Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-08-09/Technology report

Multimedia Upload Wizard ready for testing
Further to previous Signpost coverage, Guillaume Paumier (User:guillom) of the Wikimedia Multimedia Usability Team has announced that the new Multimedia Upload Wizard is ready for public testing: The prototype isn't finished yet, but we feel it's important to continue to include the Wikimedia community in the ongoing development of our tool. We would like to invite you to test the prototype, read the Questions & answers page, and share your comments and questions on the feedback page (after checking the list of existing bugs and improvements we're already working on).

We thank in advance every user who will help us provide better tools and interfaces for the Wikimedia contributors. The prototype is located at http://commons.prototype.wikimedia.org.

The wizard is first being targeted at Wikimedia Commons, but there is little to rule out a subsequent deployment on the English Wikipedia.

A centralised "data wiki"
This week, Daniel Kinzler (User:Duesentrieb), a MediaWiki developer employed by Wikimedia Germany, outlined his thoughts on how a "data wiki" might be set up as a common repository for facts and figures. There has long been talk about a "data wiki", that is, a way to collect and maintain structured, factual data in a collaborative, wiki-like fashion. The most obvious application for this would be to manage the information we now see in Wikipedia's infoboxes on the right side of many articles. The basic requirements for such a system are:
 * 1) centralized. Data used on several web pages (wikis) is maintained on one place. There may, however, be multiple data wikis for different kinds of data.
 * 2) multilingual. If values are language-specific, it should be possible to enter a value for each language, and there should be a mechanism for selecting a language (or a preference list of languages) when querying results.
 * 3) versioned. The system must provide a mechanism to store all old revisions of a record, make them available upon request, and present differences between arbitrary revisions of records.
 * 4) scalable. The system should be able to handle dozens or hundreds of millions of records, with up to a hundred properties each, and with hundreds of revisions for each record.
 * 5) flexible. It should be easy to introduce new types of records and modify the specification of existing records, without disturbing the system.

He went on to list some of the programmatic challenges facing developers if this is to be achieved, and how they might be overcome.

The history of such ideas goes back at least to Erik Möller's 2004 Wikidata proposal. It has recently been noted that one of the current Google Summer of Code projects ("Reasonably efficient interwiki transclusion") could have the side effect of establishing Commons as such a data wiki.

In brief
Note: not all fixes may have gone live on WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
 * Editing for many WMF wikis, but not the English Wikipedia and a handful of others, was temporarily prevented by a full disk on August 7 (Wikimedia techblog).
 * Similarly, but in a separate incident, emailing OTRS was temporarily prevented. Emails were eventually processed.
 * In a recent interview with the Web Hosting Industry Review, the Foundation's CTO Danese Cooper explained the plans for the second US data center which will be set up in Ashburn, Virginia and is planned to be online by January 1, 2011.
 * With the resolution of bug #24677, it is now possible to use "axto=" parameters on "allXXX" queries through the API, where the given title will be the last listed.
 * The permissions a group can add and remove are now available through the API (bug #24236).
 * Bug #23848 was solved, making a new magic word available:, which returns the   variable, i.e., the part of the url on the wiki used for articles, with $1 instead of the article name. Its current value is thus the string   (see discussion).
 * There was a discussion on the wikitech-l mailing list about Adobe Flash: Is it banned on Wikimedia? Probably. Should we relax this rule? Possibly, or we'll have to wait for HTML5 to catch up.
 * The ImageAnnotator gadget has been enabled on the English Wikipedia, allowing notes to be attached to areas of an image. This gadget has been enabled for everyone on Commons for some time, and editors of images such as File:Solvay conference 1927.jpg and File:State Govt Complex.jpg have already taken advantage of the feature. (see discussion.)