from_name: Jens Frank

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Server Side image resizing and image layout - patch
	included

body:
Hello,

many work is put into images, and a lot of places use thumbnails in the article
and a [[Media:...|larger version]] link to a big version. This requires two
uploads and some complicated code, especialy if the image and its caption
should be right aligned floats.

I'd like to propose to make the software handle this frequent task. The image
syntax would be extended to provide an options field. This can be done
backwards compatible and similar to the options for table cells:

	[[Image:Leopard.jpg|options|descriptive caption]]

Options are:

* thumbnail	  to generate a right aligned thumbnail of the image, using
		  the caption text as image caption, adding an enlarge icon
		  to the image and a [more] link to the big image
* thumbnail-left  same as above, but left aligned.
* left, right	  makes the image a left/right aligned float, without a
		  caption, without resizing it. (e.g. for use on pages like
		  http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Nebel )
* ___px		  renders the image inline, just like the classicale [[Image:,
		  but resizes it to ___ pixels width. Height is calculated
		  automatically.
		  [[Image:Leopard.jpg|250px|Leopard liegt auf einem Ast]]
		  could be used to generate the thumbnail at
		  http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopard

The thumbnails are stored on disk and are only generated if no thumbnail for
that size exists already.

Examples can be found at

  http://jeluf.mormo.org/testwiki/wiki.phtml?title=Extended_image_syntax

The stylesheets are proof-of-concept, help on layout questions is welcome.

The code implementing the above is attached as a patch.

     Best regards,

	JeLuF
-------------- next part --------------
diff -c -r -x CVS -x '*~' phase3/LocalSettings.sample ../phase3/LocalSettings.sample
*** phase3/LocalSettings.sample	Wed Nov 19 07:37:07 2003
--- ../phase3/LocalSettings.sample	Tue Jan  6 04:04:32 2004
***************
*** 38,43 ****
--- 38,49 ----
  $wgDBminWordLen		= 3;	 # Match this to your MySQL fulltext
  $wgDBtransactions   = false; # Set to true if using InnoDB tables

+ # This is the location of the convert and composite programs
+ # from the ImageMagick toolbox. You need it for the image
+ # resizing functionality
+ $wgImageMagickConvertCommand   = "/home/jf/bin/convert";
+ $wgImageMagickCompositeCommand = "/home/jf/bin/composite";
+
  # This code is still slightly experimental. Turn it off if "What links here"
  # and similar stuff does not work.
  $wgUseBetterLinksUpdate=true;
diff -c -r -x CVS -x '*~' phase3/includes/GlobalFunctions.php ../phase3/includes/GlobalFunctions.php
*** phase3/includes/GlobalFunctions.php	Mon Dec 22 05:14:33 2003
--- ../phase3/includes/GlobalFunctions.php	Sun Jan  4 23:59:30 2004
***************
*** 99,110 ****
  	return wfUrlencode( $url );
  }

! function wfImageArchiveUrl( $name )
  {
  	global $wgUploadPath;

! 	$hash = md5( substr( $name, 15) );
! 	$url = "{$wgUploadPath}/archive/" . $hash{0} . "/" .
  	  substr( $hash, 0, 2 ) . "/{$name}";
  	return $url;
  }
--- 99,141 ----
  	return wfUrlencode( $url );
  }

! function wfImagePath( $img )
! {
! 	global $wgUploadDirectory;
!
! 	$nt = Title::newFromText( $img );
! 	if( !$nt ) return "";
!
! 	$name = $nt->getDBkey();
! 	$hash = md5( $name );
!
! 	$url = "{$wgUploadDirectory}/" . $hash{0} . "/" .
! 	  substr( $hash, 0, 2 ) . "/{$name}";
! 	return wfUrlencode( $url );
! }
!
! function wfThumbUrl( $img )
! {
! 	global $wgUploadPath;
!
! 	$nt = Title::newFromText( $img );
! 	if( !$nt ) return "";
!
! 	$name = $nt->getDBkey();
! 	$hash = md5( $name );
!
! 	$url = "{$wgUploadPath}/thumb/" . $hash{0} . "/" .
! 	  substr( $hash, 0, 2 ) . "/{$name}";
! 	return wfUrlencode( $url );
! }
!
!
! function wfImageArchiveUrl( $name, $subdir="archive" )
  {
  	global $wgUploadPath;

! 	$hash = md5( $name );
! 	$url = "{$wgUploadPath}/{$subdir}/" . $hash{0} . "/" .
  	  substr( $hash, 0, 2 ) . "/{$name}";
  	return $url;
  }
***************
*** 434,446 ****
  	return $dest;
  }

! function wfImageArchiveDir( $fname )
  {
  	global $wgUploadDirectory;

  	$hash = md5( $fname );
  	$oldumask = umask(0);
! 	$archive = "{$wgUploadDirectory}/archive";
  	if ( ! is_dir( $archive ) ) { mkdir( $archive, 0777 ); }
  	$archive .= "/" . $hash{0};
  	if ( ! is_dir( $archive ) ) { mkdir( $archive, 0777 ); }
--- 465,477 ----
  	return $dest;
  }

! function wfImageArchiveDir( $fname , $subdir="archive")
  {
  	global $wgUploadDirectory;

  	$hash = md5( $fname );
  	$oldumask = umask(0);
! 	$archive = "{$wgUploadDirectory}/{$subdir}";
  	if ( ! is_dir( $archive ) ) { mkdir( $archive, 0777 ); }
  	$archive .= "/" . $hash{0};
  	if ( ! is_dir( $archive ) ) { mkdir( $archive, 0777 ); }
diff -c -r -x CVS -x '*~' phase3/includes/ImagePage.php ../phase3/includes/ImagePage.php
*** phase3/includes/ImagePage.php	Mon Nov 24 11:48:39 2003
--- ../phase3/includes/ImagePage.php	Mon Jan  5 16:46:07 2004
***************
*** 7,12 ****
--- 7,16 ----
  class ImagePage extends Article {

  	function view() {
+ 		if ( Namespace::getImage() == $this->mTitle->getNamespace() ) {
+ 			$this->openShowImage();
+ 		}
+
  		Article::view();

  		# If the article we've just shown is in the "Image" namespace,
***************
*** 14,24 ****
--- 18,61 ----
  		# it describes.

  		if ( Namespace::getImage() == $this->mTitle->getNamespace() ) {
+ 			$this->closeShowImage();
  			$this->imageHistory();
  			$this->imageLinks();
  		}
  	}
+
+ 	function openShowImage()
+ 	{
+ 		global $wgOut, $wgUser;
+ 		$name = $this->mTitle->getText();
+ 		$path = wfImagePath( $name );
+
+ 		list($width, $height, $type, $attr) = getimagesize( $path );
+
+ 		$sk = $wgUser->getSkin();
+ 		$s = "";
+ 		if ( ($width > 250) && ($width < 800) ) {
+ 			$s .= "
";
+ 		} else {
+ 			$s .= "
";
+ 		}
+ 		if ( $type != "" ) {
+ 			# image
+ 			$s .= "".$sk->makeImageLink($name,"")."";
+ 		} else {
+ 			$s .= "".$sk->makeMediaLink($name,"")."";
+ 		}
+ 		$wgOut->AddHTML( $s );
+ 	}

+ 	function closeShowImage()
+ 	{
+ 		global $wgOut, $wgUser;
+ 		$sk = $wgUser->getSkin();
+ 		$s = "
";
+ 		$wgOut->AddHTML( $s );
+ 	}
+
  	# If the page we've just displayed is in the "Image" namespace,
  	# we follow it with an upload history of the image and its usage.

diff -c -r -x CVS -x '*~' phase3/includes/MagicWord.php ../phase3/includes/MagicWord.php
*** phase3/includes/MagicWord.php	Sun Dec 14 15:25:44 2003
--- ../phase3/includes/MagicWord.php	Tue Jan  6 02:57:03 2004
***************
*** 25,30 ****
--- 25,31 ----
  		$this->mRegex = "";
  		$this->mRegexStart = "";
  		$this->mVariableRegex = "";
+ 		$this->mVariableStartToEndRegex = "";
  	}

  	# Factory: creates an object representing an ID
***************
*** 58,63 ****
--- 59,65 ----
  		$this->mRegex = "/{$this->mBaseRegex}/{$case}";
  		$this->mRegexStart = "/^{$this->mBaseRegex}/{$case}";
  		$this->mVariableRegex = str_replace( "\\$1", "([A-Za-z0-9_\-]*)", $this->mRegex );
+ 		$this->mVariableStartToEndRegex = str_replace( "\\$1", "([A-Za-z0-9_\-]*)", "/^{$this->mBaseRegex}$/{$case}" );
  	}

  	# Gets a regex representing matching the word
***************
*** 78,84 ****
  		}
  		return $this->mRegexStart;
  	}
!
  	# regex without the slashes and what not
  	function getBaseRegex()
  	{
--- 80,86 ----
  		}
  		return $this->mRegexStart;
  	}
!
  	# regex without the slashes and what not
  	function getBaseRegex()
  	{
***************
*** 99,104 ****
--- 101,122 ----
  		return preg_match( $this->getRegexStart(), $text );
  	}

+ 	# Returns NULL if there's no match, the value of $1 otherwise
+ 	# The return code is the matched string, if there's no variable
+ 	# part in the regex and the matched variable part ($1) if there
+ 	# is one.
+ 	function matchVariableStartToEnd( $text ) {
+ 		$matchcount = preg_match( $this->getVariableStartToEndRegex(), $text, $matches );
+ 		if ( $matchcount == 0 ) {
+ 			return NULL;
+ 		} elseif ( count($matches) == 1 ) {
+ 			return $matches[0];
+ 		} else {
+ 			return $matches[1];
+ 		}
+ 	}
+
+
  	# Returns true if the text matches the word, and alters the
  	# input string, removing all instances of the word
  	function matchAndRemove( &$text )
***************
*** 132,137 ****
--- 150,164 ----
  		return $this->mVariableRegex;
  	}

