Fixed an ugly internal caching bug which could break renamed image redirects on Commons being accesses from other non-English sites. Hopefully that’s most of those solved now. :)

Slides for my talk at SVG Open available for download as PDF or Keynote source. (I can make my test corpus available as well — let me know if interested!)

– brion

I’m hanging out down in Mountain View for the SVG Open conference this weekend, to speak a bit on how we use and plan to use SVG at Wikimedia and to get up to date on the state of the art. I’ll post my full talk slides on Sunday after my talk…

One of the most exciting new developments in the SVG world right now is svgweb, a very cool tool which brings high-quality SVG rendering support — including full support for the SVG DOM and interactivity — to any browser that supports Flash. This essentially fills the “SVG gap” for most Internet Explorer users, which opens up a huge world of possibilities for both interactive content and tools for building, editing, and localizing SVG-based diagrams, charts, maps, etc right in the browser.

Google web standards evangelist Brad Neuberg gave a great talk about the background of how something like svgweb was needed and showed some great demos, including a quick preview of an inline SVG pan-and-zoom tool for Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons; we’ll have some even funner demos based on that Sunday!

Also saw a good talk from Sam Ruby on some of the gotchas in the current state of HTML vs XHTML vs HTML5 and how SVG is (or isn’t) supported in various profiles and various browsers. Most interesting was his proposal to rethink how we deal with markup validators in the webdev world — right now most validators give you a lot of errors about things that don’t really make a difference (font vs style?), but freely ignore problematic but “legitimate” structures (say, unclosed list items).

Apparently due to some miscommunications, a lot of people didn’t realize that the FlaggedRevs labs test wiki has been active and waiting for people to poke at it for a month, since just before Wikimania!

We need interested people to be get up as local administrators to try out the the per-page stabilization settings (accessed via the ‘protect’ tab); by default most pages do not activate FlaggedRevs in the configuration we’re testing for English Wikipedia.

I’ve added a couple quick notes to this affect on the main page.

Update: We’re collecting some folks to be bureaucrats and help set up more test admins so we can get things going quick!

I’d like to share some exciting news with you all… After four awesome years working for the Wikimedia Foundation full-time, next month I’m going to be starting a new position at StatusNet, leading development on the open-source microblogging system which powers identi.ca and other sites.

I’ve been contributing to StatusNet (formerly Laconica) as a user, bug reporter, and patch submitter since 2008, and I’m really excited at the opportunity to get more involved in the project at this key time as we gear up for a 1.0 release, hosted services, and support offerings.

StatusNet was born in the same free-culture and free-software community that brought me to Wikipedia; many of you probably already know founder Evan Prodromou from his longtime work in the wiki community, launching the awesome Wikitravel and helping out with MediaWiki development on various fronts. The “big idea” driving StatusNet is rebalancing power in the modern social web — pushing data portability and open protocols to protect your autonomy from siloed proprietary services… People need the ability to control their own presence on the web instead of hoping Facebook or Twitter always treat you the way you want.

This does unfortunately mean that I’ll have less time for MediaWiki as I’ll be leaving my position as Wikimedia CTO sooner than originally anticipated, but that doesn’t mean I’m leaving the Wikimedia community or MediaWiki development!

Just as I was in the MediaWiki development community before Wikimedia hired me, you’ll all see me in the same IRC channels and on the same mailing lists… I know this is also a busy time with our fundraiser coming up and lots of cool ongoing developments, so to help ease the transition I’ve worked out a commitment to come into the WMF office one day a week through the end of December to make sure all our tech staff has a chance to pick my brain as we smooth out the code review processes and make sure things are as well documented as I like to think they are. ;)

We’ve got a great tech team here at Wikimedia, and we’ve done so much with so little over the last few years. A lot of really good work is going on now, modernizing both our infrastructure and our user interface… I have every confidence that Wikipedia and friends will continue to thrive!

I’ll start full-time at StatusNet on October 12. My key priorities until then are getting some of our key software rollouts going, supporting the Usability Initiative’s next scheduled update and getting a useful but minimally-disruptive Flagged Revisions configuration going on English Wikipedia. I’m also hoping to make further improvements to our code review process, based on my experience with our recent big updates as well as the git-based workflow we’re using at StatusNet — I’ve got a lot of great ideas for improving the CodeReview extension…

Erik Moeller will be the primary point of contact for WMF tech management issues starting October 12, until the new CTO is hired. I’ll support the hiring process as much as I can, and we’re hoping to have a candidate in the door by the end of the year.

– brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
CTO, Wikimedia Foundation
San Francisco

Update: Evan’s announce is up on the StatusNet blog.

Ok, we still need to complete automation of update runs for LocalisationUpdate, but it seems to be working!

It’s not the most glamorous of extensions, but you can see here an updated message (“Den här sidan” where the current deployed message file says “Denna sidan har”)!

– brion

Updates are coming back for LocalisationUpdate and ProofreadPage extensions, which we tested then pulled Tuesday due to performance problems.

Roan’s redone LU to store the message updates in serialized files instead of the database, which we can sync locally to web servers and should perform much better; I’ll also do a more gradual test rollout so we can scale it back more gracefully if we have problems again.

ThomasV has fixed up some bad queries in ProofreadPage, and it should be ready to go again; the updated version has much more advanced index support and looks pretty spiffy. :)

And if we’ve got time between other things, I’ll roll out the updated Collection as well — this makes big improvements to the UI for building a multi-page book, and leaves the sidebar much less cluttered when you’re not using it.

– brion

I’ve put in a fix for uploader tools and bots that have been broken since the last update — these bot tools didn’t expect the upload form to change, so they don’t pass in new required fields such as the edit token which was added to the form in the latest update.

Since the edit token isn’t actually required for web uploads (it’s a protection against a class of attacks which, as it happens, can’t forge file uploads) I’ve relaxed the check. I’ve confirmed that it fixes Commonist and have a report that CommonsHelper is also fixed.

Most other bots and tools that were affected are probably also fixed; please test them and let us know if anything’s still broken!

Problem #1 — causes huge increase in CPU load on web servers

Problem #2 — completely kills THE ENTIRE SITE when you DISABLE it because serialized LUDependency objects in the message cache can’t be reinstantiated.

Sigh… Why can’t life be easy :)

Update 2009-09-23 16:30: Roan is starting work on replacing the database storage layer with a flat-file which should be more efficient for our use case.

Quick note for those who have been asking — we’re starting to maintain a list of feature & extension deployments that we’re rolling out in the very near future and their status on the Wikitech wiki.

Note that some things like the English Wikipedia FlaggedRevs deployment aren’t on there yet; we’ll start prepping something for these in the next round in a couple weeks.

– brion