1.18 extension bundling; mobile testers needed; brief news
Which extensions should be bundled with MediaWiki 1.18?
With the release of MediaWiki 1.17 to external sites (its so-called "tarball" release) being drawn out by the incidence of a long series of bugs – a release is now expected "within 24 hours" of the publication of this issue – attention is rapidly turning to design decisions regarding the MediaWiki 1.18 tarball release. In particular, the installer included in the release of 1.17 supported the packaging of commonly used extensions with the software itself, in an attempt to make "straight out of the box" MediaWiki work more like a Wikimedia wiki. Although it remains both difficult and undesirable to replicate the look and feel of a Wikimedia wiki entirely, given that they run approximately 80 extensions, at the moment, even basic extensions such as ParserFunctions must be manually installed by the end user. Therefore, to ease the technical knowledge required to set up a basic wiki, Wikimedia developer and bugmeister Mark Hershberger this week opened the call for a shortlist of the most needed extensions of the wikitech-l mailing list. Though there was concern from fellow developer Robert Lanphier that including even a small number of extensions would push back the rapidly approaching target date for release of the 1.18 tarball, former CTO Brion Vibber was unconcerned: "all that's required is to drop some directories into the tarball, and they'll be available for selection in the installer".
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.
Answer the Foundation's call for testers of its new mobile gateway by grabbing your smartphone, if you have one, and navigating to [1]. Then, leave feedback on the experience via the link at the top.
- The operations team warned that this week's "extensive networking configuration... could potentially impact production" (wikitech).
- With the resolution of bug #28695, if no results are found during a search of the edit filter logs, a message to that effect will appear.
- The WMF's Volunteer Development Coordinator, Sumana Harihareswara, called for suggestions for the hackdays immediately preceding Wikimania 2011, both of which are to be held in August in the Israeli city of Haifa (wikitech-l mailing list).
irc.wikimedia.org, which provides several Wikimedia-related IRC channels (though not the major chatrooms) was down for a period this week (wikitech-l mailing list).- The Foundation also issued a call for those with internet-enabled phones to test the new "Wikimedia Mobile" gateway, which will eventually replace the existing http://m.wikipedia.org service (Wikimedia blog). The call has already resulted in a considerable amount of feedback (wikitech-l mailing list).
- The English Wikipedia's desire to have the "mark all [my] edits minor by default" preference disabled for all users was finally implemented, a year after it was first proposed (bug #24313).
- The Wikimedia Foundation did not end up participating in World IPv6 Day after switching to the new protocol was found to require "unexpected... changes to our database schema" (English Wikipedia's village pump).
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