+ 	# Matches the entire string, where $1 is a wildcard
+ 	function getVariableStartToEndRegex()
+ 	{
+ 		if ( $this->mVariableStartToEndRegex == "" ) {
+ 			$this->initRegex();
+ 		}
+ 		return $this->mVariableStartToEndRegex;
+ 	}
+
  	# Accesses the synonym list directly
  	function getSynonym( $i ) {
  		return $this->mSynonyms[$i];
diff -c -r -x CVS -x '*~' phase3/includes/Skin.php ../phase3/includes/Skin.php
*** phase3/includes/Skin.php	Thu Dec 25 04:25:17 2003
--- ../phase3/includes/Skin.php	Tue Jan  6 04:08:28 2004
***************
*** 1410,1418 ****
  	}

  	function makeImageLinkObj( $nt, $alt = "" ) {
! 		$link = $nt->getPrefixedURL();
! 		$name = $nt->getDBKey();
! 		$url = wfImageUrl( $name );
  		if ( empty( $alt ) ) {
  			$alt = preg_replace( '/\.(.+?)^/', '', $name );
  		}
--- 1410,1457 ----
  	}

  	function makeImageLinkObj( $nt, $alt = "" ) {
! 		$link  = $nt->getPrefixedURL();
! 		$name  = $nt->getDBKey();
! 		$url   = wfImageUrl( $name );
! 		$align = "";
!
! 		# Check if the alt text is of the form "options|alt text"
! 		# Options are:
! 		#  * thumbnail       	make a right aligned thumbnail with enlarge-icon and caption
! 		#  *   thumbnail-right	alias of the above
! 		#  * thumbnail-left  	same, but left aligned
! 		#  * left		no resizing, just left align. label is used for alt= only
! 		#  * right		same, but right aligned
! 		#  * ___px		scale to ___ pixels width, no aligning. e.g. use in taxobox
!
! 		$part = explode( "|", $alt);
!
! 		if ( count($part) > 1 ) {
! 			$mwThumbRight =& MagicWord::get( MAG_IMG_THUMBRIGHT );
! 			$mwThumbLeft =& MagicWord::get( MAG_IMG_THUMBLEFT );
! 			$mwLeft =& MagicWord::get( MAG_IMG_LEFT );
! 			$mwRight =& MagicWord::get( MAG_IMG_RIGHT );
! 			$mwWidth =& MagicWord::get( MAG_IMG_WIDTH );
! 			$alt = $part[count($part)-1];
!
! 			foreach( $part as $key => $val ) {
! 				if ( ! is_null( $mwThumbRight->matchVariableStartToEnd($val) ) ) {
! 					return $this->makeThumbLinkObj( $nt, $alt );
! 				} elseif ( ! is_null( $mwThumbLeft->matchVariableStartToEnd($val) ) ) {
! 					return $this->makeThumbLinkObj( $nt, $alt, "left" );
! 				} elseif ( ! is_null( $mwRight->matchVariableStartToEnd($val) ) ) {
! 					# remember to set an alignment, don't render immediately
! 					$align = "right";
! 				} elseif ( ! is_null( $mwLeft->matchVariableStartToEnd($val) ) ) {
! 					# remember to set an alignment, don't render immediately
! 					$align = "left";
! 				} elseif ( ! is_null( $match = $mwWidth->matchVariableStartToEnd($val) ) ) {
! 					# $matches[1] is the image width in pixels
! 					$url = $this->createThumb( $name, $match );
! 				}
! 			}
! 		}
!
  		if ( empty( $alt ) ) {
  			$alt = preg_replace( '/\.(.+?)^/', '', $name );
  		}
***************
*** 1421,1426 ****
--- 1460,1532 ----
  		$u = wfLocalUrlE( $link );
  		$s = "" .
  		  "";
+ 		if ( "" != $align ) {
+ 			$s = "
{$s}
";
+ 		}
+ 		return $s;
+ 	}
+
+ 	function createThumb( $name, $width, $icon = "" ) {
+ 		global $wgUploadDirectory;
+ 		global $wgImageMagickConvertCommand;
+ 		global $wgImageMagickCompositeCommand;
+ 		$imgPath   = wfImagePath( $name );
+ 		$thumbName = $width."px-".$icon.$name;
+ 		$thumbPath = wfImageArchiveDir( $thumbName, "thumb" )."/".$thumbName;
+ 		$thumbUrl  = wfImageArchiveUrl( $thumbName, "thumb" );
+
+ 		if ( ! file_exists( $thumbPath ) ) {
+ 			# @@@ REFACTOR: Use variables for convert path
+ 			$cmd  =  $wgImageMagickConvertCommand .
+ 					" -quality 95 -geometry {$width}x ".
+ 					escapeshellarg($imgPath) . " " .
+ 					escapeshellarg($thumbPath);
+ 			$conv = shell_exec( $cmd );
+ 			if ( $icon != "" ) {
+ 				# if an icon name is provided, stamp the icon into the lower right
+ 				# corner of the thumbnail
+ 				$cmd = $wgImageMagickCompositeCommand .
+ 					" -quality 95 -geometry +2+2 -gravity SouthEast {$wgUploadDirectory}/{$icon} ".
+ 					escapeshellarg($thumbPath) . " " .
+ 					escapeshellarg($thumbPath) ;
+ 				$conv = shell_exec( $cmd );
+ 			}
+ 		}
+ 		return $thumbUrl;
+ 	}
+
+ 	function makeThumbLinkObj( $nt, $label = "", $align = "right" ) {
+ 		global $wgUploadPath;
+ 		$name = $nt->getDBKey();
+ 		$image = Title::makeTitle( Namespace::getImage(), $name );
+ 		$link = $image->getPrefixedURL();
+ 		$url  = wfImageUrl( $name );
+ 		$path = wfImagePath( $name );
+
+ 		list($width, $height, $type, $attr) = getimagesize( $path );
+ 		$boxwidth = 180;
+ 		$cwidth   = $boxwidth;
+ 		$cheight  = intval( $height/($width/$cwidth) );
+ 		if ($cheight > $boxwidth*1.5) {
+ 			$cheight = $boxwidth*1.3;
+ 			$cwidth  = intval( $width/($height/$cheight) );
+ 		}
+ 		if ( $cwidth > $width ) {
+ 			$cwidth  = $width;
+ 			$cheight = $height;
+ 		}
+
+ 		$thumbUrl = $this->createThumb( $name, $cwidth, "enlarge.png" );
+
+ 		$u = wfLocalUrlE( $link );
+
+ 		$more = wfMsg( "thumbnail-more" );
+
+ 		$s = "
" .
+ 		  "" .
+ 		  "" .
+ 		  "
{$label}" .
+ 		  "[{$more}]

";
  		return $s;
  	}

diff -c -r -x CVS -x '*~' phase3/stylesheets/cologneblue.css ../phase3/stylesheets/cologneblue.css
*** phase3/stylesheets/cologneblue.css	Sun Nov 16 01:22:35 2003
--- ../phase3/stylesheets/cologneblue.css	Tue Jan  6 03:35:17 2004
***************
*** 94,96 ****
--- 94,147 ----
  small { font-size: 75%; }
  #toc { border:1px solid #8888aa; background-color:#f7f8ff;padding:5px;font-size:95%; }

+
+ /* Images */
+ div.floatright { float: right; margin: 0 0 1em 1em; }
+ div.floatright p { font-style: italic; }
+ div.floatleft { float: left; margin: 0.3em 0.5em 0.5em 0; }
+ div.floatleft p { font-style: italic; }
+
+ /* Image Page */
+ div.medium-imagepage {
+ 	float: center;
+ 	padding: 2px;
+ 	border:1px solid #8888aa;
+ 	background: #DDDDDD;
+ 	text-align: left;
+ }
+ div.imagepage {
+ 	border-width: 2px;
+ 	border-style: solid;
+ 	border-color: #CCCCCC;
+ 	padding: 1em;
+ 	text-align: left;
+ }
+
+ /* thumbnails */
+ div.thumbnail-right, div.thumbnail-left {
+ 	padding: 2px;
+ 	border:1px solid #8888aa;
+ 	background:#CCCCCC;
+ 	margin: 0.3em 0 0.5em;
+ 	font-size: 85%;
+ }
+
+ div.thumbnail-right p, div.thumbnail-left p {
+ 	margin-top:3px; margin-bottom:3px;
+ }
+
+ div.thumbnail-right {
+ 	float: right;
+ 	margin-left:0.5em;
+ }
+
+ div.thumbnail-left {
+ 	float: left;
+ 	margin-right:0.5em;
+ }
+
+ span.thumbnail-more {
+ 	float: right;
+ 	font-size: 85%;
+ }
+
diff -c -r -x CVS -x '*~' phase3/stylesheets/nostalgia.css ../phase3/stylesheets/nostalgia.css
*** phase3/stylesheets/nostalgia.css	Sun Nov 16 01:22:35 2003
--- ../phase3/stylesheets/nostalgia.css	Tue Jan  6 03:35:17 2004
***************
*** 12,14 ****
--- 12,61 ----
  p.subtitle { padding-top: 0; margin-top: 0; }
  #toc { border:1px solid #8888aa; background-color:#f7f8ff;padding:5px;font-size:95%; }

+
+ /* Images */
+ div.floatright { float: right; margin: 0 0 1em 1em; }
+ div.floatright p { font-style: italic; }
+ div.floatleft { float: left; margin: 0.3em 0.5em 0.5em 0; }
+ div.floatleft p { font-style: italic; }
+
+ /* Image Page */
+ div.medium-imagepage {
+         float: center;
+         padding: 2px;
+         text-align: left;
+ }
+ div.imagepage {
+         padding: 1em;
+         text-align: left;
+ }
+
+
+ /* thumbnails */
+ div.thumbnail-right, div.thumbnail-left {
+ 	padding: 2px;
+ 	border:1px solid #8888aa;
+ 	background:#CCCCCC;
+ 	margin: 0.3em 0 0.5em;
+ 	font-size: 85%;
+ }
+
+ div.thumbnail-right p, div.thumbnail-left p {
+ 	margin-top:3px; margin-bottom:3px;
+ }
+
+ div.thumbnail-right {
+ 	float: right;
+ 	margin-left:0.5em;
+ }
+
+ div.thumbnail-left {
+ 	float: left;
+ 	margin-right:0.5em;
+ }
+
+ span.thumbnail-more {
+ 	float: right;
+ 	font-size: 85%;
+ }
+
diff -c -r -x CVS -x '*~' phase3/stylesheets/wikistandard.css ../phase3/stylesheets/wikistandard.css
*** phase3/stylesheets/wikistandard.css	Sun Nov  9 12:45:12 2003
--- ../phase3/stylesheets/wikistandard.css	Tue Jan  6 03:35:17 2004
***************
*** 37,44 ****
  td.bottom { border-top: 1px solid gray; }
  td.top { border-bottom: 1px solid gray; }
  /* images */
! div.floatright { float:right;margin:0 0 1em 1em; }
  div.floatright p { font-style: italic; }

  /* table standards */
  table.rimage {
--- 37,93 ----
  td.bottom { border-top: 1px solid gray; }
  td.top { border-bottom: 1px solid gray; }
  /* images */
! div.floatright { float: right; margin: 0 0 1em 1em; }
  div.floatright p { font-style: italic; }
+ div.floatleft { float: left; margin: 0.3em 0.5em 0.5em 0; }
+ div.floatleft p { font-style: italic; }
+
+ /* Image Page */
+ div.medium-imagepage {
+         float: center;
+         padding: 2px;
+         border:1px solid #8888aa;
+         background: #DDDDDD;
+         text-align: left;
+ }
+ div.imagepage {
+         border-width: 2px;
+         border-style: solid;
+         border-color: #CCCCCC;
+         padding: 1em;
+         text-align: left;
+ }
+
+ /* thumbnails */
+ div.thumbnail-right, div.thumbnail-left {
+ 	padding: 2px;
+ 	border:1px solid #8888aa;
+ 	background:#CCCCCC;
+ 	margin: 0.3em 0 0.5em;
+ 	font-size: 85%;
+ 	text-align: center;
+ }
+
+ div.thumbnail-right p, div.thumbnail-left p {
+ 	margin-top:3px; margin-bottom:3px;
+ 	text-align: left;
+ }
+
+ div.thumbnail-right {
+ 	float: right;
+ 	margin-left:0.5em;
+ }
+
+ div.thumbnail-left {
+ 	float: left;
+ 	margin-right:0.5em;
+ }
+
+ span.thumbnail-more {
+ 	float: right;
+ 	font-size: 85%;
+ }
+

  /* table standards */
  table.rimage {


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Timwi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Question about MediaWiki namespace

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> I understand that we now have the MediaWiki namespace and that we can
>> insert the contents of MediaWiki:XYZ into an article by inserting
>> either {{subst:XYZ}} or {{msg:XYZ}} (and yes, I know their difference).
>>
>> Are there any plans to start using this functionality wide-spreadedly?
>>
>> For example, all the articles on Greek letters have a list of links to
>> all the other Greek letters at the bottom. I had recently moved some
>> of the pages (e.g. [[Omega (letter)]] to [[Omega]]), and so I had to
>> modify all of the articles correspondingly. Then I had to change them
>> all *again* because I forgot one of them.
>
> There is a known bug with MSG in that changing the links in a message
> will break the link table of the articles which include it. So in your
> example, the "what links here" for [[Omega (letter)]] would have listed
> all the greek letter articles, despite the fact that they were all
> updated to point to [[Omega]] instead.

