Archive for category wikimedia
Fun with Subtitles
Posted by Michael Dale in wikimedia on November 9th, 2009
You can select your subtitle language
We have just finished up the Multimedia Usability Project Meeting here in France. I am sure there will be more general wrap up coverage of the meeting shortly… but I wanted to share a hack we worked here.
For a long time people have requested subtitle support for mediaWiki embed videos and at this meeting we were finally able to sit down and hack up an initial solution. The system works by putting the srt files into the wiki so people can collaborate on translation and contribution. The naming scheme is “TimedText” followed by the file name followed by the language code followed by .srt . We include a basic editor to upload srt files and switch between between languages. We presently display the subtitles on the side of the video but they should make there way below the video soon. There are lots of supporting projects to work on if anyone is interested ;)
How do I try it out
To try it out install the mwEmbed gadget and then visit either video linked to in this post. Hopefully we can produce some more documentation soon :)
Some quick ideas for enhancements ( I am sure you can think of some too) :
- A translation interface maybe borrowing from the techniques used on translatewiki.net
- A simple search of subtitles from the current video
- A more complex search system for subtitles across all videos
- Timed metadata a-la-metavid
subtitles on commons using the mwEmbed gadget
Localization Update: As mentioned in the comments we are still missing some of the localizations msgs. They should be making their way in there soon, along with some other updates.
Usability Beta Enhancements
New watch/unwatch and cascading tabs
Thanks for trying out the usability beta. Close to 280,000 people tried out the usability beta and about 220,000 people continue using it. One of the most-frequently reported frustration about the beta was that (1) watch/unwatch was hidden under the drop-down menu and (2) tabs overlaps when the browser is scaled down or the resolution is low. Tab issues were more significant for language communities whose words tend to be long such as German. We are also simplifying the search box to simplify the interface and in order to minimize the overlapping side-effect. Those new features are currently staged on the prototype wikis in English, German, Japanese, Arabic, Serbian, Russian, and Sinhala. You need to log-in in order to see watch/unwatch tabs. The screenshot on the right is the shot when the browser window is scaled down to 640×480. “View History” is moved to drop down menu in order to keep “Read” and “Edit” tabs visible. Let us know your feedback here.
- Naoko
Update on November 18th: Thank you for your support and feedback. These features are now available in the usability beta across all Wikimedia projects.
New Media Features Gadget
Posted by Michael Dale in wikimedia on October 10th, 2009
I would like to announce that some of the new media features are now available in gadget form on Wikimedia Commons and the English Wikipedia. These include a new ogg player, the add media wizard, and firefogg upload support. I hope having these components in gadget form will enable some more testing and feedback :)
Getting Started to enable these components you must turn on the mwEmbed gadget. You can turn it on by visiting your preferences page. Once you enable the gadget you should shift reload to ensure you have a fresh copy of the JavaScript. (note you will need to enable the gadget for each wiki you want to test (ie both for wikimedia commons and Wikipedia). Once enabled you can check out the following features: Read the rest of this entry »
Click Tracking on Edit Toolbar deployed
After many a hearty SQL battle, we finally have click tracking deployed on the wikimedia projects!
Data on button usage
What’s being tracked?
Which buttons are clicked on the toolbar during editing
What information is being recorded?
The button clicked, the time of the click, total edit count of the user clicking, and edit count for the last 1, 3, 6 months
What information is NOT being recorded?
Individually identifiable information of any sort (eg who exactly clicked what) and anything that would violate our privacy policy in general
Why?
As we revamp the UI, rather than randomly throwing buttons up there we think are pretty (we think they’re all pretty), we thought we’d put buttons up and features that people actually use. Novel, right?
What about the edit history and stuff?
