Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-11-15/Technology report

MediaWiki logo: does it need refreshing?
An idea was floated this week on the wikitech-l mailing list about converting the present MediaWiki logo (an embellished photograph of a sunflower, above right) into an SVG (i.e. converted it to a pictorial representation that can be easily scaled, below right). Whilst opinion was mixed over this colour of the bikeshed issue, Markus Krötzsch summarised the case for updating the logo:

We should be able to agree that the MediaWiki logo, while doing a good job for many years, has still a very hand-crafted, home-made look to it. This actually extends beyond the logo to the MediaWiki web site as a whole. I think saying so does in no way diminish the great work that past contributors have done in creating what we currently have -- but this must not stop us from looking into possibilities for future improvements.

The question was also raised about whether or not a revised MediaWiki logo would have to conform to WMF logo guidelines, which are based around the core colours of blue, green and red. "As for the colours", wrote developer Trevor Parscal, "I think there's no reason for MediaWiki's logo to conform to the WMF colour scheme. MediaWiki, like Wikipedia, has its own community of which some WMF staff are a part - it's totally reasonable for them to have their own identity."

In brief
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.
 * The automatic blocking of Tor exit nodes is working reliably again (bug #23321).
 * Developer Max Semenik (User:MaxSem) urged those familiar with the technical English vocabulary of the new MediaWiki installer and proficient in a language other than English to help translate it into their language (wikitech-l mailing list).
 * XML data "dumps" (backups) have been temporarily suspended given a significant hardware failure and the potential risk of losing data posed by overly hasty action (wikitech-l mailing list).
 * Head of the 2010 Fundraising campaign Philippe Beaudette said on Saturday that, following 22 hours of testing, his team was happy with the technical infrastructure they had in place ahead of the official launch today. "There were a few initial hiccups," he wrote, "but they're resolved or being resolved nicely. The new cluster of servers for supporting the traffic is [also functioning well]" (foundation-l mailing list). See also this week's "News and notes".
 * Developer and sometime Technology report writer User:TheDJ blogged about printing Wikipedia articles and his work in improving the process.
 * At the end of last month, Microsoft published a cost-free Microsoft Office Word Add-in For MediaWiki that allows users to save Word documents into a MediaWiki wiki.