Then I suppose that bug should be fixed?...

> The moral to this story is: don't change messages unless you really need
> to. And don't use MSG in places where you're expecting changes to the
> links.

In light of that bug, I agree, but once it's fixed, then I suppose we
can start using this?

Timwi


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: New system ideas

body:
Nick Hill wrote:

> I have uploaded a diagram in pdf and Openoffice draw illustrating the
> redundant system idea.
>
> http://www.nickhill.co.uk/wikipedia-redundant-system.pdf

Hm. You said you were trying to eliminate single points of failure, but
in this system it seems that what you call the "Arbitration Script"
would be such a single point of failure?

I'm probably missing something. Sorry if I am.

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: user rights

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:

> IMO, "advanced user" is a better name anyway.
> Even better are "trusted user" and "old hand" (maveric149's suggestion).

Or "priv".  (Short for "privileged user".)

Shamelessly stolen from LiveJournal culture.

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: /ad/ directories considered harmful

body:
Thomas R. Koll wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 04, 2004 at 03:28:07AM -0000, Allan Crossman wrote:
>
>>Would it be possible to set it so that uploads are never placed in a
>>path called /ad/ (as they sometimes are at the moment) - I think it's
>>pretty common for software to assume that any such image is an advert
>>and not display it. Certainly Norton Personal Firewall's ad blocking
>>does this...
>
> It's not our fault if Norton PF is that stupid.

No, it's not ... but if it isn't too difficult to change this, then I
would welcome it.

WebWasher and Proxomitron exhibit the same problem.

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: RSS of wikimedia news

body:
Mark Jeays wrote:

> I've been doing something like that for a while now:
> http://jeays.net/wikipedia/announcements.xml

Great! Thank you very much! I've created a LiveJournal syndicated
account for it:
http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=wikipedia_news

However, I have one tiny little complaint ;-) Take the second most
recent entry. It reads:

	You may have noticed a "Disclaimers" link at the bottom of
	article pages. It will therefore no longer be necessary to have
	manually added links to disclaimer pages. Polish Wikipedia has
	reached 19,000 articles.

It seems weird how it jumps from the disclaimers to the Polish Wikipedia
article count. I think you should either insert
 tags, or perhaps
even better: use

 ...

 ...

 like on the
actual accouncements page. :-)

Greetings,
Timwi


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Server Side image resizing and image layout -
	patch included

body:
Jens Frank wrote:

> Examples can be found at
>
>   http://jeluf.mormo.org/testwiki/wiki.phtml?title=Extended_image_syntax

That's pretty brilliant! Thanks for making this :-)

Just one little thing. Could you increase the margin from 0.5em to 2em?
So far I've always used 15px, but now that I think about it, using px is
really dumb.

Timwi


body:
Arvind Narayanan wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 06:20:26AM +0000, Timwi wrote:
>
>>... but if it isn't too difficult to change this, then I
>>would welcome it.
>
> It wouldn't be difficult to change it, but it would be an ugly hack.
> The directory name is the first 2 chars of the md5sum of the name of
> the image. So it would mean either using a different hashing method,
> affecting *all* images, or putting special case checks in the code.

Ah. I was wondering what the two characters were.

Well, I guess you're right that it's an ugly hack, but I think with a
verbose enough comment in the source code, that should really not matter
too much. It really is a problem for users of WebWasher or Proxomitron,
and apparently that Norton Firewall thing too.

I propose just special-casing 'ad' and changing it to '__' or 'gg' or
something else that doesn't use hex digits.

Timwi


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] [Wikitech-l] Donation History

body:
Christopher Mahan wrote:
>I personally see an advantage to showing each
>individual transaction by day, so that if someone
>wanted to make sure that their $21.00 transaction
>on then 17th was counted and didn't "fall through
>the cracks", they could verify it.

Exactly! People like feedback.

>Also, it will also show the donation amounts, so
>that people who would normally not consider
>donating because their donation might seem to
>little might be encouraged to see donations of $1
>or $2  (it only takes a few thousand of those to add
>up to some big money)

As a matter of fact there were hundreds of donations below US$10. Many of
those were just a dollar or two. However, the per transaction PayPal cost is
relatively high for such small amounts (up to 40 cents for a single dollar
donation in some cases).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] [WikiEN-l] Re: www.wixpression.org?

body:
Timwi wrote on Wikien-l:
>OK, here are my major problems with Wiktionary:
>
>* English-centric (as has already been said)

Uh, it is the English Wiktionary. I guess that makes the English Wikipedia
English-centric as well.

>* not automated enough. Linking from [[biscuit]] (an English word) to
>   [[Keks]] (a German word) should automatically add a link from [[Keks]]
>   back to [[biscuit]].

That is not Wiktionary's fault! Add a feature request for MediaWiki.

>  A lot of identical formatting/layout should be
>  automated (perhaps have a template automatically show up in the edit
> window when you try to edit a not-yet-existing page?).

That would be a neat thing to have for highly structured projects like
Wiktionary and Wikiquote.

>* too crowded in places. [[e]] should not contain all its meanings in
>   hundreds of different languages on a single page.

That is what jump to TOC links are for.

>* make one major change of policy/aim/goal. I think it is completely
>   redundant and futile to try to define (explain the meaning of) all
>   words of all languages *in* all languages.

Kinda like having articles on all encyclopedia-worthy topics? Have you ever
heard of translating dictionaries? That is a big part of what Wiktionary is.

>My suggestions for major improvement would be:
>
>* wait for MediaWiki to support multi-language projects within a single
>   Wiki. This is already in the plans for Wikipedia. Once that is done,
>   you can have one page [[e]] in Spanish, another [[e]] in Italian, etc.

It will probably be a long time before projects like Wikipedia become one
wiki, one database, all languages. Too many naming conflicts to deal with.
Meta, Wikibooks, and Wikisource can be much more easily internationalized.

>   I think a word should only
>   be defined in its own language, and if you want its meaning explained
>   in another language, then you should really look up its translation in
>   that other language.

That makes about as much sense as only having an English version of an
encyclopedia article on the United Kingdom.

>   There are just so many things on Wiktionary that
>   are language-independent (e.g. the translations for each word, or
>   pronunciation written in IPA) that duplicating it hundreds of times
>   seems really dumb.

That is a valid issue, but since Wiktionary isn't internationalized yet it is
not a pressing one. IMO, a separate project is not at all needed. What /is/
needed, is for Wiktionary to finally get internationalized.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: www.wixpression.org?

body:
This thread has no place on the English mailing list. Please move it to
Wikipedia-l.

-- mav


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: RSS of wikimedia news

references:
<btd7fd$eq2$1@sea.gmane.org>	<CPEGLKEIMDOBFBCDOBMLIEHNCNAA.mjeaya069@rogers.com>
	<btdkvh$14b$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi wrote:

>
>  I think you should either insert
 tags, or perhaps even better:
> use

 ...

 ...

 like on the actual
> accouncements page. :-)
>
We *must* get round to fixing our parser's attitude to P tags!!!


subject: [WikiEN-l] www.wixpression.org?

body:
Gutza wrote:
>What do you think?

Sounds like a good idea for a series of new books at Wikibooks. They could be
used in conjunction with our language textbooks.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiktionary

body:
Jens Frank wrote:

>On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 02:00:39AM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>>Although everything else seems to be working in the wake of the big
>>crash, I still can't get onto Wiktionary.  Is there some reason for this?
>>
>Looks fine to me. Could you be more specific?
>
Yes.  When I try to access it all I continue to get is the message:

>     Sorry, but we're offline at the moment due to hardware troubles in
>     two of our three servers.
>
>     Please read this letter <http://wikimedia.org/letter> regarding
>     the continuing Wikipedia server problems and find out how you can
>     help.
>
with the Wiktionary and Wikimedia logos.


from_name: Arvind Narayanan

in_reply_to:
<btdk3b$tr5$4@sea.gmane.org>;
	from timwi@gmx.net on Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 06:20:26AM +0000

body:
On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 06:20:26AM +0000, Timwi wrote:
>
> Thomas R. Koll wrote:
>
> > On Sun, Jan 04, 2004 at 03:28:07AM -0000, Allan Crossman wrote:
> >
> >>Would it be possible to set it so that uploads are never placed in a
> >>path called /ad/ (as they sometimes are at the moment) - I think it's
> >>pretty common for software to assume that any such image is an advert
> >>and not display it. Certainly Norton Personal Firewall's ad blocking
> >>does this...
> >
> > It's not our fault if Norton PF is that stupid.
>
> No, it's not ... but if it isn't too difficult to change this, then I
> would welcome it.
>
It wouldn't be difficult to change it, but it would be an ugly hack.
The directory name is the first 2 chars of the md5sum of the name of
the image. So it would mean either using a different hashing method,
affecting *all* images, or putting special case checks in the code.

Arvind
--
Its all GNU to me


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Jens-

good work!

Small bug: On the image page, the image is a self-link. Go to
http://jeluf.mormo.org/testwiki/wiki.phtml?title=Image:Westminstpalace.jpg
& click on the image.

> * thumbnail	  to generate a right aligned thumbnail of the image, using
> 		  the caption text as image caption, adding an enlarge icon
> 		  to the image and a [more] link to the big image

Please get rid of the icon, or put it -under- the images (right-aligned
with the caption, perhaps). The [more] link also is redundant, we should
either have the icon or the [more] link, but not both (the icon can have
[more] as an ALT text). It was probably hard to embed the icon, but I
really think this behavior should be turned off ASAP -- works of art
should not be obscured by zoom icons just because we assume the lower
right corner is "not important".

Could the "thumbnail" option accept a width parameter? Personally I would
probably always want to specify my own width, depending on the context.
But I would like the zoom link (*below* the image) and the caption to be
included regardless, thus a "thumbnail + width" combination would be most
useful to me. I also think "thumbnail" should be shortened to "thumb".
Neither term makes much sense for those not in the know already.

It would be very neat to have an option to use the image page content
itself as a caption -- tricky to code though. We may also want to think
about making image pages look less hacky -- with a human-readable title
and the image history somewhat more separated from the image content.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Nick Hill

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: New system ideas

references:
<3FF42BB5.5090701@nickhill.co.uk>
	<3FF448BB.6020401@nickhill.co.uk>	<3FF46DA8.1010907@nickhill.co.uk>
	<btdis8$tr5$2@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi wrote:
>
> Nick Hill wrote:
>
>> I have uploaded a diagram in pdf and Openoffice draw illustrating the
>> redundant system idea.
>>
>> http://www.nickhill.co.uk/wikipedia-redundant-system.pdf
>
>
> Hm. You said you were trying to eliminate single points of failure, but
> in this system it seems that what you call the "Arbitration Script"
> would be such a single point of failure?
>
> I'm probably missing something. Sorry if I am.