We figure the way a novice editor uses the toolbar is different form a ‘power’ editor, and that there’s probably some gradation in between. Is there? Well, that’s what we hope to find out…
–Nimish
Image renaming fix
Fixed an ugly internal caching bug which could break renamed image redirects on Commons being accesses from other non-English sites. Hopefully that’s most of those solved now. :)
SVG Open
Posted by brion in open-source, wikimedia on October 2nd, 2009
I’m hanging out down in Mountain View for the SVG Open conference this weekend, to speak a bit on how we use and plan to use SVG at Wikimedia and to get up to date on the state of the art. I’ll post my full talk slides on Sunday after my talk…
One of the most exciting new developments in the SVG world right now is svgweb, a very cool tool which brings high-quality SVG rendering support — including full support for the SVG DOM and interactivity — to any browser that supports Flash. This essentially fills the “SVG gap” for most Internet Explorer users, which opens up a huge world of possibilities for both interactive content and tools for building, editing, and localizing SVG-based diagrams, charts, maps, etc right in the browser.
Google web standards evangelist Brad Neuberg gave a great talk about the background of how something like svgweb was needed and showed some great demos, including a quick preview of an inline SVG pan-and-zoom tool for Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons; we’ll have some even funner demos based on that Sunday!
Also saw a good talk from Sam Ruby on some of the gotchas in the current state of HTML vs XHTML vs HTML5 and how SVG is (or isn’t) supported in various profiles and various browsers. Most interesting was his proposal to rethink how we deal with markup validators in the webdev world — right now most validators give you a lot of errors about things that don’t really make a difference (font vs style?), but freely ignore problematic but “legitimate” structures (say, unclosed list items).
MediaWiki’s new discussion system in testing on Wikimedia Labs
Posted by andrew in mediawiki, software, summer of code, wikimedia on October 1st, 2009
I’m very excited to announce that LiquidThreads, the next-generation discussion system that I’ve spent the last few months developing for the Wikimedia Foundation, is now in beta testing on liquidthreads.labs.wikimedia.org.
Sample of the LiquidThreads interface
Wikimedia XML data sets released on Amazon Public Data Sets
For our community members that do analysis on Wikimedia project data, I’m happy to announce the release of our XML snapshots within Amazon Public Data Sets.
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/09/new-public-data-set-wikipedia-xml-data.html
To those curious about why this happened … earlier this year I had gotten approached multiple times from researchers and community members wanting to parse our data but frustrated at the costs and time of doing it on their own infrastructure.
Many of them were already familiar with academic computational clusters and were wondering if there were any similar solutions available for them to do large scale processing. The tool sever was one option but sometimes it didn’t provide the level of flexibility that they needed and/or their projects were too computationally intensive to run alongside other tasks.
Instead I mentioned that I had already been thinking of pushing our data sets in the Amazon cloud as they had a wealth of the infrastructure in place and had an infrastructure that our users who were familiar with.
Fast forward to now, we have our first release ready to be worked on and I’m sure that we will hear back about new and exiting discoveries that our communities make.
This isn’t the first Wikipedia data set to exist in Public Data Sets but it will be the first that Wikimedia is committing to supporting on a regular release cycle. Amazon will be picking it up every month and retaining copies for at least three months.
I’m excited to see the stats of how many people use it.
–tomasz
Supporting translatewiki.net
Translatewiki.net is a core part of the MediaWiki ecosystem. While not a Wikimedia Foundation project, it’s used by hundreds of volunteers to improve the localization of MediaWiki and its extensions, alongside other open source projects, which has led to MediaWiki being one of the most internationalized software packages available.
We’re very pleased to be able to recognize the incredible volunteer efforts behind translatewiki.net at least in a small way. Starting tomorrow, Siebrand Mazeland will be able to devote one day a week to the support of the project on a contract with the Wikimedia Foundation. We’ve identified core priorities for the next year as an increase in the number of volunteer developers supporting the translatewiki.net infrastructure, and the number of volunteer translators working on localization for the most widely spoken languages.
Welcome, Siebrand, and a big thank you to the entire translatewiki.net community for their work. :-)
Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Announce: Brion moving to StatusNet
I’d like to share some exciting news with you all… After four awesome years working for the Wikimedia Foundation full-time, next month I’m going to be starting a new position at StatusNet, leading development on the open-source microblogging system which powers identi.ca and other sites.
