The Jackal Rants

Yesterday, I was pleased to have the opportunity to discuss a company’s internal use of MediaWiki in some depth. Although no longer actively involved, I do still take an interest in how people proceed with developing things – once they wipe the introductory text off the main page, where a wiki goes is completely up to them. It’s becoming pretty clear that a lot of companies see the benefits of using a wiki for internal documentation/communications – the ease of contribution and the freedom to structure as you please are, I think, two major factors in play here.

It seems to me that this particular organisation is generally very pleased with what MediaWiki offers them, and with the concept in general. Interestingly, they’ve managed to get pretty much 100% buy-in from all employees, which some companies would probably think of as a holy grail – getting people to work with the wiki is often a major problem in setting one up.

Better people than I have written extensively on the subject of enterprise wiki deployment. Nevertheless, I figured I’d share this. There’s also something pretty weird about seeing, first hand, a commercial enterprise using a piece of software you’ve contributed to.

Just a quick heads-up for anyone who cares, but I have no futher intention to continue working on the (uncommitted) Slideshow extension I wrote for MediaWiki back in the summer, nor do I intend to commit the work I was doing on log formatting methods. I don’t see myself committing any further code to the mainline, nor any extensions for the foreseeable future.

I dislike moving.

Well, I’m back in Bristol again, and another…interesting year it no doubt will be. The house itself is all right – pretty typical student property, if in need of quite a bit of TLC. The good news is that we’ve got cable up and running, although we plan to upgrade to a faster package, so we’re in and going straight off the bat. The bad news is that when I connected to the router, about 10 people were connected to it wirelessly – the guy who set it up didn’t secure it. I wonder if anyone was actually using it, or if it was due to an unfortunate tendency of Windows to connect to anything it possibly can? Regardless, they’d have got a nasty shock about two minutes after I realised…

MediaWiki work’s slowed to a crawl for the present time – quite a few bits and pieces to do – but I hope to get the log formatting stuff committed next week. Next week, rather than this week, because I forgot to copy most of my uncommitted working copies and various other personal projects onto my laptop before I left.

I’m also wondering…what’s happening with CentralAuth now? Frankly, the workload the Wikimedia Foundation have placed their CTO under is astronomical – they need to allocate budget for projects such as this, so that the CTO can request additional manpower with things.

At long last, following the Wikimania conference in Taipei, and a spate of various problems, Brion’s been able to sort out the 1.11.0rc1 release candidate (announcement, download links etc.) which means 1.11.0 is on the horizon.

It was decided in July this year that the release would be held back at least until after Wikimania, since a lot of changes happen, and don’t get a chance to get tested live and initial regressions identified and resolved, which makes for very sucky releases.

As usual, we’ve got the upgrade documentation for 1.11 prepared.

At some point in the next week (read: when I can be bothered), I’ll commit the long-awaited log formatting changes, which look pretty nifty in my opinion, along with complementary changes to the RenameUser, Newuserlog, MakeBot and Makesysop extensions, so all our log entries will start to look less dumb, and extension and core developers can create log entries which contain useful tools that just make sense.

As a final thing; one quick moan. There’s a committer who’s continuing to spread FUD and misinformation about MediaWiki and Wikimedia operations in general in various fora, but in particular, on IRC, and on the English Wikipedia Technical Village Pump. It’s getting damn irritating to read, and I wish he’d stop doing it.

As anyone who designs or develops web sites or web applications will know, Microsoft Internet Explorer is atrocious, not just in the lack of support for standards, or the more esoteric behaviour it exhibits, but in the lack of decent debugging tools when it goes wrong.

With that in mind, Jonathan Boutelle’s excellent cheat sheet on getting the Microsoft Script Editor (comes free with Microsoft Office XP/2003, so I guess it’s not that free)  is well worth a read.

I don’t really mind who copies or mirrors our upgrade documentation – it’s great – but it would be nice if people actually remembered to sufficiently attribute the people who write it in the first place.

I’ve added some basic EXIF metadata extraction support to the MediaFunctions extension, following a thread on wikitech-l, which uses Tim’s excellent work on media handlers, so we can do things like:

{{#mediaexif:File.jpg|Make}}

I’ve also introduced a {{#mediadimensions}} parser function, which fetches the natural “dimensions string” from the file – for images, this returns a width and height, e.g. “800×600”; for audio, a duration, e.g. “1m30s”, etc.

The MediaFunctions extension is in Subversion, but not live on Wikimedia sites at this time.

Well, these images are getting the better of me, eh? Seems I made an (idiotic, now I look on it) assumption about the “timestamp-like” part of file archive names when I wrote the FileRevertForm and the FileDeleteForm, and thus extracted the wrong timestamp for presentation in the UI. Good job nothing in the backend relied upon this.

In similar news, it seems MediaWiki’s inconsistent image markup tripped me up, too; RandomImage’s “size” parameter was being ignored for goodness knows how long.

Anyway, all fixed now. There’s some talk of parser functions for extracting metadata (EXIF, etc.) from files, which I might poke if Magnus doesn’t implement this as he seems to want to do. I also plan to poke the existing MediaFunctions extension a bit.

Some updates to the RandomImage extension:

• Captions will now be pulled from the image description page, if possible. Text within <randomimage></randomimage> tags is preferred, if present, otherwise, the first paragraph of the description is used. This idea came from Dave Cook.
• The extension can now perform a more complex SELECT to ensure that non-images are excluded from selection.

Update: Dave caught a bug, which I’ve fixed – when a size was specified, the caption wasn’t showing. This is due to the fact that I’m a touch lazy and the extension just generates wiki markup, passing it to the parser to do the actual work. Of course, this results in MediaWiki’s slightly inconsistent sizing/framing behaviour.

There’s an interesting gem on the wikien-l mailing list:

This is one of the older ideas that’s been drifting around WP for years. Trouble is, we don’t have the developers to work on this problem. This isn’t like policy; we can’t be bold and write it. Oh, technically we can, except most of us lack the technical prowess to do it, and those who have it are already working on MediaWiki

This is in response to a suggestion to create “a new kind of block”, or some other option, which would keep users out of the main namespace.

I don’t recall a recent feature request or discussion on wikitech-l about whether or not this is feasible (it is, and quite straightfoward) or a request to have it done.

We (the development team) do not have the mind-reading capabilities some users would like us to have, and cannot respond to queries we’ve never been asked.