Posts Tagged Wikipedia
Wikimedia donates servers to deserving non-profits.
Posted by RobH in hardware, open-source, wikimedia on February 3rd, 2010
Every year, Wikipedia usage goes upward, and every year the technical folks working and volunteering with Wikimedia have to plan, purchase, and implement new servers to keep up to the growing popularity of Wikipedia and its sister projects. With the advances in computing, running 9 new application servers this year took the load of 36 application servers from 3 years ago.
So when we upgrade, what happens to the old equipment that is too slow for Wikipedia, but not too slow for MANY other non-profits? We donate them! These systems were 1U rackmount servers, dual cpu 2.5-3, single core, 2-4GB of RAM, and 2-4 HDD Bays with 1-2 80-250GB HDDs. This year, we have three non-profits who received our older systems (in alphabetical order): Drupal.org, OpenStreetMap Foundation, and Sugar Labs.
Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites.
The OpenStreetMap Foundation is an international non-profit organisation supporting but not controlling the project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and to providing geospatial data for anybody to use and share.
OpenStreetMap is an open initiative to create and provide free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them.
The mission of Sugar Labs® is to produce, distribute, and support the use of the Sugar learning platform; it is a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and developers to create, extend, teach, and learn with the Sugar learning platform.
We hope the recipients of our servers will be able to put them to good use!
Below are some common questions involving Wikimedia and the server donation process:
Q. How can I get some of the decommissioned donation servers?
A. The best place to follow the goings on of our technical team is here, on the Wikimedia Technical Blog. When we have a batch of servers up for decommissioning and donation, we will announce it on the tech blog, and instructions on how to apply to receive some servers.
Q. Who is eligible to apply for servers?
A. We try to only donate servers to other non-profits whose core values are similar or in support of our own. This means we do not donate them for individual use. Since these servers were purchased with donations to support Wikimedia, we feel we need to further donate them to other like-minded organizations, since that is how the money for the servers was meant to be spent.
Q. How often does this happen?
A. Most servers are kept in use by Wikimedia beyond three years. Many of our servers that we have turned off in this batch are anywhere from 3 to 5 years old. We only replace them when it makes sense from the technical standpoint to do so. This means we cannot just say ‘we will do this every X months.’ We try to get the most use out of every server, as they were donated or purchased with donations. So there is no set date, just keep checking the Wikimedia Technical Blog, when we have more to donate, we will say so there!
Q. I am a student/person/so and so, and I want to learn to develop and do such and such. Can you send me a server?
A. Sorry, unfortunately it is just not realistic or fair of us to try to sort out which personal use requests for servers are legitimate and which are folks wanting computers for any other reason. We choose to limit our donations to other like minded non-profit organizations.
Rob Halsell
Systems Administrator
LiquidThreads almost ready to deploy
Hi all,
With the Foundation’s support, I’ve spent the last few months churning away at LiquidThreads, a new discussion system that is proposed for use on Wikimedia projects.
Essentially, it’s an attempt to marry the radical openness of the wiki paradigm with the usability and practicality of a forum-like system. As the name implies, LiquidThreads is designed to allow any user to easily refactor discussions while maintaining edit history, to edit other users’ comments, and to collaborate on a summary of an ongoing discussion. LiquidThreads also brings many standard communication features lacking from wiki discussion pages, such as watching and protecting individual discussion threads, RSS feeds of comments in a discussion or on a discussion page. In the world of online communication, its approach is entirely unique.
LiquidThreads has been in alpha testing on Wikimedia Labs for several months, and, more recently, it’s been used in a production context on the strategy wiki, where it has been quite well-received. It’s been easy to run these smaller trials, as the extension allows the activation and deactivation of LiquidThreads discussions on individual pages with a simple parser function.
While there are still some issues remaining before wider trials, I believe I can resolve most of them quite quickly (within a few weeks when my vacation finishes at the end of next month), and I’d like to get the ball rolling in proposing small-scale trials on some of the larger wikis, so that a full discussion can be had, and so that adjustments can be made on the basis of ongoing feedback. I’d especially like to see LiquidThreads used on some of the higher-traffic discussion pages on English Wikipedia (such as the technical village pump), and progressive rollout on some of our mid to large sized wikis.