I’ve been contributing to StatusNet (formerly Laconica) as a user, bug reporter, and patch submitter since 2008, and I’m really excited at the opportunity to get more involved in the project at this key time as we gear up for a 1.0 release, hosted services, and support offerings.
StatusNet was born in the same free-culture and free-software community that brought me to Wikipedia; many of you probably already know founder Evan Prodromou from his longtime work in the wiki community, launching the awesome Wikitravel and helping out with MediaWiki development on various fronts. The “big idea” driving StatusNet is rebalancing power in the modern social web — pushing data portability and open protocols to protect your autonomy from siloed proprietary services… People need the ability to control their own presence on the web instead of hoping Facebook or Twitter always treat you the way you want.
This does unfortunately mean that I’ll have less time for MediaWiki as I’ll be leaving my position as Wikimedia CTO sooner than originally anticipated, but that doesn’t mean I’m leaving the Wikimedia community or MediaWiki development!
Just as I was in the MediaWiki development community before Wikimedia hired me, you’ll all see me in the same IRC channels and on the same mailing lists… I know this is also a busy time with our fundraiser coming up and lots of cool ongoing developments, so to help ease the transition I’ve worked out a commitment to come into the WMF office one day a week through the end of December to make sure all our tech staff has a chance to pick my brain as we smooth out the code review processes and make sure things are as well documented as I like to think they are. ;)
We’ve got a great tech team here at Wikimedia, and we’ve done so much with so little over the last few years. A lot of really good work is going on now, modernizing both our infrastructure and our user interface… I have every confidence that Wikipedia and friends will continue to thrive!
I’ll start full-time at StatusNet on October 12. My key priorities until then are getting some of our key software rollouts going, supporting the Usability Initiative’s next scheduled update and getting a useful but minimally-disruptive Flagged Revisions configuration going on English Wikipedia. I’m also hoping to make further improvements to our code review process, based on my experience with our recent big updates as well as the git-based workflow we’re using at StatusNet — I’ve got a lot of great ideas for improving the CodeReview extension…
Erik Moeller will be the primary point of contact for WMF tech management issues starting October 12, until the new CTO is hired. I’ll support the hiring process as much as I can, and we’re hoping to have a candidate in the door by the end of the year.
– brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
CTO, Wikimedia Foundation
San Francisco
Update: Evan’s announce is up on the StatusNet blog.
Theora 1.1 Released
Posted by Michael Dale in wikimedia on September 28th, 2009
Theora 1.1 has been released
Theora 1.1 has been released. This release reflects the efforts of xiph.org developers who over the past year have done incredible work to greatly improve the core free codec video library. This effort has been support by Mozilla Foundation, Red Hat and others. These improvements include:
Chris Blizzard from Mozilla has a detailed blog post about the improvements and what they mean for open video creators, distributors and viewers. Wikimedia foundation makes exclusive use free/open formats and has been a long time supporter of ogg theora and makes use of the free codec in its websites. Wikimedia also helped organize some improvements by administrating a theora improvement grant from Mozilla earlier this year.
Also a new version of ffmpeg2thora has been released using this new codebase making it easy to take advantage of these new features. If you would like to give the new encoder a spin you try it out with the web based firefogg encoding app.
Server Donation Entry Period Ending
Just to let folks know, we have had quite a large interest in our donation of some of our decommissioned servers. In fact, I have way too many emails!
So to be fair, rather than just stop today, we will stop accepting submissions for this next Monday, September 28th. That means if you want your proposal/request in the running, you have to have it emailed to servers@wikimedia.org by Midnight GMT this coming Sunday, Sept. 27th.
For ease of reference, here is a copy of the post from the start of this process:
It is that time again. We have approx 35 servers to donate to a good home. These are servers that Wikimedia has used on the projects for 3+ years, so they are out of warranty and just not fast enough for us to keep using on the cluster.
