The Signpost

Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

CTO Danese Cooper does Office Hours

Danese answering questions during the office hours session

Wikimedia's Chief Technical Officer Danese Cooper last week took part in an "office hours" discussion on IRC. Speaking about her own role, the state of Wikimedia's technical departments, and answering questions from the community, she gave insights into what the future might hold for Wikimedia (public logs). Although discussion was fragmented, a number of important points were touched on:

Video developments for Wikimedia Commons

"Cats" (edit)

Michael Dale, a Kaltura employee working with the Wikimedia Foundation to build easier ways of using the power of video in Wikimedia projects, this week announced the creation of a free "video sequencer" for Commons (Wikimedia techblog). The sequencer, which allows users to remix existing and new video, audio, text and images into single video sections (see example, right), was described by Kaltura as "a stepping stone in the world of online media". It requires a modern browser to use, with the best performance by the Firefox 4 betas. It is hoped the sequencer will bridge the gap between images, which are relatively common on Wikimedia projects, and videos, which are relatively rare, to create overview, documentary-style introductions to topics on Wikipedia, among other uses.

As the capabilities around video are refined and expanded, a worry has been that increased usage of video would impose a significant additional cost on the Foundation, especially due to bandwith usage. Michael Dale announced a cooperation with P2P-Next, who presented at Wikimania this year. Their technology makes it possible to use peer-to-peer technology for downloading the videos and all you need is to enter the mwEmbed video pilot and install the P2P-Next Swarmplayer Firefox plugin (a plugin for Internet Explorer and a MacOS version of Swarmplayer are still in development). After viewing the video, your browser will share the video for you with other viewers and thus alleviate the strain on the resources of the Foundation. It is claimed that the sharing is configurable and will not get in the way of your browsing experience.

Google Summer of Code: Stephen LaPorte

We conclude a series of articles about this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) with Stephen LaPorte, a law school student, who describes his project to creating a tool to format judicial decisions, legal scholarship, and statutes for Wikipedia's sister project Wikisource:

Stephen worked on four such tools: importing U.S. Supreme Court cases (example), importing the current U.S. legal code (example), wikifying legal citations (tool) and helping categorise U.S. Supreme Court cases (tool).

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.


















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