So, I’d like to encourage you to have a play with LiquidThreads, either on the strategy wiki or on the test site (which generally runs a newer version). Tell me what you like about it, and (far more importantly) what improvements you think it needs before we can expand our trials to wider parts of the Wikimedia Universe, and perhaps move towards a full rollout of this very exciting technology.
I should give the following caveats about LiquidThreads as it stands. These are all issues that I intend to address before any trial expansion occurs.
- Presently the system is somewhat vulnerable to abuse. I intend to make changes to the way signatures work, and improve tracking and listing of thread actions by specific users.
- While LiquidThreads allows for thread summaries and discussion headers, the system does not currently have support for collaboratively-edited posts which are unsigned or signed by a group of people. These are a key piece of any decision-making framework, and I intend to make adjustments to make this possible.
- There is no support for embedding LiquidThreads discussion pages on other pages.
- There are plenty of minor interface issues which I intend to clean up.
Feedback is best directed to the dedicated feedback page, or, alternatively, to bugzilla (although before filing a bug, you should check the list of existing LiquidThreads bugs).
Thanks,
Andrew Garrett
Software Development Contractor
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!!
Improving Wikimedia’s Discussion System
Hi all,
Some of you might have already seen my blog posts about LiquidThreads, Wikimedia’s in-development discussion system.
For those who haven’t, this is a quick primer on what LiquidThreads is, and what it’s going to do for Wikimedia’s communities.
Currently, Wikimedia’s discussion system sucks. Here’s why:
- It’s not easily usable by the average user. It isn’t obvious how to leave a comment on a talk page, or how to reply to a comment. The indenting we use now is ad-hoc and unsustainable for long discussions.
- Signatures are done manually and we have to jump on poor unsuspecting newbies who don’t know this (or write bots…)
- Archiving is done unevenly by bots, which are maintained by users and therefore of very uneven quality. Archives are something of a black hole — they aren’t searchable, easily maintainable or easily accessible. You can’t resurrect an archived discussion easily, nor can you view its history.
- It’s stored as plain wikitext, which is opaque to any sort of automated process.
- You can’t move a thread to a different discussion page and preserve its history.
- There’s no encouragement, mechanism or incentive for quoted, point by point inline replies like we’re all used to with e-mail.
Imagine being a new user and trying to figure out how to add your comment to this.
Enter LiquidThreads. LiquidThreads is a system that makes MediaWiki’s discussion system behave like a forum or comments thread, while still maintaining the unique refinements that make wikis work. It was originally designed by a Google Summer of Code student, David McCabe, and I’ve been making incremental improvements to make it work for Wikimedia.
Overview of the new LiquidThreads interface
So, what’s changed?
- Comments are separated from each other in the wikitext, so there are no more edit conflicts in discussions, and the usability is vastly improved.
- Instead of indenting, each comment is in its own box, along with its replies. It makes it much easier to follow each post and its replies, and it’s much nicer on the horizontal whitespace. Hopefully, it will be the death of the ‘arbitrary section break’!
- Each post has its own history page, making it easy to see what’s going on with individual threads without trying to navigate the history of a whole page.
- It’s easy to move threads between pages, preserving the page history.
- Discussions are never ‘archived’. Instead, older discussions fall to the bottom of the page, and eventually they drop off entirely, to hit a new page. If you missed the chance to have your say, just reply to a discussion and it’ll be bumped right up to the top of the page again!
- Discussions with recent changes are at the top of the page. Discussions that have fallen dormant fall to the bottom. It’s easy to find out what’s happening!
- You can watch individual threads of a discussion, and even get an email when they’re replied to.
- It’s easy to link to a discussion, and the links are permanent unless the discussion is deleted. There’s no need to point to an archive or to an old revision ID.
If you’re interested, I’ve put together a test setup for you to play with it.
As always, questions, comments and suggestions are more than welcome, in the comments or elsewhere.
First usability release, Acai, is now available.