The servers will go out to homes for folks who are willing to pay for the freight. They are as follows:
- Dual CPU 2.5 GHz AMD
- 3-4GB RAM Each
- Most have 80 GB or larger HDD
Disclaimers: The Wikimedia Foundation does not guarantee the operation or use of these servers in any shape or form. They are old, some may have dying fans, bad hdd sectors, and the like. Servers have been wiped of information, and they ran through that, but no promises on function!
If you would like to receive some of these servers for your NONPROFIT use, please email servers@wikimedia.org. Please include in your email how you will be using the servers, and the address they would be shipped to. We will review all requests and try to fairly pick out where they go. (Selection process may be refined, but it also may just include throwing darts at a board to break up ties.)
Additions: Due to request, the servers are indeed located in Tampa, FL USA. Zip code 33602 for shipping purposes. This means that if you are international, shipping this hardware is really not cost effective for you. If you want to be in the running still, and are comfortable with personally handing all customs, duties, export, and tax issues, go ahead and email us.
Correction: Dates were off.
Feature deployment updates
Quick note for those who have been asking — we’re starting to maintain a list of feature & extension deployments that we’re rolling out in the very near future and their status on the Wikitech wiki.
Note that some things like the English Wikipedia FlaggedRevs deployment aren’t on there yet; we’ll start prepping something for these in the next round in a couple weeks.
– brion
Help us make Commons work better
It’s come to my attention that Commons has had some more problems than we saw on the other wikis… I want to make sure we get that cleaned up!
Andrew has just deployed some more fixes which should eliminate the ‘file already exists on Commons’ bug. It would be a huge help if folks who’ve been reporting problems can go through the lists on the Village Pump and collect just the problems that are still current:
- Uploads via Commonist — fixed or do we still have problems?
- (Who’s the best person to contact about debugging or developing fixes for Commonist?)
- Missing description page immediately after edit — is this still happening?
- Anything else?
Please add info about confirmed problems or fixes at the Commons Village Pump. Thanks to everybody — your feedback is important; we need to know which bugs are affecting you guys the most!
– brion
Update 2009-09-22 23:49 UTC: I’ve fixed the problem with Commonist by relaxing the edit token check in the form handler (this is safe for uploads via the web, which can’t be injected in a CSRF attack; we still enforce it for upload-by-URL). This probably fixes most of the other client-side upload tools and bots as well — please test!
Babaco Preview
Screenshot of Navigable Table of Contents
As brion’s earlier post stated, the new set of usability features (nickname: Babaco)are integrate into the source code but disabled until these features are stable. New features include, navigable table of contents and content generation dialogues for links, tables, search and replace. These features are currently staged on the usability prototype environment, and you are welcome to check them out and encouraged to push them hard to find bugs. :-)
We are also hoping to integrate add-media-wizard created by Michael Dale in Babaco. While API to extend the toolbar is being worked on, media import functionality can be played at the usability sandbox environment. Click the “Edit” tab and click an image gallery icon in the toolbar. You will see a nice media import function there. Feel free to create an article and import image from Commons using this neat feature.
Browser compatibility matrix for Babaco is found here. As always, share your thoughts and experience through the usability wiki. Feedback on Babaco goes this discussion page.
- Naoko
Server Donation Time Again!
It is that time again. We have approx 35 servers to donate to a good home. These are servers that Wikimedia has used on the projects for 3+ years, so they are out of warranty and just not fast enough for us to keep using on the cluster.
The servers will go out to homes for folks who are willing to pay for the freight. They are as follows:
- Dual CPU 2.5 GHz AMD
- 3-4GB RAM Each
- Most have 80 GB or larger HDD
Disclaimers: The Wikimedia Foundation does not guarantee the operation or use of these servers in any shape or form. They are old, some may have dying fans, bad hdd sectors, and the like. Servers have been wiped of information, and they ran through that, but no promises on function!
If you would like to receive some of these servers for your NONPROFIT use, please email servers@wikimedia.org. Please include in your email how you will be using the servers, and the address they would be shipped to. We will review all requests and try to fairly pick out where they go. (Selection process may be refined, but it also may just include throwing darts at a board to break up ties.)