If the arbitration script failed, the master will cease to accept
updates but all the wikis will still be available for read-only access.


body:
On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 11:36:20AM +0530, Arvind Narayanan wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 06:20:26AM +0000, Timwi wrote:
> >
> > Thomas R. Koll wrote:
> >
> > > On Sun, Jan 04, 2004 at 03:28:07AM -0000, Allan Crossman wrote:
> > >
> > >>Would it be possible to set it so that uploads are never placed in a
> > >>path called /ad/ (as they sometimes are at the moment) - I think it's
> > >>pretty common for software to assume that any such image is an advert
> > >>and not display it. Certainly Norton Personal Firewall's ad blocking
> > >>does this...
> > >
> > > It's not our fault if Norton PF is that stupid.
> >
> > No, it's not ... but if it isn't too difficult to change this, then I
> > would welcome it.
> >
> It wouldn't be difficult to change it, but it would be an ugly hack.
> The directory name is the first 2 chars of the md5sum of the name of
> the image. So it would mean either using a different hashing method,
> affecting *all* images, or putting special case checks in the code.

The directory is /upload/a/ad/, the first letter is used twice, once
for /a/ and once for /ad/. It's not hard and not ugly to change this
to /a/d/. Then go to /upload/ and do

for a in ?; do (cd $a; for b in ??; do ln -s $b `echo $b|cut -c2`; done); done

symlinks instead of move since page cache still has links to /a/ad/

Regards,

	JeLuF


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

body:
On Tue, 6 Jan 2004, Timwi wrote:

>Well, I guess you're right that it's an ugly hack, but I think with a
>verbose enough comment in the source code, that should really not matter
>too much. It really is a problem for users of WebWasher or Proxomitron,
>and apparently that Norton Firewall thing too.

Are you sure? I have Proxomitron always on, with lots of filters (banner
blaster, kill popup, javascript banners, area map ads, etc, mostly the
default stuff), and I don't have any problems looking at the images in the
/upload/a/ad/ directory, for example the ones, in [[Shandong]] and in
[[Fructose]]. It seems to me that Proxomitron is unaffected, or that only
a very specific combination of filters triggers this.

Alfio


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

body:
On Sun, 04 Jan 2004 10:19:32 +0000, tarquin wrote:
> It's a pretty stupid filter. Those sites that use a path /ad/ will
> figure it out eventually and start using something else.

Hello,

They still haven't figured it out since I beginning blocking ad using my
good old At Guard :0)

--
Ashar Voultoiz
http://fr.wikipedia.org/Utilisateur:Hashar
do not send mail to listme at listme.dsbl.org


from_name: Gabriel Wicke

subject: [Wikitech-l] Single-sign-on (was: Mirror in Europe)

body:
On Tue, 06 Jan 2004 01:27:43 -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> This argument is a bit on the semantic side.  There is, of course,
> Wikibooks, and Wiktionary etc., not to mention the different language
> projects.  Having associations will make it easier for those in smaller
> projects to know just who is interested in what project.

Maybe it would be sufficient to look for edits or watch entries to find
out who's interested in a certain project.
The user pages could propably just be 'multilingual', with a knob
'create [french|german|russian|...] version- the same for other content.
I've never bothered to dive into the source, but i guess it's mainly skin
glue that's needed (once the sign on is working).

Gabriel Wicke


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: RSS of wikimedia news

references:
<btd7fd$eq2$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<CPEGLKEIMDOBFBCDOBMLIEHNCNAA.mjeaya069@rogers.com>
	<btdkvh$14b$1@sea.gmane.org> <3FFA8DBB.9030007@planetunreal.com>

body:
On Tue, 06 Jan 2004 10:28:11 +0000, tarquin wrote:

> We *must* get round to fixing our parser's attitude to P tags!!!

Yeah! moving closer to xhtml!

Gabriel Wicke


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Server Side image resizing and image layout -
	patch	included

body:
On Tue, 06 Jan 2004 05:30:40 +0100, Jens Frank wrote:

> The thumbnails are stored on disk and are only generated if no thumbnail
> for that size exists already.

Hmm- is this done into an nfs-mount shared across the Apaches or is there
some other replication mechanism? Otherwise it will be impossible to
distribute the load between several machines.

Gabriel Wicke


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Timwi wrote:
>
> Hi.
>
> I understand that we now have the MediaWiki namespace and that we can
> insert the contents of MediaWiki:XYZ into an article by inserting either
> {{subst:XYZ}} or {{msg:XYZ}} (and yes, I know their difference).
>
> Are there any plans to start using this functionality wide-spreadedly?
>
> For example, all the articles on Greek letters have a list of links to
> all the other Greek letters at the bottom. I had recently moved some of
> the pages (e.g. [[Omega (letter)]] to [[Omega]]), and so I had to modify
> all of the articles correspondingly. Then I had to change them all
> *again* because I forgot one of them.
>

There is a known bug with MSG in that changing the links in a message
will break the link table of the articles which include it. So in your
example, the "what links here" for [[Omega (letter)]] would have listed
all the greek letter articles, despite the fact that they were all
updated to point to [[Omega]] instead.

If such a change needs to be made, the link table can be refreshed by
making some trivial change to each of the affected articles.

The moral to this story is: don't change messages unless you really need
to. And don't use MSG in places where you're expecting changes to the links.

-- Tim Starling


body:
On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 01:13:00PM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Jens-
>
> good work!

Thanks :-)

> Small bug: On the image page, the image is a self-link. Go to
> http://jeluf.mormo.org/testwiki/wiki.phtml?title=Image:Westminstpalace.jpg
> & click on the image.

I was lazy and used makeImageLink for this. Will fix this tonight.

> > * thumbnail	  to generate a right aligned thumbnail of the image, using
> > 		  the caption text as image caption, adding an enlarge icon
> > 		  to the image and a [more] link to the big image
>
> Please get rid of the icon, or put it -under- the images (right-aligned
> with the caption, perhaps). The [more] link also is redundant, we should
> either have the icon or the [more] link, but not both (the icon can have
> [more] as an ALT text). It was probably hard to embed the icon, but I
> really think this behavior should be turned off ASAP -- works of art
> should not be obscured by zoom icons just because we assume the lower
> right corner is "not important".

wasn't hard, just one call to ImageMagick's composite. The first version
of the code used an icon below the image, like e.g. at
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/weltraum/0,1518,280633,00.html

tarquin said he wouldn't like an icon but prefer text. Any opinions?

If we'd use an icon, anyone has a nice one?

>
> Could the "thumbnail" option accept a width parameter? Personally I would
> probably always want to specify my own width, depending on the context.
> But I would like the zoom link (*below* the image) and the caption to be
> included regardless, thus a "thumbnail + width" combination would be most
> useful to me. I also think "thumbnail" should be shortened to "thumb".
> Neither term makes much sense for those not in the know already.
>

Specifying width for thumbnails is not hard to do. Do we want to have this
from a "corporate identity" point of view? I think I'll implement it and
let the community have a policy whether and when this should be used.

Aliasing thumb or thumbnail is easy, thanks to MagicWord class. It can
even be localized ("Daumennagel" *g*) since it's defined in Language.php.

> It would be very neat to have an option to use the image page content
> itself as a caption -- tricky to code though. We may also want to think
> about making image pages look less hacky -- with a human-readable title
> and the image history somewhat more separated from the image content.

I had the vision of the image page containing much more info/text than
the caption, and the caption might be different for different articles.
(say, Leopard.jpg being linked from [[Leopard]] and [[Predator]])

The image page layout is an issue, though. Currently, it's mostly used to
state the copyright status of an image. Options:

* Have a separate "Show big picture and nice caption" page, having an
  own article in a separate namespace
* Add a new field to the table, 'caption', that's used as a caption, the
  current field will be used for copyright status. Upload page should ask
  for "Copyright status" in a new field, perhaps assisted by a drop down
  box containing predefined values like "Pre 1920", "PD since from US gov",
  "Took the photo myself and release it to the GFDL", "... the PD".
  And make this meta data available on a separate page or (maybe user option) at
  the images pages bottom.

We have many photos that neither state their source nor what they show.

	Regards,

		JeLuF


body:
Jens-
> wasn't hard, just one call to ImageMagick's composite. The first version
> of the code used an icon below the image, like e.g. at
> http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/weltraum/0,1518,280633,00.html

I like that much better.

> tarquin said he wouldn't like an icon but prefer text. Any opinions?

With the [edit] and the [hide/show] links, I think we could really do with
an icon here and there. The mangifying glass is almost universally
recognized, and an ALT and TITLE tag could be further used to convey the
meaning.

> If we'd use an icon, anyone has a nice one?

A friend of mine made this:
http://scireview.de/be/i2.gif
(looks best on a dark background.)

> Specifying width for thumbnails is not hard to do. Do we want to have this
> from a "corporate identity" point of view?

I think so -- it's most important that individual pages are consistent,
not that the entire project maintains a single layout standard. Having
flexibility here avoids situation where text becomes unreadable and a page
is not understood because the explanatory image is too small.

> I had the vision of the image page containing much more info/text than
> the caption, and the caption might be different for different articles.
> (say, Leopard.jpg being linked from [[Leopard]] and [[Predator]])

Yes, what I meant is that in cases where this is -not- true, I would like
to be optionally able to transclude the caption from the image page (e.g.
"|loadcaption"). Right now we have a lot of image pages that are redundant
with the pages that include them; furthermore, showing the image page
content this way would increase the visibility of this text, which is
often neglected.

> The image page layout is an issue, though. Currently, it's mostly used to
> state the copyright status of an image. Options:
> * Have a separate "Show big picture and nice caption" page, having an
>   own article in a separate namespace

That would be confusing, because some people might never figure out the
difference between the two types of image pages. Could lead to "Why am I
here?" reactions.

> * Add a new field to the table, 'caption', that's used as a caption, the
>   current field will be used for copyright status. Upload page should ask
>   for "Copyright status" in a new field, perhaps assisted by a drop down
>   box containing predefined values like "Pre 1920", "PD since from US gov",
>   "Took the photo myself and release it to the GFDL", "... the PD".
>   And make this meta data available on a separate page or (maybe user
> option) at   the images pages bottom.

I think that we only need an additional integer field for the copyright
status, and one of the status values would be "see caption". For complex
cases, having the explanation in the (extended) caption seems appropriate
to me.

> We have many photos that neither state their source nor what they show.

That's very true. Even for fair use, at the very least the source should
be stated.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiktionary

body:
On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 02:00:39AM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Although everything else seems to be working in the wake of the big
> crash, I still can't get onto Wiktionary.  Is there some reason for this?
>

Looks fine to me. Could you be more specific?

Regards,

	JeLuF


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: squid idea summary

body:
Gabriel Wicke wrote:

>               |-----------  Bind DNS round robin
>        _______|______       (multiple A records)

How well does DNS round robin work in practice as compared to
a proper load balancer?

I've never tried DNS round robin because people say it sucks.  But I
have no actual knowledge from first hand experience.  I do know that
load balancing using the tools that linuxvirtualserver.org talks about
works great, and gives a very good and predictable level of control.

But yeah, there'd be no problem in waiting on that and just using
squid, as per the rest of your diagram.

