Wikitech-l October 2011

117 participants
108 discussions

Temporary password too short
by William Allen Simpson 31 Oct '11

31 Oct '11

I've been around a long time (2003) and have old accounts that I never use, usually explicitly setup to prevent folks from creating accounts with different capitalization for misleading user names in comments. After SUL, that case variance problem should be handled correctly. But those existing variants could still be re-activated. Many of these accounts have expired email, so I don't see any notices. Recently, one that has a current email sent me a notice that reads in relevant part: # Temporary password: YH2MnDD # # This temporary password will expire in 7 days. # You should log in and choose a new password now. If someone else made this # request, or if you have remembered your original password, and you no longer # wish to change it, you may ignore this message and continue using your old # password. # I use fairly long passwords with special characters (a 96 character set including space). This replacement password is much more easily guessed. The account could have been stolen within minutes or hours. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Password_strength (Merely 7 case insensitive alphanumeric characters is equivalent to only 40-bits of strength.) Please update the password generator to use at least 17 characters, with at least some punctuation! (Users reading the text might have trouble noticing blanks, so don't use the space character.) Of course, I know that various studies show that 12 to 15 characters using a 95 character set are probably enough. And that's fine for the user's choose. But this is an automatically generated replacement, emailed out in the clear. It should be something stronger!

15 23

#parser parser function - does this make any sense?
by Daniel Werner 31 Oct '11

31 Oct '11

I am thinking about creating a very simple parser function #parse doing nothing but returning parameter 1 with an "'noparse' => false" option. Is there anything like this (or what could be abused for this) already or is there any reason why this might be a bad idea? The reason I want to have something like this is, I want to create a template (for template and parser function black-box tests) accepting something like {{((}}#somefunction:a{{!}}b{{!}}c{{))}} as parameter value, showing {{#somefunction|a|b|c}} as output and at the same time calling {{#parse: {{((}}#somefunction:a{{!}}b{{!}}c{{))}} }} so that besides the definition also the result can be shown by the template output. regards, Daniel

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declining Google Code-In
by Sumana Harihareswara 31 Oct '11

31 Oct '11

(What follows is MediaWiki community stuff, not technical discussion, offered in the interests of transparency and collaborative planning.) TL;DR version: I don't think we can do Google Code-In well, so I don't think we should apply to participate this year. Since MediaWiki has participated in the Google Summer of Code mentorship program, we have also received an offer to apply to participate in Google Code-In, which runs Nov. 21 2011-Jan. 16 2011. "Google Code-in is a contest for pre-university students (e.g., high school and secondary school students) with the aim of encouraging young people to participate in open source. We work with open source organizations, each of whom will provide a list of tasks to be completed by student contestants. Tasks can be anything a project needs help with, from bug fixes to writing documentation to user experience research." http://www.google-melange.com/gci/document/show/gci_program/google/gci2011/… https://code.google.com/p/google-code-in/wiki/GCIAdminMentorInformation I have now gotten more information about what it's like to participate in GCI, from organizations that have taken part in the past. And it sounds like we just do not have the community capacity to do GCI this year. * I can't take the time to develop the task lists or wrangle others to do so by the deadlines (applying by 1 November, creating big task lists by 21 November), due to other commitments (another volunteer development/mentoring program, India hackathon 18-19 November, mentoring existing new contributors). And I do not believe anyone else in the MediaWiki community has the capacity to administer our participation between now and mid-January, either. Tell me if I'm wrong! * We'd need enough mentors on call to review the teenagers' assignments as soon as they're submitted, so they aren't stuck waiting around before they can grab a new task. This is for the whole two-month period, including any winter holidays. Right now I do not think we can satisfactorily guarantee that. We all have too much other work that takes priority. So: it's a cool idea, but I don't think we can do it well in the given time period, so I'm turning it down. (Unless you want to run it, and can guarantee some mentors' attention! In which case, tell me ASAP so we can get an application in by 1 November.) BUT: the number of participants we're getting in our Coding Challenge (thanks, Greg!) means that if we want to do something like this *ourselves* next year, on our timeline, we could probably get some pretty good participation rates -- especially if we partner with Wikimedia Foundation's Global Education Program. So let's come back to this idea, perhaps sometime in the spring. -- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia lacks a "share' button
by John Du Hart 30 Oct '11

30 Oct '11

Why. Why does an encyclopedia need a share button? I can see the purpose on Commons, but for an article? I just don't see the justification. What do you really need to share with your friends from an reference source. What does a button do that copypaste can't? There's also the technical problems this would incur. Each of these buttons require yet another HTTP request each, which would make the hard work by RL team moot. It just doesn't make sense. On Oct 20, 2011 11:54 PM, <jidanni(a)jidanni.org> wrote: Gentlemen, where is the Share button? All other sites have them by now, but on Wikipedia one cannot even find its definition in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share . At least on ones account preferences there should be a way to "activate sharing with the following websites ... " causing a share button to appear in the navigation menu. If there is an extension, then wikipedia should install it and not depend on browser plugins, etc. OK, I made https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31853 _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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New committers
by Sumana Harihareswara 29 Oct '11