Additions: Due to request, the servers are indeed located in Tampa, FL USA. Zip code 33602 for shipping purposes.
… few hundred megabits at a time
Posted by Domas Mituzas in wikimedia on August 28th, 2009
We’re sitting here in Wikimania Underground, where our “hacking days” at Buenos Aires happen. Seeing each other face to face can allow us to discuss much faster how we should approach some of possible changes, that could make the site faster for everyone.
We eliminated quite a few web response headers (which cannot be compressed, due to how HTTP works), especially some of large ones we are using inside the cluster to achieve better caching, or debugging information – causing few hundred megabit savings (it is difficult to know exact numbers, due to the nature of caching).
Also, we’re experimenting with trade offs in content compression – by choosing more expensive compression methods, we decrease size of transmitted pages by up to 15%, though doubling compression costs on our side. We still think that we may end up doing different levels of compression for different types of content (something what will be efficiently cached from anonymous users will have way higher relative wins).
Of course, we will have reduced bandwidth bills, probably more than the additional hardware to cover the change would cost us in resources.
Presentations from Wikimania and More
Many folks do not know, but we actually try to upload and make available all our presentations. Presently, you can see a list of them on our Wikitech wiki. You can follow this link to see them all.
Keep checking back, because the conference isn’t finished!!
Wikimania talk videos
Yesterday’s tech talks from Wikimania are online at our temporary video file staging location (Ogg Theora format). They should appear on Commons soon. :)
Update: Some of the movies have encoding problems; reencoded versions should be reposted within a couple days. Sorry!
Code, code, code away home
Hacking was cut short a bit on our first day at Wikimania yesterday due to troubles with the conference facility network :( but we did get a lot done:
- Some basic specs and programming interface for a configuration database have been hashed out — once implemented, this’ll give us infrastructure to start phasing out the more fragile parts of LocalSettings.php editing and making it much easier to manage both multi-wiki sites and one-off installs!
- Bunch of folks hashed out some details on getting our mapping servers set up and online
- Lots of general code review and poking!
Feel free to join us during the day — project page on Wikimania wiki and #wikimania-codeathon on IRC!
Codeathon now!
The fun is starting! Get your code on…
- Wikimania_Codeathon/Projects
- #wikimania-codeathon on irc.freenode.net
Weekly Wiki Tech Update: Pre-Wikimania edition
What happened?
A few highlights from the last week…
- The first version of Wikimedia’s official Wikipedia Mobile app for iPhone has hit the iTunes app store (free download). As with all Wikimedia software, it’s open source and we welcome patches and bug reports! (Unfortunately there’s a known problem with this release which prevents installation on first-gen iPod Touches — just use the mobile web site for now, which shares the same backend.)
- Test wikis with Flagged Revisions and ReaderFeedback configurations have been set up to shake down UI and workflow before we prepare to deploy these extensions on English Wikipedia in the coming weeks. The test sites have been populated with featured articles, and should be getting some decent front pages soon. ;)
- A push of new donation buttons to English Wikipedia to test response rates has been delayed until we’ve got more of our techs in one place again.
- Mark is completing performance testing of SSD-based Squid proxy servers.
- We encountered failures on ms2, one of our text storage servers, which has required some behind-the-scenes running about.
- Ariel and River are bringing media storage replication between our Tampa master and Amsterdam off-site copy back up to date after cleaning up most of the base configuration.
- There’s been a lot of talk on-list in the last couple weeks about testing infrastructure, with various people poking at the parser tests and the other half-done test suites. This is a happy thing and I hope to see more solid tests going — and more automated reports into CodeReview like the parser tests!
The week ahead…
Come with us if you want to code!
It’s Wikimania week in Buenos Aires, and the Wikimania Codeathon starts this Tuesday at 10am (15:00 UTC). If you can’t be there in person, join us online in #wikimania-codeathon on FreeNode.