--Jimbo


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiktionary

body:
On Jan 6, 2004, at 11:27, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Yes.  When I try to access it all I continue to get is the message:
>
>>     Sorry, but we're offline at the moment due to hardware troubles in
>>     two of our three servers.
>>
>>     Please read this letter <http://wikimedia.org/letter> regarding
>>     the continuing Wikipedia server problems and find out how you can
>>     help.
>>
> with the Wiktionary and Wikimedia logos.

1) Force a reload (shift+reload or ctrl+reload)
2) Clear your browser cache.
3) Restart your browser.
4) Tell us exactly what URL you're using (canonical URL is
http://wiktionary.org/)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On Tue, 06 Jan 2004 16:05:00 +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:

>> tarquin said he wouldn't like an icon but prefer text. Any opinions?
>
> With the [edit] and the [hide/show] links, I think we could really do with
> an icon here and there. The mangifying glass is almost universally
> recognized, and an ALT and TITLE tag could be further used to convey the
> meaning.

This could be done with css- a scalable image has a special class attached
that can be used to add a icon (even on top of the image) or text (the
latter would require js), all changeable with the css skin.

Gabriel Wicke


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] www.wixpression.org?

body:
Gutza wrote:

> How about a Wikipedia "documenting" expressions in various languages?
> I mean, try googling around for "bring it on" (~542,000 matches), or
> "what goes around comes around" (~98,500 matches)--and try finding out
> what they /mean/. I'm pretty sure you won't be able to find any
> explanation anywhere--I haven't.
>
> Now I'm aware such a topic is more "dictionary-like" rather than
> "encyclopedia-like"--I guess that's the first objection which comes to
> mind, although we already have a Wiktionary--, but is Wikimedia's
> purpose to only support encyclopedic projects, or to support projects
> which would be helpful?

While this certainly seems useful, I'm not sure it can't be incorporated
within Wiktionary itself instead of starting a new project.  Some paper
dictionaries include some idiomatic phrases in them already, so this
isn't completely unusual.  So I'd say just go ahead and add them to
Wiktionary, though perhaps some sort of meta-markup on Wiktionary would
be useful to categorize these sorts of things (perhaps the same sort of
meta-markup being discussed for Wikipedia categories?).

-Mark


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: squid idea summary

body:
On Mon, 05 Jan 2004 08:40:14 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> In particular, I think that Gabriel's "artist's impression" of load
> balancer in front of squid in front of apache in front of mysql is the
> right thing to do.

Hi Jimmy,

i've looked at Squid's failover and load balancing capabilities a bit-
the short story: we could do without any separate load balancer with
slightly better performance and HA.

          Internet
              |-----------  Bind DNS round robin
       _______|______       (multiple A records)
      |              |
    Squid          Squid    Squid Tier1 (connected with heartbeat)
   ___|______________|___
  |           |          |
Apache      Apache     Apache
  |___________|__________|
        |          |
      MySQL       MySQL

The Details about the Squid setup are on
http://www.aulinx.de/oss/code/wikipedia/.

This would free resources to throw on MySQL.

Gabriel Wicke


from_name: Daniel P.B.Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] DNA and "nucleic acid"

body:
Crick and Watson's original paper was entitled  "Molecular structure
of Nucleic Acids," (1953), Nature 171:737-738. The opening
sentence is:  "We wish to suggest a structure
for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has
novel features which are of considerable biological interest."

The American Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed. defines "nucleic acid" as

"Any of a group of complex compounds found in all living cells
and viruses, composed of purines, pyrimidines, carbohydrates,
and phosphoric acid. Nucleic acids in the form of DNA and RNA
control cellular function and heredity."

However, looking at [[Talk:DNA]] and the descriptions of the changes
on the page, history, I don't see any obvious dispute
framed in terms of whether "whether DNA is a nucleic acid."

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at world.std.com alternate:
dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/


from_name: Peter Jaros

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: www.wixpression.org?

references:
<3FFB3BB4.5050906@moongate.ro> <3FFB40AB.5050005@rufus.d2g.com>
	<3FFB442D.5070406@moongate.ro> <btfl15$uf9$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On Jan 6, 2004, at 7:48 PM, Timwi wrote:

> * make one major change of policy/aim/goal. I think it is completely
>   redundant and futile to try to define (explain the meaning of) all
>   words of all languages *in* all languages. I think a word should only
>   be defined in its own language, and if you want its meaning explained
>   in another language, then you should really look up its translation
> in
>   that other language. There are just so many things on Wiktionary that
>   are language-independent (e.g. the translations for each word, or
>   pronunciation written in IPA) that duplicating it hundreds of times
>   seems really dumb.

The trouble arises here when exact translations aren't available.  If I
want to know what 'guba' means in Hoobiflitz, I'd look up guba,
translate to English (via inter-lang link), and read the definition.
But 'guba' (let's say) doesn't have an exact English translation, so
there's no appropriate English definition to link to.  Here it's most
effective to explain the definition of 'guba' in English.  I think
there may be a better way to set up inter-language links to allow for
this.  And if I had a good idea for it, I'd really have a point.

Peter

---
Funding for this program comes from Borders without Doctors: The
Bookstore Chain That Sounds Like a Charity.
		--Harry Shearer, Le Show


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Server Side image resizing and image layout
	-	patch	included

body:
It should be considered that I recently threw in an "image location and
caption style" feature in form of the table markup.

{| class=rimage

will align the image to the right, select a smaller font for the caption
etc. Maybe we should focus on the thumbnail capability here.

<brag>
Too bad my Nupedia software isn't runnig anymore, it had thumbnail,
normal, high quality, and "figure only" view, with SVG support (SVG
plugin required), and even *different* captions (brief for thumbnail,
extended for normal/HQ/figure-only), and even hidden text for the "alt"
tag to be read to the blind...
</brag>

Magnus

Gabriel Wicke wrote:
> On Tue, 06 Jan 2004 16:05:00 +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>
>
>>>tarquin said he wouldn't like an icon but prefer text. Any opinions?
>>
>>With the [edit] and the [hide/show] links, I think we could really do with
>>an icon here and there. The mangifying glass is almost universally
>>recognized, and an ALT and TITLE tag could be further used to convey the
>>meaning.
>
>
> This could be done with css- a scalable image has a special class attached
> that can be used to add a icon (even on top of the image) or text (the
> latter would require js), all changeable with the css skin.
>
> Gabriel Wicke
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: squid idea summary

body:
Gabriel Wicke wrote:

>On Mon, 05 Jan 2004 08:40:14 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>
>
>>In particular, I think that Gabriel's "artist's impression" of load
>>balancer in front of squid in front of apache in front of mysql is the
>>right thing to do.
>>
>>
>
>Hi Jimmy,
>
>i've looked at Squid's failover and load balancing capabilities a bit-
>the short story: we could do without any separate load balancer with
>slightly better performance and HA.
>
>          Internet
>              |-----------  Bind DNS round robin
>       _______|______       (multiple A records)
>      |              |
>    Squid          Squid    Squid Tier1 (connected with heartbeat)
>   ___|______________|___
>  |           |          |
>Apache      Apache     Apache
>  |___________|__________|
>        |          |
>      MySQL       MySQL
>
>The Details about the Squid setup are on
>http://www.aulinx.de/oss/code/wikipedia/.
>
>This would free resources to throw on MySQL.
>
>Gabriel Wicke
>
>
>

The Apache and MySQL systems could all exist on the same switched
network (even though the data flow would remain as above), making the
system a bit simpler to build and administer, whilst still keeping
advantage of having the Squid machines as a full proxy firewall for the
back-end machines:

          Internet
              |-----------  Bind DNS round robin
       _______|______       (multiple A records)
      |              |
    Squid          Squid    Squid Tier1 (with heartbeat)
   ___|______________|_________________________
  |           |          |         |         |
Apache      Apache     Apache    MySQL     MySQL ...

Switch speed should not be an issue: an Ethernet switched network will scale to Gbit speeds, at which time the Distributed Squid Borg would probably be a natural follow-on from Gabriel's design.

-- Neil


from_name: Timwi

body:
Jens Frank wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 11:36:20AM +0530, Arvind Narayanan wrote:
>
>>It wouldn't be difficult to change it, but it would be an ugly hack.
>>The directory name is the first 2 chars of the md5sum of the name of
>>the image. So it would mean either using a different hashing method,
>>affecting *all* images, or putting special case checks in the code.
>
> The directory is /upload/a/ad/, the first letter is used twice, once
> for /a/ and once for /ad/. It's not hard and not ugly to change this
> to /a/d/.

Geez, everyone has better ideas than I! ;-)

So can we make this change, then?

Thanks,
Timwi


body:
Jens Frank wrote:

> I'd like to propose to make the software handle this frequent task. The image
> syntax would be extended to provide an options field. This can be done
> backwards compatible and similar to the options for table cells:
>
> 	[[Image:Leopard.jpg|options|descriptive caption]]
>
> Examples can be found at
>
>   http://jeluf.mormo.org/testwiki/wiki.phtml?title=Extended_image_syntax

Oh, another thing. Could we change "more" to "zoom" or perhaps
"full-size"? I believe the primary function of the link is to enlarge
the image, not to provide "more" information.

Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: www.wixpression.org?

body:
Gutza wrote:

> I think Wiktionary is not a well-though project, I guess some guy (gal)
> said "let's do this" at some point, and it was done.

Wow. I'm really not the only one who thinks that? :-)

OK, here are my major problems with Wiktionary:

* English-centric (as has already been said)
* not automated enough. Linking from [[biscuit]] (an English word) to
   [[Keks]] (a German word) should automatically add a link from [[Keks]]
   back to [[biscuit]]. A lot of identical formatting/layout should be
   automated (perhaps have a template automatically show up in the edit
   window when you try to edit a not-yet-existing page?).
* too crowded in places. [[e]] should not contain all its meanings in
   hundreds of different languages on a single page.

My suggestions for major improvement would be:

* wait for MediaWiki to support multi-language projects within a single
   Wiki. This is already in the plans for Wikipedia. Once that is done,
   you can have one page [[e]] in Spanish, another [[e]] in Italian, etc.

* add more options to the MediaWiki software to customise the appearance
   and behaviour, including:

* * allow for the inter-wiki links (which should really be called
     inter-language links once it's a single wiki) to be displayed in a
     completely different fashion, i.e. instead of:
       _dansk_ | _dansk_ | _Deutsch_ | _English_ | _English_ | _Fran?ais_
     at the top and bottom, display them as a dominantly visible list
     only at the bottom:
        == Translations ==
        * Dansk:    _kiks_, _biskuit_
        * Deutsch:  _Keks_
        * English:  _biscuit_, _cookie_
        * Fran?ais: _biscuit_

* * allow for automatic reciprocal adding of inter-language links

* make one major change of policy/aim/goal. I think it is completely
   redundant and futile to try to define (explain the meaning of) all
   words of all languages *in* all languages. I think a word should only
   be defined in its own language, and if you want its meaning explained
   in another language, then you should really look up its translation in
   that other language. There are just so many things on Wiktionary that
   are language-independent (e.g. the translations for each word, or
   pronunciation written in IPA) that duplicating it hundreds of times
   seems really dumb.

So far are my ideas.

Timwi


from_name: Gutza

subject: [WikiEN-l] www.wixpression.org?

body:
How about a Wikipedia "documenting" expressions in various languages? I
mean, try googling around for "bring it on" (~542,000 matches), or "what
goes around comes around" (~98,500 matches)--and try finding out what
they /mean/. I'm pretty sure you won't be able to find any explanation
anywhere--I haven't.

