Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-07-19/Technology report

From Wikimania
The first technology presentations from last weekend's Wikimania conference in Gdansk have begun to be published. They include "Why your extension will not be enabled on Wikimedia wikis in its current state and what you can do about it" (pictured), which gave advice to developers, particularly of extensions. This came in the form of instructions on security and scalability, for example, that all inputs should be escaped to prevent SQL injection. Also published were the slides from "Geodata in Wikipedia and Commons", which outlined how Wikimedia is going about geocoding its images and then utilising this data.



Mass upload of Ordnance Survey images
Following on from last week's import of Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF) images, this week the technical preparation for a mass upload of map images created by the Ordnance Survey (OS), the government body responsible for mapping in the United Kingdom. The files, provided by the OS as part of their OpenData initiative under their own free licence, will be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by OrdnanceSurveyBot in both native TIFF form and JPG form for easier use and display across Wikimedia Projects.

Unlike with the BNF, however, the release was not the result of a specific partnership, but of years of campaigning by the wider open data community in the UK. The Ordnance Survey website notes that the selection of maps it agreed to release to the public, under a free licence on April 1 2010, represents some "of the most detailed mapping datasets available for Great Britain". The free licence is compatible with the Creative Commons 3.0 licence; this means that all derivative works can be licensed as CC.

In brief
Note: not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
 * Very rough skin usage figures have been produced. Vector leads with 220,000 plus around 270,000 legacy editors who never set a preference; Monobook has around 35,000 users. Modern is the only other skin used by more than 10,000 editors at 16,571.
 * Discussions about an improved MediaWiki testing framework have begun following talks at Wikimania.
 * MediaWiki projects set to timezones other than UTC will now have Flagged Revisions diff times properly displayed (bug #24370).
 * With the resolution of bug #24334, numbers on special pages will now be properly formatted.
 * Revision #69414 reduces long loading times (10-20 seconds) when displaying a diff between the current version and an older version (bug #24124).
 * The API has been changed in revision 69339: Make output containing private or user-specific data uncacheable for logged-in users [...] Without this change, the output of requests like ?action=query&list=recentchanges&rcprop=patrolled&smaxage=3600 would be... viewable for anyone using the same URL, even if they don't have patrol rights.