What’s going to happen? We can’t say for sure ahead of time, but here’s a few of my favorites I hope to work on:
- Deploying updated MediaWiki code to Wikimedia sites!
- Exploring the power of jQuery and Michael Dale’s advanced media features in JS2 mode!
- Pushing LocalisationUpdate to fast-track the work of our tireless translators!
- Driving plans for the Usability Initiative’s new UI work!
- Bringing forth the power of Flagged Revisions!
- Awesome times with OpenStreetMap testing!
- Hashing out plans for a MediaWiki configuration database… down with LocalSettings.php once and for all!
- Figuring out how to start Selenium-based MediaWiki testing!
- …YOUR project?
Now put on yer codin’ legs and get typing!
Wikimania Codeathon in Buenos Aires next week
Wikimania’s classic “Hacking Days” event is back, and better than ever as the Wikimania Codeathon will be open throughout the entire conference this year.
Based on the success of April’s Developer Meet-up in Berlin, we’re starting with an “unconference”-style planning session to let attendees break out into common working groups 10am Tuesday, August 25 (note — this is the day before the main conference begins). The coding room will remain open throughout the rest of the conference, so folks can pop in and out between other sessions.
We’ll be in Room F at the Centro Cultural, which should be nicely spacious. Non-developers are welcome during the conference if you just need a quiet place to sit and check on your sockpuppet accounts. ;)
There’ll be a wrap-up presentation in Room 3 at 14:00 Friday, August 28 to give folks a chance to do mini-talks on what they’ve been working on.
If you’re planning to attend, either in person or virtually via IRC, please add yourself to the list.
Squashing the Bugs
Posted by Trevor Parscal in mediawiki, wikimedia on August 18th, 2009
Fresh off the whiteboard of the Wikipedia Usability Initiative
Over 40,000 users are now participating in the beta testing of new features for Wikipedia, and other Wikimedia projects. These users have been helping the Wikipedia Usability Initiative to find bugs, of which we are doing our best to squash quickly.
If you are a Firefox 3 user, your experience with the new features has most likely been without issue, but we have found some older browsers such as Internet Explorer 6 to be less stable, especially for projects which use a right-to-left language. After collecting information on browser compatibility and evaluating each browser’s capabilities against the technologies we are using to achieve a better editing experience, we’ve designed a map of which browsers support the new editing tools well enough to ensure a quality user experience, and which do not. Where users’ browsers do not support the new editing tools the old editing tools are provided instead.
While we hope that we can extend support to some of the currently unsupported browsers, we are focusing our efforts on developing a richer browsing and editing experience for users of more modern browsers. Thank you to everyone who has been participated so far in our beta testing process!
– Trevor Parscal (trevor @ wikimedia.org)
Software Developer, Wikimedia Foundation
Weekly Wiki Tech Update
Got your coffee on? Good!
Let’s quickly review last week’s excitement and what we’ve got planned for this coming week…
Looking back:
- Ops magnate Mark Bergsma has completed his thesis and is able to come up for air again. Welcome back Mark and congratulations!
- Mark has been testing performance of Squid proxies backed by solid-state disk drives… so far so good!
- Ariel has continued background cleanup of our media fileservers to prevent recurrence of the performance problems we saw last month.
- The Wikipedia Usability Initative team has rolled out their opt-in beta program to get more people trying out the updated site theme and edit toolbar.
- We’ve announced plans to form and hire a new Wikimedia CTO position to free up Brion for more development time as Senior Software Architect
- Flagged Revisions extension is being tested on Help and Manual pages for www.mediawiki.org
Coming this week:
- The Wikimedia Foundation board election finishes tonight at midnight UTC! Go vote while you can…
- A testing configuration for Flagged Revisions on English Wikipedia will be deployed on a test site soon!
- Planning to bring the site up to date with development trunk by the end of the week…
- Tomasz is in progress getting our data dumps mirrored to Amazon’s public data sets
Upcoming events:
- August 25-28: The annual Wikimania conference in Buenos Aires will include a code-a-thon developer sprint — join us in person or via IRC!