Now I'm aware such a topic is more "dictionary-like" rather than
"encyclopedia-like"--I guess that's the first objection which comes to
mind, although we already have a Wiktionary--, but is Wikimedia's
purpose to only support encyclopedic projects, or to support projects
which would be helpful?

Also, think about the various languages which make use of
expressions--due to the human nature, I expect all languages do--, and
think how helpful such a (successful) project would be for people around
the world trying to find out information about this and that obscure
expression in some language. Bells and whistels included a la Wikipedia,
as in cross-referencing languages, historical periods, you know the
drill, I won't go into that.

What do you think?

--Gutza


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: squid idea summary

body:
On Tue, 06 Jan 2004 15:09:01 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Gabriel Wicke wrote:
>
>>               |-----------  Bind DNS round robin
>>        _______|______       (multiple A records)
>
> How well does DNS round robin work in practice as compared to a proper
> load balancer?

I think it's the solution with the least control on how the traffic will
be actually distributed. On the other hand the squids might not be
the bottleneck anytime soon, and by that time it would propably make sense
to install a second, possibly distributed squid layer. It might as well
save some time because the work to install Heartbeat would only need to be
done once on the Squids. Once a second Squid layer is installed any
separate Linux Directors are not needed anymore (and the Squids
will need Heartbeat then). Except maybe for balancing the database, but
that's propably a different setup altogether.

> I've never tried DNS round robin because people say it sucks.  But I
> have no actual knowledge from first hand experience.

Me neither.

> I do know that
> load balancing using the tools that linuxvirtualserver.org talks about
> works great, and gives a very good and predictable level of control.

I've asked the squid guys about the load balancing setup: If ICP is
disabled (Apache doesn't support it) it would do a dumb round-robin
without weighting. With ICP enabled (as a dumb echo on port7) it
will take the weighting into account (i'm waiting for the answer on how
this works out if the ISP roundtrips are all very quick in case of port7).
The best solution would be an ICP daemon that delays ICP responses
depending on the system load, then the system load would be 100% the same
on all Apaches. If the Apaches are all similar in performance this is an
academical question anyway. Linux Director also does it as round-robin
with static weighting unless feedbackd is installed.

Gabriel Wicke


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: From the talk page

body:
John Robinson wrote:

>  From [[Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Peerage]]:
>
> ...could we please make some headroads into changing [[Benjamin
> Disraeli]] to an article rather than a redirect, and [[Duke of
> Wellington]] into an article instead of a disambiguation page

I've moved [[Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield]] to [[Benjamin
Disraeli]] for you, but the rest really has to be done by someone who
knows about this stuff.

Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] www.wixpression.org?

body:
Delirium wrote:

> While this certainly seems useful, I'm not sure it can't be
> incorporated within Wiktionary itself instead of starting a new
> project.  Some paper dictionaries include some idiomatic phrases in
> them already, so this isn't completely unusual.  So I'd say just go
> ahead and add them to Wiktionary, though perhaps some sort of
> meta-markup on Wiktionary would be useful to categorize these sorts of
> things (perhaps the same sort of meta-markup being discussed for
> Wikipedia categories?).
>
> -Mark

Well, Mark, I actually have a problem with markup in Wiktionary, hope
this doesn't get personal. :)

I think Wiktionary is not a well-though project, I guess some guy (gal)
said "let's do this" at some point, and it was done. But it's waaaay too
English-centric, Wiktionary tends to become a good English-to-anything
dictionary if successful in the long run, but it's a shame that it's
nothing-to-English in return, due to lack of formalized markup. I
personally never followed (nor even found) any discussion on the topic,
but since there are a lot of intelligent, knowledgeable people involved
in all of Wikimedia's projects, I expect I'm not raising a new issue here.

What I'm trying to say is that Wiktionary will probably have to go
through some major (hopefully automated) markup changes in the mid-ling
run in order to support arbitrary language-to-language dictionary
searches, whereas "Wixpression" or whatever it would be called, if
accepted as a new project at all, is not suitable for such treatment
because expressions are generally not translatable 1:1, as words tend to
be. Also, while "red" in English is simply translated to "rouge" in
French, "bring it on" in English needs to be explained /in English/
first, and only then, optionally, in French. Therefore I think these
should be two separate projects.

--Gutza


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: squid idea summary

body:
Gabriel Wicke wrote:

>On Tue, 06 Jan 2004 15:09:01 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>
>
>>Gabriel Wicke wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>              |-----------  Bind DNS round robin
>>>       _______|______       (multiple A records)
>>>
>>>
>>How well does DNS round robin work in practice as compared to a proper
>>load balancer?
>>
>>
>
>I think it's the solution with the least control on how the traffic will
>be actually distributed. On the other hand the squids might not be
>the bottleneck anytime soon, and by that time it would propably make sense
>to install a second, possibly distributed squid layer. It might as well
>save some time because the work to install Heartbeat would only need to be
>done once on the Squids. Once a second Squid layer is installed any
>separate Linux Directors are not needed anymore (and the Squids
>will need Heartbeat then). Except maybe for balancing the database, but
>that's propably a different setup altogether.
>
>
>
>>I've never tried DNS round robin because people say it sucks.  But I
>>have no actual knowledge from first hand experience.
>>
>>
>
>Me neither.
>
>
>
>>I do know that
>>load balancing using the tools that linuxvirtualserver.org talks about
>>works great, and gives a very good and predictable level of control.
>>
>>
>
>I've asked the squid guys about the load balancing setup: If ICP is
>disabled (Apache doesn't support it) it would do a dumb round-robin
>without weighting. With ICP enabled (as a dumb echo on port7) it
>will take the weighting into account (i'm waiting for the answer on how
>this works out if the ISP roundtrips are all very quick in case of port7).
>The best solution would be an ICP daemon that delays ICP responses
>depending on the system load, then the system load would be 100% the same
>on all Apaches. If the Apaches are all similar in performance this is an
>academical question anyway. Linux Director also does it as round-robin
>with static weighting unless feedbackd is installed.
>
>Gabriel Wicke
>
>
>
Here's another way of doing it without the load balancers: have a pool
of say 36 IP addresses (chosen because lots of numbers exactly or
approximately divide into it: other numbers would do fine), and do
simple DNS round-robin to balance user traffic across these. Browsers
and DNS caches will cache DNS lookups, but we don't care, so long as
traffic is distributed roughly evenly across the IP addresses.

Now, have N << 36 Squid servers, and allocate the IP addresses
_dynamically_ to the servers. If they are all on the same Ethernet, this
can be done using ARP.

Very roughly:
First set every machine to serve requests on all IP addresses on each
Ethernet card in the shared pool. Requests will be seen so long as that
logical interface is configured "up" on that machine.

Now start a polling process:
* every machine checks whether there is a live machine at each IP
address in the pool at some reasonable pseudo-randomized interval, by
doing an ARP request
* if it sees that another machine as well as itself is serving an IP
address from the pool, it will take down that logical interface, to
prevent allocation collisions
* when it sees there isn't, it looks at the number of addresses assigned
to each machine (which it knows from its ARP scans)
* am I the machine with the lowest MAC address from the set of
least-assigned machines? --> take over the IP by calling 'ifconfig' for
that interface

The interval is pseudo-random to break symmetry to prevent
synchronization by entrainment and thus make races very unlikely. (Note
that races are self-fixing, see below).

Also, excessively heavily loaded machines could also _take down_ logical
interfaces, to allow other machines to take up the load. This would also
be done on the basis of exceeding a "fair share": a damping mechanism
would be needed to stop excess re-balancing and to aid convergence.
(Margin too small to contain details of formula for stable damping
thresholds and timeouts).

Upside: simple and distributed. Race conditions will be very rare
(p<0.001), and rapidly corrected. If we poll each IP address once a
second from each machine, a new server will be allocated to a fallen IP
address within substantially less than a minute (it gets less as N gets
bigger). Overhead on each machine: user-space doing an ARP probe once a
second, the kernel listening to N ARP requests per second.

Downside: when an IP address is transferred from one machine to another,
any HTTP transfer in progress will time out. However, as this should
only occur when nodes fail, or when new or rebooted nodes are brought up
within the cluster, this is probably acceptable.

Doing things this way could possibly eliminate the need for the
load-balancing boxes completely, and the scripts are no more complex
than the heartbeat script.

Possible problem: partial failure of a system, so it responds to network
requests but not application-level requests
Two possible resolutions:
* watchdog-like process which performs local tests, and in the event of
failure, shuts down all logical interfaces in the pool on that machine,
allowing them to be picked up by other machines
* remote monitoring, and remote operator intervention via SSH or the
power strip, if the above fails (automated STONITH does not make sense...)

The code can written entirely in Python, and can simply use standard
UNIX commands to do low-level stuff.

-- Neil


from_name: Jens Frank

subject:
class rimage (was Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Server Side image resizing and
	image layout -	patch included)

body:
On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 09:49:48PM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
> It should be considered that I recently threw in an "image location and
> caption style" feature in form of the table markup.
>
> {| class=rimage
>
> will align the image to the right, select a smaller font for the caption
> etc. Maybe we should focus on the thumbnail capability here.

I just tried to test this. It didn't work. After some searching, I noticed
that these classes are defined only for the wikistandard.css. cologneblue.css
and nostalgia.css don't have them.

> <brag>
> Too bad my Nupedia software isn't runnig anymore, it had thumbnail,
> normal, high quality, and "figure only" view, with SVG support (SVG
> plugin required), and even *different* captions (brief for thumbnail,
> extended for normal/HQ/figure-only), and even hidden text for the "alt"
> tag to be read to the blind...
> </brag>

<nag>
Why didn't you implement this in phase II ? I wouldn't have to code all
night long and read all this strange PHP code if it would have been available
already ...
</nag> ;-)

Regards,

	JeLuF


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
Could we please reach some type of decision on this so that we know what can
be posted on meta?

These are the columns I would like to have on the detailed part of the
spreadsheet:

Date	, Time, Time Zone, Type,	 Status, Subject, Currency, Gross, Fee, Net,
Note, Payment Type, Balance

"Subject" and "Note" are the areas where the donors can write whatever they
want. So for this first publication we should contact anybody who added their
names and/or user names to that part to ask them if it would be OK for us to
publish that (or we could remove their name and/or user name from the
messages - even the messages if they wanted).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: A

from_email: A

subject: [WikiEN-l] Adam Carr

body:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Socialism&diff=0&oldid=2105510

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes
http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus


from_name: Jake Nelson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] www.wixpression.org?

body:
[Moved to wikipedia-l at mav's request]
Gutza wrote:
> How about a Wikipedia "documenting" expressions in various languages? I
> mean, try googling around for "bring it on" (~542,000 matches), or "what
> goes around comes around" (~98,500 matches)--and try finding out what
> they /mean/. I'm pretty sure you won't be able to find any explanation
> anywhere--I haven't.
>
> Now I'm aware such a topic is more "dictionary-like" rather than
> "encyclopedia-like"--I guess that's the first objection which comes to
> mind, although we already have a Wiktionary--, but is Wikimedia's
> purpose to only support encyclopedic projects, or to support projects
> which would be helpful?
>
> Also, think about the various languages which make use of
> expressions--due to the human nature, I expect all languages do--, and
> think how helpful such a (successful) project would be for people around
> the world trying to find out information about this and that obscure
> expression in some language. Bells and whistels included a la Wikipedia,
> as in cross-referencing languages, historical periods, you know the
> drill, I won't go into that.
>
> What do you think?