Posted by Naoko in mediawiki, open-source, software, wikimedia on July 2nd, 2009
The first usability release, Acai, hit Wikipedia and sister projects this afternoon. The new skin, Vector, and the enhanced toolbar can be turned on from the user preference under “Appearance” and “Editing”. Search result page now has a new layout with less daunting information. Vector is only available for left-to-right languages at a moment due to IE6 incompatibility. However, the enhanced toolbar can be selected from all languages and the new search result page is enabled globally. We could not roll out two features we had planned. First, warning messages for unsaved changes when a user switches away from the edit tab did not work properly thus they are disabled. So please be careful when you switch away from the edit tab. Secondly importing language specific configuration for special characters were not graceful, so we disabled special character function from the toolbar. We are working on the fixes and plan to roll them out as soon as we have stable solutions. The usability project wiki has Vector and the new toolbar as a default, so if you prefer to check them out without changing your preferences it is a good place to visit first. Let us know what you think. We would love to hear from you.
Best,
Naoko
First usability release is coming up soon.
Screenshot of enhanced toolbar
I am happy to announce that the first set of usability improvements is scheduled to be integrated in MediaWiki and will be enabled as one of user preferences in Wikipedia in the first week of July. The nickname for this release is called Acai. The release names will follow the names of tropical fruits in alphabetical order. The description of features are found in this release page. The major improvements are; 1) reorganized tabs which clearly indicates the state of “Read” and “Edit”, 2) enhanced edit toolbar which is expandable based on users’ needs, 3) search result page which hides the clutter and make search results more visible, and etc. We are still combating with IE6 bugs , but come and play with the prototypes and let us know your feedback. On the localization front, we have introduced a set of new texts for localization. If you are a MediaWiki translator, your collaboration on localization is greatly appreciated as always.
Naoko Komura
The Wikipedia Usability Initiative is still hiring.
Posted by Naoko in mediawiki, open-source, software, wikimedia on May 20th, 2009
The Wikipedia Usability Initiative has extended the application deadline for the Software Developer position till May 30th. We are recruiting two candidates for this position. Both local applicants to the San Francisco Bay Area and remote applicants are encouraged to apply. Please help spread the word.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Software_Developer_(project)
Naoko Komura
Wikipedia Usability Initiative
OpenStreetMap maps will be added to Wikimedia projects
Posted by Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason in open-source, wikimedia on April 4th, 2009
There has been rapid progress on the subject of adding OpenStreetMap maps to Wikimedia projects (e.g. Wikipedia) during the MediaWiki Developer Meet-Up taking place right now in Berlin.
We now have a clear plan of action for getting OpenStreetMap maps embedded in Wikimedia wiki (e.g. Wikipedia) pages:
- Wikimedia will set up a database to mirror the OSM data (Planet.osm)
- Wikimedia will set up its own rendering infrastructure for rendering tiles & other maps from the OSM data
- The existing MediaWiki extensions for displaying OSM data in a MediaWiki article will be improved to work acceptably in production on Wikimedia servers
To prototype all this we’ll be using new infrastructure provided by Wikimedia Deutschland. Once things have been tested there they’ll eventually be deployed on the main Wikimedia sites.
After discussion with the Wikimedia operations people (including Brion Vibber, Mark Bergsma et al) there seem to be no objections to the above plan as long as:
- The maps will work not only for JavaScript enabled browsers but also non-JavaScript enabled ones
- The tools involved are improved to be relatively stable & deployable on Wikimedia, e.g. being able to embed more than one slippy map, the internationalization of error messages etc.
- The end product (the generated tiles or map files) are cachable so that they can be thrown at the frontend squids, as they’re static images this should be easy.
The featureset that we’re aiming for to be able to deploy this on Wikimedia sites from the view of the user (more can be added later once we’ve got it working) is:
- The ability to embed OSM maps in articles with something like the Simple image extension, perhaps automagically turning into a Slippy Map if the browser supports it
- A static or slippy map that can be used by geotagged articles so we can have maps without explicit inclusion of a <map> tag.
We’ll also set up a map toolserver for experimenting with other uses of OpenStreetMap data on Wikimedia. People with relevant projects can get access to this toolserver to try out their ideas for tools that could eventually be integrated on the main Wikimedia sites.
This project is seeking help from anyone who’s interested who’d like to be a part of making this happen, if you want to be a part of adding free maps to the world’s largest encyclopedia please subscribe to this mailing list:
And/or read/edit/comment on the relevant wiki coordination pages: