedia movement with regard to the five
focus areas of the conference~[3], there were also several math-specific
achievements. In this message, I will focus on those aspects:
1) Bold italic capital greek symbols are now possible. Please join me in
thanking Petr Kadlec (aka. Mormegil) for his perennial effort to make this
possible~[4].
2) We will - very soon - have a demo on the Wikimedia beta cluster enabling
links from formulae to a dedicated special page that displays definitions and
explanations regarding mathematical objects of interest, i.e., identifiers,
symbols, terms. Thank you André Greiner-Petter for the implementation of this
feature~[5].
3) In a session on 'Integrating contributions from other teams or volunteers`
organized by Christoph Jauera (aka. Fisch). We derived definitive action items
on improving the participation opportunities to the Math on wikis~[6].
4) We discussed the future of Math rendering with Petr Pchelko (WMF) which
will simplify the setup of mathoid and eventually get rid of fallback images
while maintaining support for MathML disabled browsers~[7].
I am grateful to the Wikimedia Foundation and the organizers of the event, in
particular, Rachel and Greg to get the chance to enjoy this well-organized
conference with amazing people and a wonderful program.
All the best
Moritz (physikerwelt)
http://moritzschubotz.de | +49 1578 047 1397
[1]:https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Conference/2019
[2]:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_User_Group_Math
[3]:https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238406
[4]:https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T218295
[5]:https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T208758
[6]:https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T234662#5660102
[7]:https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T237516
Some more details on item 4, from my personal, biased perspective:
I started working on the Math extension in 2012 and implemented the
main functionality
of the new rendering method which is based on MathJax rather
than on LaTeX in 2013 at the Wikimedia Foundations Headquarter in San
Francisco. At that time the vision was to replace the monolithic PHP based
framework MediaWiki, with a large number of small dynamic JavaScript modules.
The idea was that those modules are developed as isomorphic platform-independent
components using interfaces of a management framework that takes
care of caching and efficient execution. The long-term goal was that the
functionality could be executed either on the client or on the server and that
the management layer would figure out the best execution strategy based on the
current prerequisites. In the first step, a framework based on HTTP requests was
set up to handle services such as math rendering. Mathoid the math rendering
service was one of the first instances of this service template. From the
retro perspective that might have been too early. Neither a convenient type and
schema description language existed, nor a way to specify rich metadata on the
execution characteristics existed. However, a fine-grained I/O schema seems
desirable for implementing robust and durable services. Moreover, rich
metadata on the execution characteristics such as runtime, memory footprint,
I/O data distributions seem required to allow an execution management layer
for effective execution strategy planning. After the services went into
production schema improvement was difficult and never happened.
Today, it seems pretty certain that MediaWiki will be PHP based for the
foreseeable future. Given this situation, we did now plan to improve Math
support by making the best use of the build-in MediaWiki core functionality. We
will rely on the MediaWiki core caching functionality to continue providing an
instant user perception of math rendering and continue using a stateless
node-based math rendering service. Our hope is that by incorporating the 'new`
MathJax 3 rendering mode 'common HTML` also MathML disabled browsers will be
able to display high-quality mathematical formulae without to rely on
disturbing images. We plan to enable this rendering mode as opt-in in a first
step and thereafter have a community vote if the new imageless rendering mode
should become the default. If that won't work, we will need to
evaluate inline SVG
images that would require either SVG or JavaScript support on the client.
Given the situation that only a very small number of visitors use browsers
that neither support SVG images nor allow JavaScript this second alternative
seems to an ethical option as well.
I will update the associated ticket phabricator ticket~[7] as soon as we have
derived a more detailed plan for the implementation.
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