Wikitech-l February 2012

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

135 participants
150 discussions

MediaWiki to Latex Converter
by Hugo Vincent 18 Jun '12

18 Jun '12

Hi everyone, I recently set up a MediaWiki (http://server.bluewatersys.com/w90n740/) and I need to extra the content from it and convert it into LaTeX syntax for printed documentation. I have googled for a suitable OSS solution but nothing was apparent. I would prefer a script written in Python, but any recommendations would be very welcome. Do you know of anything suitable? Kind Regards, Hugo Vincent, Bluewater Systems.

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Report on WebFonts deployment
by Siebrand Mazeland (WMF) 07 May '12

07 May '12

Dear all, My apologies up front for the long e-mail that follows. In this e-mail you will find a comprehensive status overview of the recent WebFonts deployment. On Monday December 12 at 18:00 UTC we deployed the extension WebFonts[1] to 40 wikis in 11 Indic languages and Wikimedia Incubator -- all wikis in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, (Eastern) Punjabi, Sankrit and Telugu have WebFonts now. WebFonts was not deployed on Malayalam and Tamil projects. The reason for this was that community members had requested us not to. We are confident that in time, the communities will request that WebFonts is enabled on their projects. WebFonts aims to resolve the issue that users see incomplete web pages, because the fonts to properly render the page is not present in the local system by downloading the font through the browser. One of our great challenges developing this functionality is the multitude of scripts and the low availability of freely licensed fonts that may be modified and redistributed. Over the past few months we have tried to build out a collection of fonts in the extension mainly for Indic languages, and we have performed many tests. We have solicited community involvement through messaging in village pumps, e-mails on mailing lists, blog posts on personal blogs as well as on the Wikimedia Foundation blog, at developer events, through personal e-mails and through our bug tracker, and gotten some feedback, although unfortunately not for all the languages we would like to have gotten it for. We will of course continue our efforts in this area. Next to the community involvement, we have had a two day session with the Red Hat Localisation team in Pune, India. Since the deployment, we have been criticised for not communicating enough -- or not through the right channels, not with the right people, not in time, or too soon, or not with the right messages. I'm not really sure how to respond to that, except for uttering a general "mea culpa, mea maxima culpa". We are working really hard in continuously improving the work that we do, and the way that we do it. We make mistakes, we are human after all, and when we become aware of our mistakes, we will do everything in our power to make it better. With our team we support the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation to "imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." I care about that -- a lot. We all care, and I am pretty certain that we're not ignorant, dismissive or incapable. I acknowledge that we as the Localisation team are a relatively new entity within the MediaWiki development community and within the Wikimedia Foundation, with a very wide scope, and that we are dealing with a lot of technical details on which we are simply not able to assess the final quality; there are after all 7.500 languages in this world of over 7 billion people that we theoretically all cover, some 350 of those languages are supported in MediaWiki, and 280 within Wikimedia. I accept that we cannot keep everybody happy -- doesn't keep us from trying, though. I want to try and work with as many people as possible in a constructive way. With these numbers, that's not always easy to coordinate. To channel the input on languages, we have set up "Language Support Teams"[2]. We do not yet have a language support team for every language. Please sign up if you care about the technical facilitation of your language in the Wikimedia movement. Let's use the mediawiki-i18n mailing list[3] to have constructive discussions about language support. Let's use the #mediawiki-i18n IRC channel[4] on Freenode to have real-time discussions. Let's use bugzilla.wikimedia.org to report bugs[5]. Link [5] explains the bug reporting procedure. If you already know how, report issues quickly using this link: http://ur1.ca/6ov9a . Since the deployment, we have been made aware of about 17 issues. Some very serious in nature, others not requiring immediate attention. Yesterday an issue with web fonts not loading in Firefox was resolved in the infrastructure. Today around 15:30 UTC, we have deployed fixes for an additional hand full of issues[6]: functionality disabled in IE6, IE8 on Windows XP, selection buttons not working properly in IE7 and hiding the Samyak fonts in the font selector. During our current sprint, we are working on a framework for multi-lingual and localised user documentation as well as feature based feedback functionality for WebFonts, Narayam and Translate. In the future we will also explore what is known as "dark launch" by some, a kind of hidden live deployment of a feature, only usable be for example manipulating a URL. This would allow us to deploy a feature in a live environment, without having the "full deployment" impact. Thanks for reading through this. I am looking forward to working with you! Please read on for details on all the issues that were reported on WebFonts recently. Cheers! Siebrand Mazeland Product Manager Localisation Wikimedia Foundation ======================================= Links ======================================= [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WebFonts [2] https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Language_support_team [3] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n [4] https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Special:WebChat [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bugzilla [6] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106204 ======================================= Open issues ======================================= https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33004 -- Old cached pages do not have web fonts enabled Priority: HIGH -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wikimedia is able to serve this many pages with relative few servers because of very aggressive caching strategies, especially for anonymous users. WebFonts requires the addition of JavaScript for anonymous users, which is not being done for pages that are in the squid cache at the moment WebFonts was enabled. All squid cache objects for wikis on which WebFonts was deployed need to be purged. An internal RT ticket created for the Wikimedia Operations team to get anonymous squid caches purged. This may take up to a week or longer to be resolved. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33018 -- Firefox 5 on Windows XP has script time-outs Priority: MEDIUM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Localisation team has tested this report, and was not yet able to confirm the observation. The reason for using a non-recent version of Firefox for the report was the alleged lower memory usage. Brion noted that Mozilla has been actively working on lowering memory usage over the last year, so the reporter may be better off with the current versions than the old ones. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33110 -- Google Crome on Windows XP dispays gibberish Priority: LOW -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Observed very rarely on a page on Wikimedia Incubator, and we have not been able to reproduce this observation, let alone reproduce it reliably. A screenshot is present in the bug report. Except for reporting upstream, no action is being taken on this issue at this point in time. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33054 -- Hinting issues in Lohit fonts Priority: MEDIUM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Confirmed in Windows XP. We can do something to the font by adding hinting, but this is a lot of work if it needs to be done manually. The stem of the Lohit glyphs could do with more width and darkness. This may not be desirable for platforms (Linux) which render it perfectly, because it already has hinting and anti-aliasing on an operating system level. Same goes got Windows 7. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33100 -- Page crashes on Webkit browsers with WebFonts enabled. Priority: MEDIUM (could be HIGH if we find many occurances) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A page in Nepali Wikipedia makes a tab on Mac OS X 10.7.2 with Google Crome crash. This behaviour was also reported for Mac OS X 10.7.2 (11C74) with Safari 5.1.1 (7534.51.22, r102522) [This is a webkit nightly build] by thedj. This is most probably related to the WebFonts code, because if, as a logged in user, web fonts is disabled in preferences, the page does not crash Chrome. Developer Derk-Jan Hartman was asked to report this bug in the WebKit. Please make us aware of any additional pages that would cause this behaviour in any wiki. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33102 -- OSX 10.7.2/Opera 11.60 has no fallback for Latin characters Priority: MEDIUM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a bug that needs to be reported upstream. No technical measures have been taken so far to mitigate this issue. One of the Localisation team members has been in contact with a high level executive of Opera, and will contact that person again. We're going to wait for a few days for an outcome -- if there is no expectation of a relatively quick fix, we might disable WebFonts for Opera completely. Opera unfortunately does not have a public bug tracker. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33027 -- Narayam and WebFonts both loading slows down page Priority: MEDIUM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The reporter claims that the functionality is quicker on translatewiki.netthan it is in Wikimedia wikis. A commenter states that more functionality usually means more code, means more data that needs to be transferred, and without changing bandwidth, that causes longer load times. This currently isn't our highest priority, but eventually we will look into this a little deeper. We're inviting volunteers to do some of the data gathering and analysis for us. What is needed in our opinion is insight in the data volume added by WebFonts, as well as an assessment of the code quality with regards to size optimisation. All referenced properly, of course :). There are alternate EOT conversion tools that have a good compression ratio. Needs to be explored, but EOT is not required for modern browsers since they started using WOFF fonts which are compressed OpenType fonts. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33085 -- Integration of updated Lohit-Tamil Font Priority: MEDIUM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Request to update WebFonts with a font that is updated upstream. This is something the Localisation team checks regularly. Will probably be closed this week, pending issues the have a higher priority. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/32942 -- Provide help page and bug report link for WebFonts Priority: HIGH -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- More recently developed tools by the Wikimedia Foundation have often included feedback mechanisms. The Localisation team plans on implementing these for the functionality of the WebFonts, Narayam and Translate extension. Besides that, we also want to provide multi-lingual and localised documentation. This needs some thinking and some work to provide in a structured and navigable way. We'll keep you posted. It will most probably involve translatable *user* documentation on MediaWiki.org and hopefully it is possible to have one feedback location per feature across the multiple Wikimedia wikis -- this is something we're going to contact the ArticleFeedback and MoodBar teams for. ======================================= Closed issues ======================================= https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33025 -- When changing to a non-default web font, the content does not -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This issue was a side effect of a feature to allow multiple web fonts to be used using the "lang" attribute. It was resolved in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/105980 and has been deployed. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33034 -- Web fonts not loading in Firefox -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Duplicate reports were 33038 and 33044. This issue originated from http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/#same-origin-restriction. Almost all browsers except for Firefox ignore that specification. A fix was designed and deployed: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106092, https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1501. Thanks to Roan, Brion and Ryan for their help. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/32775 -- Gibberish in Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is an unexplained phenomenon only observed in Internet Explorer on Windows XP. It is also hard to reproduce. One of the developers was able to make something somewhat reproducible on a clean, fully patched installation of Windows XP with Internet Explorer 8. See bug report for details. Based on these observations we think it is a bad idea to keep supporting WebFonts in Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP and we have disabled it in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106172. This fix has been deployed. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33096 -- Internet Explorer 6 does not have font fallback -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IE6 not having font fallback causes Latin characters to display as squares when a web font is loaded that does not contain glyphs for the Latin script. A screenshot is available at http://media.crossbrowsertesting.com/users/34057/screenshots/window/z669002…. Based on this observation, we think it is a bad idea to keep supporting WebFonts in Internet Explorer 6 and we have disabled it in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106172. This fix has been deployed. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33024 -- WebFonts menu buttons not working in IE7 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This was caused by the JavaScript $( '<input type="radio" />' ) . attr( "name" ,"font"); not working in IE6 and IE7. Updating name attributes once they have been created is not possible. We think there may be more occurances of this in our code (one occurance in jQuery has already been identified: resources/jquery/jquery.validate.js:59). A fix was made in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106175. This fix has been deployed. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33040 -- Overlap in Samyak font for Hindi and Sanskrit -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This issue occurs in Windows XP and Windows 7 (possibly also in Windows Vista) when using Google Chrome. It is not observed when using Chrome with Mac OS X 10.7.2 or several Linux distributions (Debian and Fedora). Samyak Devanagari is available as a non-default web font in Hindi, Marathi, and Sanskrit. Samyak Gujarati is available for Gujarati as a non-default font. This font needs to be corrected. The maintainers will be notified of the observed issues, and mean while, the fonts will be removed from the WebFonts selection list (but can still be used using the font-family property. A fix was made in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106179. This fix has been deployed. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33039 -- Overlap in Madan font for Nepali -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This report was invalid. The reporter was not aware of the correct glyph for the Nepali script. Comments on this bug report resulted in two odd observations (Crome crash, Opera font fallback), that have been split off into separate bug reports: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33100 and https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33102. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33095 -- WebFonts menu can expand off the screen -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If the translations for "Select font" and "Login / Register" are really short, like in http://mr.wiktionary.org, expanding the WebFonts menu for anonymous users will display a menu that is partially off the screen. It was resolved in http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106186, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106197, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106201, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106202. These revisions also depend on a few small UI changes of both WebFonts and Narayam, and will be deployed on December 19, 2011. <no bugzilla report> -- WebFonts menu expands under the control for customised input method in IE6 on transliteration -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There are issues with the z index in IE6. Because of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106172, WebFonts is no longer available in IE6, so this issue is obsolete. Observing that the Hindi projects Wikipedia and Wiktionary are using an custom input methods tool, we would like to invite them to test Narayam which contains many input methods in a MediaWiki extension. We are very open to having the Hindi input method InScript tested and add a transliteration input method with some community representatives, as we have done with other Indic languages. We hope this will eventually lead to Narayam being adopted by the Hindi community, and the custom input method being abandoned.