29 Oct '11

New Subversion committers: >From OmniTI, who's working on the Article Feedback Tool, four people got core commit access: * Yoni Shostak (project manager) - yonishostak * Greg Chiasson (developer) - gregchiasson * Reha Sterbin (developer) - rsterbin * Sean Heavey (UI designer/front-end developer) - seanheavey Also, Simon Bachenberg (sbachenberg) got extensions-only access to work on Semantic MediaWiki and a Solr Extension. Welcome! :-) -- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation

3 2

etherpad-lite
by Thomas Gries 29 Oct '11

29 Oct '11

I just do not know, whether you have read about ETHERPAD LITE https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite/wiki It needs only a fraction of the resources of Etherpad. Etherpad vs Etherpad Lite Etherpad Etherpad Lite Size of the folder (without git history) 30 MB 1.5 MB Languages used server side Javascript (Rhino), Java, Scala Javascript (node.js) Lines of server side Javascript code ~101k ~9k RAM Usage immediately after start 257 MB (grows to ~1GB) 16 MB (grows to ~30MB) I like this: "The Etherpad Lite jQuery plugin <https://github.com/johnyma22/etherpad-lite-jquery-plugin> easily allows you to add a pad from Etherpad in a web page. It injects the pad contents into a div using iframes." Tom

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New Orleans hackathon wrapup
by Sumana Harihareswara 29 Oct '11

29 Oct '11

I've posted a summary here: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/10/28/tech-meetup-moves-wm-infrastructure-f… Basically, in New Orleans we made progress on the SwiftMedia extension, Wikimedia Labs, continuous integration, ArchiveLinks, user scripts, Max's API Query Sandbox, Puppetization, Git migration, and more. That blog entry's chock full of links to notes in case you want to know more. Thanks to Ryan Lane and Dana Isokawa for organizing the event with me, and thanks to Launch Pad New Orleans for providing the venue! And thanks to Ben Hartshorne for the photos. Our next developers’ event is a hackathon in Mumbai, November 18-20, concentrating on internationalization, localization, and mobile/offline work. To find out about other upcoming Wikimedia technical events, check the meetings wiki page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_developer_meetings and follow @MediaWikiMeet on Identi.ca or Twitter. -- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: [Wikitech-l] How do I upload images locally from an extension?
by bawolff 28 Oct '11

28 Oct '11

> Hello all, sorry if this is a noobish question, but I get strange problems when trying to upload a newly generated image from within an extension. It's seems the title of the calling page gets corrupted getting the name of the uploaded file), and sometimes the resulting image, despite being called File:XXX, end up in the main namespace. At times there are also a lot of UNIQ/QINU-strings in the page. These problems seem to appear both when doing the upload from the job queue, and when uploading at once. I am, by the way, not using any globals like $wgOut. > This is the actual upload lines (it inside an Semantic MediaWiki Result Printer class, but I've had the same problems when trying it in an ordinary MediaWiki parser function): > $ulUser= User::newFromName($myUserName); > $mUpload = new UploadFromUrl(); $mUpload->initializePathInfo ( $filename, $tempdir, false ); > $status = $mUpload->getLocalFile()->upload( $tempdir . '/' . $filename, $tempdir, $description, 0, false, false, $ulUser ); > if ( $status->isGood() ) { unlink($tempdir . '/' . $filename); return true; } else { ... } > I'm not a programmer, so the code is probably quite ugly. I'm not even sure this is the proper way to do a file upload, but it's the only way I found working. Any help would be greatly appreciated (e.g. examples of extensions doing file uploads, making it work)! > Best regardsLeo Wallentin > Leonard Wallentin > leo_wallentin at hotmail.com > +46 (0)735-933 543http://säsongsmat.nu > > http://nairobikoll.se/ > http://twitter.com/leo_wallentin > Skype: leo_wallentin This type of issue (lots of UNIQ_....'s in output) is usually caused by calling $wgParser->parse() method when already parsing stuff. In this case you're probably already parsing stuff because its being executed from an smw printer (I'm not familar with SMW, but i assume that's called from some parser hook or something). I would guess (but haven't checked) that the upload method calls $wgParser->parse somewhere along the line, probably when its creating the image description page. The babel extension had a very similar issue with auto-creating categories. See the BabelAutoCreate.class.php file in the Babel extension. Cheers, -bawolff

2 1

Message tags
by Jay Ashworth 28 Oct '11

28 Oct '11

I asked, a bit ago when setting up some private wikis using the new features in 1.17, how one finds out which messages are modifiable, and where to find them to change them. Specifically, I was trying to locate the messages on the login page you're presented with when arriving, un-logged-in, at such a wiki. I think that this: "Another help tool is the qqx language code: there is no associated MessageQqx.php file, and it isn't possible to select this fake language in the user's preferences. But when used with the &uselang parameter to display a wiki page (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges?uselang=qqx), MediaWiki will display the message keys instead of their values in the user interface: this is very useful to identify which message to translate or change." from Guillaume's technical writeup at: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_architecture_document/text might be the answer I was looking for. I document it here for the archives. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra(a)baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274

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So how does WMF set up its Apaches?
by David Gerard 28 Oct '11

28 Oct '11

As I understand it, WMF has (a) hundreds of Apaches (b) running Ubuntu. How do you set up the Apaches to a substantially-identical configuration? I looked on the wikitech wiki and couldn't see it. (I ask only for my own interest - I currently want to take the Debian/Ubuntu apache2 out and have it shot.) - d.

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Wikitech-l October 2011