I'd say this would be better as a part of Wikiquote than a separate project,
personally.

-- Jake


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] www.wixpression.org?

body:
Gutza wrote on <wikiEN-L>:

>How about a Wikipedia "documenting" expressions in various languages? I
>mean, try googling around for "bring it on" (~542,000 matches), or "what
>goes around comes around" (~98,500 matches)--and try finding out what
>they /mean/. I'm pretty sure you won't be able to find any explanation
>anywhere--I haven't.

>Now I'm aware such a topic is more "dictionary-like" rather than
>"encyclopedia-like"--I guess that's the first objection which comes to
>mind, although we already have a Wiktionary--, but is Wikimedia's
>purpose to only support encyclopedic projects, or to support projects
>which would be helpful?

>Also, think about the various languages which make use of
>expressions--due to the human nature, I expect all languages do--, and
>think how helpful such a (successful) project would be for people around
>the world trying to find out information about this and that obscure
>expression in some language. Bells and whistels included a la Wikipedia,
>as in cross-referencing languages, historical periods, you know the
>drill, I won't go into that.

>What do you think?

Some of this has been happening on Wikipedia already.

I tried to write a brief summary for this post, but it was impossible;
you might read [[en:Let's Roll]], [[en:Talk:AKFD]], and of course
[[en:Wikipedia:Naming conventions (slogans)]] to see why.
But you have to look at edit history and see things in dynamic context,
and that is literally ''impossible'' now.

Suffice it to say that allowing [[Bring it on]] to be an article
on the English Wikipedia (I don't know about the other wikis)
produces an irreconcilable conflict between NPOV and good taste.

However ...

On Wiktionary, one ''expects'' page titles to be words or phrases.
By default, they are mentions rather than uses, if you like.
If Wiktionary can accept phrases (I don't see why not, but I don't know),
then Wikipedia authors can write "[[Fred Phelps]] paraded [[anti-gay slogan]]s,
most famously [[wiktionary:AIDS Kills Fags Dead|]] at the Sheppard's funeral"
on [[Matthew Sheppard]] without worry.

In any case, the history and usages of phrases in a worthy topic
for Wikimedia to cover, if Wikimedians can find a tolerable format
to discuss even the loathesome ones.

-- Toby


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Adam Carr

body:
Hitler was always for "Peace" too, maybe he ought to be in the article on
the Peace Movement.

Nothing more than the briefest mention that Nazism was called National
Socialism is appropriate. The various efforts the Nazis made which have some
socialist content can be covered in the Nazism article.

That certain apologists want to have links to [[Stalinism]] and
[[Marxist-Leninist government]] is no excuse (But of course those are not
the links they choose to make). In any event you cannot discuss socialism
without somehow referencing communism, but you can write a very informative
article without bringing in fascism and Narxism as examples.

Shame on you, Lir, stirring up trouble...

Fred

> From: Flockmeal <Flockmeal at cox.net>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2004 08:19:07 -0500
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Adam Carr
>
> A [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
>
>>
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Socialism&diff=0&oldid=21055
1>> 0
>>
>>
>>
>
> Yes, there is an active edit war going on with the Socialism article
> between Adam Carr and Lir. The question appears to be about the
> inclusion of the Nazis and their brand of National Socialism in the
> article. An NPOV statement regarding the Nazis needs to be added to the
> article and then someone must protect the article.
>
> Please help.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Flockmeal

subject: [WikiEN-l] Adam Carr

body:
A [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:

>http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Socialism&diff=0&oldid=2105510
>
>
>

Yes, there is an active edit war going on with the Socialism article
between Adam Carr and Lir. The question appears to be about the
inclusion of the Nazis and their brand of National Socialism in the
article. An NPOV statement regarding the Nazis needs to be added to the
article and then someone must protect the article.

Please help.


subject:
class rimage (was Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Server Side image resizing
	and	image layout -	patch included)

body:
Jens Frank wrote:

>On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 09:49:48PM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>
>>It should be considered that I recently threw in an "image location and
>>caption style" feature in form of the table markup.
>>
>>{| class=rimage
>>
>>will align the image to the right, select a smaller font for the caption
>>etc. Maybe we should focus on the thumbnail capability here.
>>
>>
>
>I just tried to test this. It didn't work. After some searching, I noticed
>that these classes are defined only for the wikistandard.css. cologneblue.css
>and nostalgia.css don't have them.
>
>
That's why I suggested to include several stylesheets with the article.
At least, a "common" one, and the actual skin stylesheet.

Or would that be a problem somehow?

Magnus


from_name: Tim Starling

references:
<btd3lb$9hl$1@sea.gmane.org> <3FFA31F8.8010706@hotmail.com>
	<btdihk$tr5$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi wrote:
>
> Tim Starling wrote:
>>
>> There is a known bug with MSG in that changing the links in a message
>> will break the link table of the articles which include it. So in your
>> example, the "what links here" for [[Omega (letter)]] would have listed
>> all the greek letter articles, despite the fact that they were all
>> updated to point to [[Omega]] instead.
>
>
> Then I suppose that bug should be fixed?...
>
>> The moral to this story is: don't change messages unless you really
>> need to. And don't use MSG in places where you're expecting changes to
>> the links.
>
>
> In light of that bug, I agree, but once it's fixed, then I suppose we
> can start using this?

Yes. In fact with a few simple extra features, it could be used for many
templates. The most important suggested feature is "parameterised
inclusion". For example, if [[MediaWiki:Hello]] contains "Hello $1,
welcome to $2", then {{msg:hello|Timwi|Wikipedia}} would generate "Hello
Timwi, welcome to Wikipedia".

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Gabriel Wicke

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: class rimage (was Re: Re: Server Side image
	resizing	and	image layout -	patch included)

body:
On Wed, 07 Jan 2004 09:46:53 +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:

> Or would that be a problem somehow?

+1
It's only one additional request. The more is done in css the more complex
stylesheets will get, this will simplify updating a lot.

Gabriel Wicke


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: squid idea summary

body:
On Wed, 07 Jan 2004 01:34:02 +0000, Neil Harris wrote:

> Here's another way of doing it without the load balancers: have a pool
> of say 36 IP addresses (chosen because lots of numbers exactly or
> approximately divide into it: other numbers would do fine), and do
> simple DNS round-robin to balance user traffic across these. Browsers
> and DNS caches will cache DNS lookups, but we don't care, so long as
> traffic is distributed roughly evenly across the IP addresses.

I'd expect a decent Squid box (a lot of ram) to do well over 1000 Requests
per second. I have no detailed information about the current traffic, but
from my benchmarks i would guess the current machines do propably 100
Requests/ second all together (most likely less). So even if the simple
DNS load balancing would fail completely (which is unlikely) there would
be no problem in using one squid box alone. I see no point in a Heartbeat
setup if one Squid couldn't do it ;-)

Gabriel Wicke


subject: [WikiEN-l] Hitler and Socialism

body:
That might be ok in the article [[Hitler and socialism]] but the socialism
article need to be about socialism, not Nazism or Communism.

Fred

> From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2004 16:24:38 -0500
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Hitler and Socialism
>
> I'd like the articles to clarify to what extent the "National Socialism"
> of Hitler and Nazism is or is not "socialist". Perhaps a short list of
> the essential attributes of socialism, combined with a brief discussion
> of the degree to which Nazism had or did not have these attributes.
>
> The article should also explain any reasons why Soviets despised
> Hitler's government. Germany's invasion of Russia was probably a big
> factor, to be sure, but was Nazism a "competing variant" of socialism?
> Is it possible for a socialist economy or socialist government to be
> more nationalistic than internationalist? If not, who says so, etc.
>
> Remember, the Soviets were not always straightforward about their goals
> and deeds, and they may have characterized Nazism as non-socialist for
> propaganda purposes. Have enough decades elapsed for us to puncture the
> veneer of Soviet propaganda and reveal the truth? (Or at least give
> several POVs on the topic?)
>
> Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Adam Carr

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>Nothing more than the briefest mention that Nazism was called National
>Socialism is appropriate. The various efforts the Nazis made which have some
>socialist content can be covered in the Nazism article.
>
>
Something like:

''See also: [[National Socialism]]''

Seems like it'd be sufficient.  The very fact that "National Socialism"
uses "Socialism" in its name implies to the reader that there is a
claimed connection, and they may click through to read more about it.

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: www.wixpression.org?

body:
Peter Jaros wrote:

> The trouble arises here when exact translations aren't available.

I don't think that's a problem at all.

If you know Hoobiflitz well enough to appreciate the subtleties of the
language, then you can just read the definition of guba in Hoobiflitz.

If you don't, then you wouldn't be able to appreciate the subtle
implications of a word anyway, so a few suggested translations can give
you the general idea.

Besides, several inaccurate translations often give you a more accurate
picture of a word's meaning than a single inaccurate translation.
Suppose, for example, the three possible translations for guba were
"offer", "sale", "promotion". The combination of the three gives you
more information than each single one. What I'm getting at here is that
having a list of well-chosen translations is as good as a definition.

Timwi


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Hitler and Socialism

body:
I'd like the articles to clarify to what extent the "National Socialism"
of Hitler and Nazism is or is not "socialist". Perhaps a short list of
the essential attributes of socialism, combined with a brief discussion
of the degree to which Nazism had or did not have these attributes.

The article should also explain any reasons why Soviets despised
Hitler's government. Germany's invasion of Russia was probably a big
factor, to be sure, but was Nazism a "competing variant" of socialism?
Is it possible for a socialist economy or socialist government to be
more nationalistic than internationalist? If not, who says so, etc.

Remember, the Soviets were not always straightforward about their goals
and deeds, and they may have characterized Nazism as non-socialist for
propaganda purposes. Have enough decades elapsed for us to puncture the
veneer of Soviet propaganda and reveal the truth? (Or at least give
several POVs on the topic?)

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Adam Carr

body:
Bwahahahahahahahahahaha!

Lir?  Stir up trouble?

RIckK

Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:

Shame on you, Lir, stirring up trouble...

Fred

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes
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from_name: Imran Ghory

subject: [WikiEN-l] www.wixpression.org?

body:
On Tue, 6 Jan 2004, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> Gutza wrote:
> >What do you think?
>
> Sounds like a good idea for a series of new books at Wikibooks. They could be
> used in conjunction with our language textbooks.

It's in rather a strange position, as initially the expression must have
started life as quote, but some expressions have become so common that
they have essentially become parts of the English language so would be
suitable for a dictionary.

So the choice between wikiquote and wiktionary is rather clouded, so maybe
wikibooks would be the best place to have it.

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


from_name: tarquin

body:
Jens Frank wrote:

>I just tried to test this. It didn't work. After some searching, I noticed
>that these classes are defined only for the wikistandard.css. cologneblue.css
>and nostalgia.css don't have them.
>
Our stylesheets are a terrible mess.
Once I get MediaWiki working on my PC, I'll make a few short-term fixes,
pending our implementation of Smarty templates.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] www.wixpression.org?

body:
Delirium wrote:

> While this certainly seems useful, I'm not sure it can't be
> incorporated within Wiktionary itself instead of starting a new
> project.  Some paper dictionaries include some idiomatic phrases in
> them already, so this isn't completely unusual.  So I'd say just go
> ahead and add them to Wiktionary, though perhaps some sort of
> meta-markup on Wiktionary would be useful to categorize these sorts of
> things (perhaps the same sort of meta-markup being discussed for
> Wikipedia categories?).