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Status of Instant Archive Project for Wikipedia
by Kevin Brown 02 Apr '12

02 Apr '12

Hey, I know it’s been a while since we last talked. I’m currently working on jump starting the ArchiveLinks project over on the Wikimedia Foundation side. I was wondering what the status is on your side? I understand that you've been waiting on some fixes and a feed from us. I plan on creating that feed by February 9th and will let you know when it is up. I'm tracking my progress at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Kevin_Brown/ArchiveLinks/status so you can keep informed. Thanks, Kevin Brown Wikimedia GSoC Student 2011

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Regarding GSoC 2012
by Aashish Mittal 29 Mar '12

29 Mar '12

Hello everyone, I am Aashish Mittal, a final year student from Mumbai University, India. I aim to take part in GSoC 2012 with Mediawiki and wish to get an early start in knowing and understanding the software well. I am relatively new to the organizationg. I have been through the intro steps <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker> and the project ideas of this year. I have started working on the code and submitted a patch for one of the bugs (bug 33545<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33545>) and am looking into solving more bugs. I am going through the projects and the attached links. However, I would request some more details on the following projects: 1. Integration of Mediawiki/Sakai: I have been a GSoC student with Sakai in 2010, so I would like to explore the project more deeper. 2. Convention extension for converting mediawiki wiki into website for conference. I have been through the links, but I would like to get a better technical understanding of this project related to the implementation of the project. Any appropriate link or some useful guidelines would be great. Apart from the above two projects, I am interested in a couple of more projects (Create a way to have “books” for wikisource/wikibooks<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15071>and Give editors a way to slice and dice their watchlists with groups)<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5875>. I am going through the comments on their bugzilla page. Kindly provide me with some suggestions or tips which would help me understand the project and their implementation aspects better. Any help regarding the same would be appreciated. Thanks in advance. Regards, Aashish -- Aashish Mittal Student at University of Mumbai Gtalk: ashishmittal.mail(a)gmail.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/aashishmittal

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Please preload a space in the page for the banner
by David Gerard 15 Mar '12

15 Mar '12

A Wikipedia page loads. The last thing to load is the banner. This pushes the page content down. If you've clicked on a link near the top of the page, the banner grabs it instead. This happened last year and it was reported then (and it was incredibly annoying then too). It also fouls up stats on banner effectiveness, as banners are clicked on without intention to do so. Please load the page with a space for the banner to avoid this effect. - d.

15 21

Who can make Gerrit/Labsconsole accounts?
by Sumana Harihareswara 11 Mar '12

11 Mar '12

As Ryan mentioned in an email to another list a couple weeks ago: > Everyone with access to create svn accounts can also link them to Labs > accounts. Feel free to make Labs accounts. Also feel free to add users > to the bastion project, and to any other project you are a member of. > Unless the user needs/wants Labs access, don't give them bastion or > other project access by default, though. It seems to me that the list of people who can make SVN accounts is unclear to the average newbie -- https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/System_administrators doesn't have me on it. Is there a better list? How to make a Labs account: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/OpenStack#Wiki_access which I am about to merge into https://labsconsole.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Access . -- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation

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Bump of minimum required PHP version to 5.3 for MediaWiki 1.20
by Sam Reed 09 Mar '12

