leŭksman

I’m putting together a talk proposal for SVG Open 2009, which will be in early October at the Google campus in Mountain View, CA.

I’ve got plenty of background I can pull in on the challenges and benefits of SVG on the web and the tradeoffs we’ve made in our usage and implementation, but I know lots of you folks out there have been more active on the ‘content-generation’ end of things and can point out some things I wouldn’t think of.

If anybody’s got any particularly interesting issues, examples, problems, or idea prototypes relating to usage of SVG on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites, I’d love to see how much I can pack in.

Pointers to cool feature proposals like Nikola’s localization presentation at Wikimania last year, or bulk anaylsis like benchmarks and compatibility tests on images in actual use would be of particular interest.

Did a quick pass squishing my at-event notes onto wiki… May be more tomorrow.

A couple items have already hit announcements over at the tech blog:

• Wikimedia Deutschland offering short term contracts
• OpenStreetMap maps will be added to Wikimedia projects

And of course, my photos from the trip so far.

Just a quick shout-out to my post on the tech blog until I figure out how to aggregate my posts there back into my own log.

MediaWiki devs — Wikimedia needs you!

An update to the Universal Edit Button Firefox extension is in the works, with better compatibility and a spiffy new icon:

A public release should come soon…

Note that MediaWiki 1.14 and later have native support for the Universal Edit Button by specifying the <link rel=”edit”> it detects; older versions of MediaWiki can add it by installing the UniversalEditButton extension.

Last week was busy — we had our Wikimedia Foundation all-staff meeting here in San Francisco, so some of our out-of-towners were in for planning and wackiness.

Plenty of new stuff to come over the next while…

This week so far:

• We’re starting up techblog.wikimedia.org as a more focused place for Wikimedia tech staff and other MediaWiki core contributors to give updates on what’s going on. It’s still fresh and will receive some visual style lovin’ soon.
• Uploads of TIFF files are now enabled (with limitations; so far no thumbnailing) on test and Commons by request of folks doing image restoration work. Improved support for TIFF and other work formats (like XCF) is being investigated.
• Image file renaming is now enabled for sysops on Wikimedia wikis.

Coming soon…

• A big code review update and bump to the live sites will come in the next couple days. Yeah, yeah.
• Drafts extension will go live.
• Fixes for video on Firefox 3.1beta…
• Hopefully, more support for large file uploads — we’ll try some experimentation with upload-by-URL.
• Tomasz will be summarizing architecture work on the data dump design.

And I’ll have plenty more to blog about…

I’ve just put in Wikimedia’s org application for Google Summer of Code 2009… Hopefully we’ll get in.

We’ve had mixed luck in previous years with GSoC, but I think we’ve got enough internal bandwidth this year that we can make sure there’s enough effort put into interacting with the student candidates ahead of time to pick the coolest and most go-get-em self-starter awesome projects and then support them through the project term.

I’ve tossed up a student application template if you want to get started early.

Update 2009-03-18: We’re in!

Part of the Wikipedia Usability Initiative’s work plan is to do some genuine real end-user testing — this’ll give us a more solid idea of a) what problems to prioritize and b) a solid measure of progress as improvements get made.

An initial test run is starting now: a banner is running for a small percentage of English Wikipedia anonymous page views inviting folks to participate in the study:

This leads to an online survey thingy which the testing firm we’ve contracted uses to pick out candidates for remote or in-person testing:

A subset of the respondants will get a callback from the testing firm, and in a couple weeks we’ll get folks in a lab and smack ourselves with how confusing our site is while we tape them.

Currently we’re mostly targeting San Francisco Bay Area locals; next time we think we can trim down the notice a little better to ensure it’s not showing to non-local visitors.

Just a quick test of Ogg-friendly video embedding with mv_embed in my WordPress blog…

Here’s Elephant Mud Bath.ogg from Wikimedia Commons:

Good:

• Seems to work nice in Firefox 3.0 with Java
• Seems to sort of work in Safari 3.2 with Xiph Quicktime components (have to play, then pause, then play again

Haven’t tested other browsers or FF 3.1 yet.

Bad:

• Still have to edit some settings in mv_embed.js manually to make it work (fix path, disable MediaWiki-dependent script loader)
• Currently have to manually make/pick a thumbnail image
• Seeking doesn’t currently seem to work (needs server support for oggz_chop?)
• WordPress’s wysiwyg editor eats the entire <video> tag if I switch out of HTML mode! It leaves the <script> at least.
• Integrating support into the upload/insert tool would be awesome of course, beating manual writing of the HTML.

We had a “dent event” meetup of open microblogging fans the other day here in San Francisco, as identi.ca’s Evan Prodromou is wandering about after the recent RecentChangesCamp in Portland.

There was wacky fun! Beers were drunk, fish and chips were eaten, netbooks were compared, and there was a nice little turnout of Wikimedians and Creative Commoners in the group.

There was talk about some of the various ways in which microblogging feeds are being used in the Wikimedia world (there are Twitter and Identica feeds of Wikinews updates, as well as a feed we set up recently with server administration log updates [and at Twitter]) and some talk of possible set up of localization work for the Laconica software at Betawiki where most of MediaWiki’s localizations are maintained.

We also discussed the necessity of setting firmer plans ahead of time for our next San Francisco Wikimedia meetups.

Also of note — there’s a Laconica hackfest planned in Berkeley tomorrow (Saturday, February 28), which may be of interest to some Bay Area coders.

I’ve enabled the article-to-PDF generation extension on en.wikipedia.org for live production testing. This is still slightly experimental, so the PDF download link and multi-article book collection part of it are currently limited to logged-in users only to let the load grow gradually.

We’re going to be keeping an eye on load on the PDF generation server in case we need to pull it temporarily.

Update: the server died for a few minutes as we had a memory leak go very bad. We’ve re-installed a watchdog script which automatically reboots it. PediaPress devs have been looking into seeing if they can prevent the leak.

I’ve been asked to point out where to report problems with page rendering — please report them to the PediaPress developers bug tracker directly, or in a pinch if you report something on our Bugzilla under the “Collection” extension component it’ll get to them as well.

Update 2009-02-27: More helpful links for folks:

• Wikipedia:Books
• Help:Books/Feedback
• Book tool on Meta