I generally agree that this type of thing is fine on Wiktionary.  I also
believe that some kind of meta-markup will be be needed on Wiktionary.
 Nevertheless I would like to see some kind of such scheme up and
working on one single project so that we can get the bugs out before the
scheme is adopted on other projects.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] www.wixpression.org?

body:
Gutza wrote:

> Delirium wrote:
>
>> While this certainly seems useful, I'm not sure it can't be
>> incorporated within Wiktionary itself instead of starting a new
>> project.  Some paper dictionaries include some idiomatic phrases in
>> them already, so this isn't completely unusual.  So I'd say just go
>> ahead and add them to Wiktionary, though perhaps some sort of
>> meta-markup on Wiktionary would be useful to categorize these sorts
>> of things (perhaps the same sort of meta-markup being discussed for
>> Wikipedia categories?).
>>
>> -Mark
>
>
> Well, Mark, I actually have a problem with markup in Wiktionary, hope
> this doesn't get personal. :)
>
> I think Wiktionary is not a well-though project, I guess some guy
> (gal) said "let's do this" at some point, and it was done. But it's
> waaaay too English-centric, Wiktionary tends to become a good
> English-to-anything dictionary if successful in the long run, but it's
> a shame that it's nothing-to-English in return, due to lack of
> formalized markup. I personally never followed (nor even found) any
> discussion on the topic, but since there are a lot of intelligent,
> knowledgeable people involved in all of Wikimedia's projects, I expect
> I'm not raising a new issue here.
>
> What I'm trying to say is that Wiktionary will probably have to go
> through some major (hopefully automated) markup changes in the
> mid-ling run in order to support arbitrary language-to-language
> dictionary searches, whereas "Wixpression" or whatever it would be
> called, if accepted as a new project at all, is not suitable for such
> treatment because expressions are generally not translatable 1:1, as
> words tend to be. Also, while "red" in English is simply translated to
> "rouge" in French, "bring it on" in English needs to be explained /in
> English/ first, and only then, optionally, in French. Therefore I
> think these should be two separate projects.

The last thing that Wiktionary needs is a listing of automated
translation.  Of course the English Wiktionary is "English-centric".
 What else did you expect?  It is first a dictionary, and only secondly
a book of translations.  Still, to choose one example and say that there
is a 1:1 correspondence between the words of two languages represnts a
totally na?ve view of language.

The idea of other language Wiktionary projects has come up repeatedly.
 At this stage I find "Wixpression" completely useless, or at best
premature.  There has always been an intent to have Wiktionaries in
other languages,  and once they are functional it will be a lot easier
to co-ordinate them with the English project and with each other.  But
instead of seeing Wiktionaries in other languages, all I see is
complaints.  If the whiners went ahead and started Wiktionaries in the
language of their choice we would all be further ahead.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiktionary

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Jan 6, 2004, at 11:27, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> Yes.  When I try to access it all I continue to get is the message:
>>
>>>     Sorry,  ...
>>
>> with the Wiktionary and Wikimedia logos.
>
>
> 1) Force a reload (shift+reload or ctrl+reload)
> 2) Clear your browser cache.
> 3) Restart your browser.
> 4) Tell us exactly what URL you're using (canonical URL is
> http://wiktionary.org/)

Thanks Brion, number 1 did it.  Previously I was just using a simple reload.

My apologies for making such a dumb complaint.

Ray


body:
On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 10:39:21PM +0000, tarquin wrote:
>
>
> Jens Frank wrote:
>
> >I just tried to test this. It didn't work. After some searching, I noticed
> >that these classes are defined only for the wikistandard.css.
> >cologneblue.css
> >and nostalgia.css don't have them.
> >
> Our stylesheets are a terrible mess.
> Once I get MediaWiki working on my PC, I'll make a few short-term fixes,
> pending our implementation of Smarty templates.

That sounds good, what can I do to help you set up MediaWiki?

JeLuF


subject: [Wikipedia-l] registering Wikipedia as a trademark

body:
Delirium wrote:

>
> FWIW, it's $335 in the US, also for 10 years.  However, I'm not sure I
> like the idea of spending our money in this way.  At least in the US,
> registering a trademark is not necessary to claim trademark ownership:
> the only requirement is that you show use of the trademark.  In fact,
> registering doesn't help you if you don't show use of the trademark,
> so that's the only requirement, registration or not.  Really the only
> things registration gives you, at least in the US, are the ability to
> sue for punitive damages, and some procedural things (like petitioning
> to US customs to ban the importation of infringing foreign products).
> You can still do the normal "cease and desist" thing without a
> registered trademark.
>
> Not that registering a trademark is completely worthless, but I think
> for what we're doing, simply using it is sufficient, and registration
> gives marginal additional benefits, so we can find better uses for $1k+.

One of the biggest benefits is evidentiary.  If both you and someone
else try to use the same trademark, the registration is prima facie
evidence that you used it when you did.  For many small enterprises
records are often deficient, and proving first use can be a problem.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] New version of server resizing code

body:
Hi,

considering your responses, I've improved the syntax and the code.

Changes:

* Orthogonal syntax. Reduced keywords: thumb(nail), left, right, ___px.
  any combination of these is possible (well, left|right is possible,
  but not useful). [[Image:Leopard.jpg|left|200px|thumb|African Leopard]]
  will create a 200 pixel wide left aligned thumbnail image with the
  caption African Leopard.
* Thumbnail default alignment depends on language's writing direction
  (left-to-right ./. right-to-left). Can be overwritten as above.
* Configured it not to stamp the enlarge icon into the image. The image
  is shown below the image right-aligned. (can be changed to left using
  CSS)
* Nicer icon (magnifying glass, contributed by bumms13, thanks!)
* Fixed image page linking back to image page
* removed mostly all changes to imagepage. Only change kept:
  Include the image at the image page. Should this be restricted
  to images smaller than 150 KByte?

Examples and TODO-List are at
http://jeluf.mormo.org/testwiki/wiki.phtml?title=Extended_image_syntax

Best regards,

	JeLuF


from_name: Delirium

body:
Kurt Jansson wrote:

> So what about registering Wikipedia (and also Wikimedia?) as a
> trademark? I think we can afford it now, and I also think it's
> important enough to do it. But in which countries? Maybe in those
> where the languages of the biggest five or ten Wikipedias are spoken?
>
> If there is no reaction I consider this as approval and will organize
> the registration for Germany. It costs 300 Euro and lasts for 10 years.

FWIW, it's $335 in the US, also for 10 years.  However, I'm not sure I
like the idea of spending our money in this way.  At least in the US,
registering a trademark is not necessary to claim trademark ownership:
the only requirement is that you show use of the trademark.  In fact,
registering doesn't help you if you don't show use of the trademark, so
that's the only requirement, registration or not.  Really the only
things registration gives you, at least in the US, are the ability to
sue for punitive damages, and some procedural things (like petitioning
to US customs to ban the importation of infringing foreign products).
You can still do the normal "cease and desist" thing without a
registered trademark.

Not that registering a trademark is completely worthless, but I think
for what we're doing, simply using it is sufficient, and registration
gives marginal additional benefits, so we can find better uses for $1k+.

-Mark


body:
Forgot to attach the patch. See attachment.

	JeLuF

On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 02:34:37AM +0100, Jens Frank wrote:
> Hi,
>
> considering your responses, I've improved the syntax and the code.
>
> Changes:
>
> * Orthogonal syntax. Reduced keywords: thumb(nail), left, right, ___px.
>   any combination of these is possible (well, left|right is possible,
>   but not useful). [[Image:Leopard.jpg|left|200px|thumb|African Leopard]]
>   will create a 200 pixel wide left aligned thumbnail image with the
>   caption African Leopard.
> * Thumbnail default alignment depends on language's writing direction
>   (left-to-right ./. right-to-left). Can be overwritten as above.
> * Configured it not to stamp the enlarge icon into the image. The image
>   is shown below the image right-aligned. (can be changed to left using
>   CSS)
> * Nicer icon (magnifying glass, contributed by bumms13, thanks!)
> * Fixed image page linking back to image page
> * removed mostly all changes to imagepage. Only change kept:
>   Include the image at the image page. Should this be restricted
>   to images smaller than 150 KByte?
>
> Examples and TODO-List are at
> http://jeluf.mormo.org/testwiki/wiki.phtml?title=Extended_image_syntax
>
> Best regards,
>
> 	JeLuF
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
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from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: squid idea summary

body:
Jens Frank wrote:
> 1 CPU at about 2GHz
> 2 GB RAM
> 2*36G 15kRPM SCSI Disks
> Remote controller (rILO, eRIC) for remote "lights out" management
> 1 Unit rack mountable
> redundant power supply
>
> Being most familiar with Compaq's Intel servers, I configured the box
> in their webshop and it was about 4,000$

I just looked at a configuration at Silicon Mechanics.  (But, I am
also considering another vendor with similar prices, Penguin
Computing.  And I'm open to more suggestions, as always.)

SM-1151SATA, http://www.siliconmechanics.com/i1511/p4-server.php

1 CPU at 2.4GHZ P4.  (They offer a cheaper Celeron, I'm not sure if
the P4 is worth the extra money for webserving or not.)

2 GB Ram (2x1GB, which is a little more expensive than 4x512, but
leaves slots open for future growth.)

2*80G 7.2kRPM, 8MB cache SATA drives

SATA RAID controller (we could run raid 0 or 1 for redundancy or
speed - since a webserver ought not hit the disk all that much,
I think redundancy is more important)

NO CD-ROM
yes floppy
Red Hat 9

The price on this box is $1951.  Going with a cheaper processor,
and (4x512) RAM, I can get that down to $1579.

----

SATA vs. SCSI -- SCSI is theoretically faster, although many say that
the practical difference is minimal.  SCSI is theoretically more
reliable, but with 2 SATA drives in RAID redundant configuration, this
is a very minor issue?

Anyhow, for reference, the same exact configurations as above, but
with SCSI instead of SATA (and only 36Gb disks instead of 80Gb since
disk size on the webserver boxes is not so important):

$2521/$1749.

Just for clarity in case people dozed off during the boring bits
above:

SATA 80GB RAID    $1951 or $1579 depending on ram/processor
SCSI 36GB RAID    $2521 or $1749 depending on ram/processor

----

I am thinking of buying several of these boxes, to be potentially used
in these capacities:

load balancers (2)
squid proxies (3)
web servers (4)
backup db machine (1) (this one should be stuffed with extra ram and
the fastest processor, I guess)

Many alternative configurations are possible, esp. if as the current
trend seems to suggest, we eliminate the load balancers and simply
count on squid+heartbeat

then we would have
database machine as geoffrin, the big dog, when fixed
and other old hardware eventually moved to the new colo to be
mailserver, etc.

Our budget is $20,000 but we have more money than that by far, donated
by people who knew that we were already over $20,000.  We don't want
to go crazy and spend it because we have it -- better to take a wait
and see attitude, because hardware will only get cheaper, and our
needs will be better understoood in a few months.  However, going a
little bit over or under should be no cause for concern, if the
purpose is valid.

--Jimbo