09 Mar '12

Sooo. Here we are again, looking at PHP version bumps. Our current minimum version is 5.2.3, released in June 2009 (5.2.0 was November 2006). I'm proposing to at least bump to version 5.3.0 (as the minimal), release back in June 2006. Though a higher point release would be acceptable if anyone knows of any blocking bugs that were fixed later in the release series. Obviously, we want to try and use a version that gives both developers benefits, without hopefully causing most administrators issues having to manually update PHP etc. >From terms of version availability, Ubuntu 10.04 (from April 2010) Lucid LTS gives PHP Version 5.3.2 [1]. From the Wikimedia Foundations setup this means we are sufficiently ahead that no extra work would be needed looking to attempt to backport versions. And with 12.04 not long away (granted, we're not going to be immediately upgrading), which has 5.3.10 (current stable release) [2]. >From the developers point of view, we get some extras such as Namespace support, Late static binding among other useful features. I have already committed some code to our repo as part of AntiSpoof that now has a 5.3 minimal php version. I know there was support from other developers to make this version bump. It would be nice to have this change for the 1.20 release cycle if there are no major reasons not to. One step closer to 5.4.0 and buh-bye to register_globals and safe_mode! Thanks Sam [1] http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/php5 [2] http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise/php5

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Secure.w.o in js on wiki sites
by mhershberger＠wikimedia.org 09 Mar '12

09 Mar '12

5 6

New cryptographic random number generator up for review
by Daniel Friesen 05 Mar '12

05 Mar '12

The sources and methods we've been using for the generation of security tokens in our code has been either fairly inadequate or has system support issues. -- TL;DR portion -- In the installer we try to use /dev/urandom directly. While this is a good source it's not available in some situations. And if it's not available, then we all the way back to nearly the weakest random number generator we could have. For the generation of user_token we take the secret key generated during installation (or use microtime if not available), combine it with mt_rand( 0, 0x7fffffff ), the wiki id, and the user_id and the md5 it. Given that both the wiki id and the user id are public and mt_rand is weak we basically rely entirely on the secret key. If the secret key is leaked then it becomes a mere matter of time before one could find out what token was used by trying the possible values of mt_rand. And the entire user_token column needs to be reset. Also given that people regularly post their LocalSettings.php in #mediawiki and some forget to strip out their $wgSecretKey it would be a good idea to not depend so heavily on the secret key actually being secret. For the generation of other security tokens like email confirmation tokens and temporary passwords we use nothing but mt_rand() not even bothering to see if there is a proper source of random data. -- END -- In light of that, I've built a new MWCryptRandom class intended to be used in the installer for generating tokens, when generating user_token, and when generating other cryptographic random tokens. The class is in-part based on Drupal's drupal_random_bytes[1] method, some of our own code, some code I had written prior to writing this (eg: I had already planned to use openssl_get_random_bytes in User::setToken before I wrote this), and some extras added into the theory based on what we have available. Since it's security related I'd like people to look over the code and give some feedback on it. The class was committed in r111964 but backed out till after the git migration: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/111964 If you want to try out and test the class yourself you can get it into your trunk svn checkout by using: $ svn merge -c 111964 . [1] http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/core!includes!bootstrap.inc/function/drupa… -- ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]

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2012 Q1 Extension Page Review Drive
by Gregory Varnum 02 Mar '12

02 Mar '12

WikiProject Extensions is presenting our first ever "Extension Page Review Drive" - http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:WikiProject_Extensions/Projects/Page_… Several extension pages are long overdue for review. Many are lacking the appropriate tags, both header and within the extensions, which cause confusion for other developers and sysadmins. In addition to time wasted on bad installations, there is also time wasted by other developers providing tech support to these bad installations. This will also help with future drives reviewing actual code of extensions (although you're welcome to do thorough code review during this drive if you'd like) and moving extensions based in wikicode to the code repository. The goal is to review as many of the pages as possible during the 1st quarter of this calendar year (so by March 31st). We've just officially started this and already 1% done. :) During this drive, all extension pages are marked with an additional category. These will be removed once the drive is completed. Page drive specific template modifications and wikicode will also be removed upon the page drive's completion. Any interested participants are welcome to sign on as a participant on: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:WikiProject_Extensions/Projects/Page_… Feel free to email me with any questions or feedback. :) -greg aka varnent ------- Gregory Varnum Lead, Aequalitas Project Lead Administrator, WikiQueer Founding Principal, VarnEnt @GregVarnum fb.com/GregVarnum

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Wikitech-l February 2012