Developers are currently discussing the possibility of a MediaWiki Foundation to oversee those aspects of MediaWiki development that relate to non-Wikimedia wikis. The proposal was generated after a discussion on the wikitech-l mailing list about generalising Wikimedia's CentralAuth system.
Proponents are clear that they do not intend any new creation to compete directly with the Wikimedia Foundation, which has historically considered MediaWiki development within its remit. Indeed, the initial proposal has shied away from even critiquing the WMF's software priorities, focussing instead on filling in the gaps by providing funding to projects that were of benefit to the wider MediaWiki ecosystem but not necessary to Wikimedia wikis. How a "MWF" would generate its own funding is unknown; the problem has historically dogged proposals to overhaul MediaWiki governance.
More realistically in the short term, the new body (if it materialised) could take over responsibility for generating so-called "tarballs" – snapshots of MediaWiki software for external wikis. As the desire for a MediaWiki 1.20 release grows, this aspect of the WMF remit has come under increasing scrutiny, especially because the complete detachment of Wikimedia deployments (now fortnightly) from external releases (six-monthly) means that the WMF has no clear incentive to ensure tarballs are released on time.
One possible complicating factor with this proposal would be the presence of security releases – code changes that are then "backported" to previous versions in a process increasingly reliant on the WMF's security expertise. Indeed, this week saw just such a release, with six fixes being backported to MediaWikis 1.17, 1.18 and 1.19 ( wikitech-l mailing list).
Continuing our series looking at this year's Google Summer of Code students, this week the Signpost caught up with Belgian student of public administration Robin Pepermans, who spent his summer working on an element of the Wikimedia universe few large-wiki editors ever encounter: the Wikimedia Incubator. The Incubator provides a space for new language versions of Wikimedia projects to prove their sustainability before a wiki is created for them. Pepermans explained to the Signpost what he had been doing:
“ |
I have been working for quite some time to make it as easy as possible for anyone to start a new language version of Wikipedia or another Wikimedia project on the Wikimedia Incubator. For this broad project, I had in particular created a MediaWiki extension which improves the usability of the Incubator and makes maintenance of the wiki easier. Being also active as a volunteer MediaWiki developer in general, I had considered working on another topic for MediaWiki in Google Summer of Code 2012, but I chose to focus on the Incubator extension and language support in MediaWiki. On the Incubator, all existing or possible language versions have an automatic "info page"; see for example the Slovak Wikinews page, which invites anyone to start on Incubator this particular language edition which does not exist yet. I had already coded this function before GSoC, but improved it during the project. One of the new features that integrates with these info pages is a special page called IncubatorFirstSteps which guides new interested contributors through creating an account and getting started working on a test project. A core aspect of my GSoC project was to include all ISO 639 language names, which would display the correct language name "Bagri" on Wp/bgq instead of not recognizing the language code (at present a more restrictive list of language names is used); this has however not been deployed yet as opposed to my other work. During the project, I have also continued working on improving MediaWiki's " page content language" feature, which does not only benefit Incubator, but MediaWiki in general by allowing pages to be marked as being in a certain language and making MediaWiki language features behave differently depending on that language. The most visible outcome of this is the writing direction, e.g. Pashto pages on Incubator are right-to-left without any extra HTML in the page content; during the GSoC period specifically I converted {{#formatdate:}} and dates in sortable tables to the page content language. |
” |
Robin, who has stated his intention to continue his development work outside of the programme, runs a blog documenting his progress. He added that if you speak a language that lacks one or more Wikimedia projects, you are encouraged to start or contribute to the wiki and that anyone is welcome to contact him or the Incubator community for ideas, problems or suggestions.
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.
Developers are currently discussing the possibility of a MediaWiki Foundation to oversee those aspects of MediaWiki development that relate to non-Wikimedia wikis. The proposal was generated after a discussion on the wikitech-l mailing list about generalising Wikimedia's CentralAuth system.
Proponents are clear that they do not intend any new creation to compete directly with the Wikimedia Foundation, which has historically considered MediaWiki development within its remit. Indeed, the initial proposal has shied away from even critiquing the WMF's software priorities, focussing instead on filling in the gaps by providing funding to projects that were of benefit to the wider MediaWiki ecosystem but not necessary to Wikimedia wikis. How a "MWF" would generate its own funding is unknown; the problem has historically dogged proposals to overhaul MediaWiki governance.
More realistically in the short term, the new body (if it materialised) could take over responsibility for generating so-called "tarballs" – snapshots of MediaWiki software for external wikis. As the desire for a MediaWiki 1.20 release grows, this aspect of the WMF remit has come under increasing scrutiny, especially because the complete detachment of Wikimedia deployments (now fortnightly) from external releases (six-monthly) means that the WMF has no clear incentive to ensure tarballs are released on time.
One possible complicating factor with this proposal would be the presence of security releases – code changes that are then "backported" to previous versions in a process increasingly reliant on the WMF's security expertise. Indeed, this week saw just such a release, with six fixes being backported to MediaWikis 1.17, 1.18 and 1.19 ( wikitech-l mailing list).
Continuing our series looking at this year's Google Summer of Code students, this week the Signpost caught up with Belgian student of public administration Robin Pepermans, who spent his summer working on an element of the Wikimedia universe few large-wiki editors ever encounter: the Wikimedia Incubator. The Incubator provides a space for new language versions of Wikimedia projects to prove their sustainability before a wiki is created for them. Pepermans explained to the Signpost what he had been doing:
“ |
I have been working for quite some time to make it as easy as possible for anyone to start a new language version of Wikipedia or another Wikimedia project on the Wikimedia Incubator. For this broad project, I had in particular created a MediaWiki extension which improves the usability of the Incubator and makes maintenance of the wiki easier. Being also active as a volunteer MediaWiki developer in general, I had considered working on another topic for MediaWiki in Google Summer of Code 2012, but I chose to focus on the Incubator extension and language support in MediaWiki. On the Incubator, all existing or possible language versions have an automatic "info page"; see for example the Slovak Wikinews page, which invites anyone to start on Incubator this particular language edition which does not exist yet. I had already coded this function before GSoC, but improved it during the project. One of the new features that integrates with these info pages is a special page called IncubatorFirstSteps which guides new interested contributors through creating an account and getting started working on a test project. A core aspect of my GSoC project was to include all ISO 639 language names, which would display the correct language name "Bagri" on Wp/bgq instead of not recognizing the language code (at present a more restrictive list of language names is used); this has however not been deployed yet as opposed to my other work. During the project, I have also continued working on improving MediaWiki's " page content language" feature, which does not only benefit Incubator, but MediaWiki in general by allowing pages to be marked as being in a certain language and making MediaWiki language features behave differently depending on that language. The most visible outcome of this is the writing direction, e.g. Pashto pages on Incubator are right-to-left without any extra HTML in the page content; during the GSoC period specifically I converted {{#formatdate:}} and dates in sortable tables to the page content language. |
” |
Robin, who has stated his intention to continue his development work outside of the programme, runs a blog documenting his progress. He added that if you speak a language that lacks one or more Wikimedia projects, you are encouraged to start or contribute to the wiki and that anyone is welcome to contact him or the Incubator community for ideas, problems or suggestions.
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.
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, it is needlessly confusing to remember the different meanings attributable to such similar terms. (Though I suppose it is too late to rename either WikiMedia or MediaWiki.) — Richardguk ( talk) 13:49, 4 September 2012 (UTC) reply