Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-07-12/Technology report

Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Wikimania live streaming and rebroadcast

As Wikimania draws to a close, the debate about how best to (re)broadcast video footage has begun on the wikitech-l mailing list. There was general praise for the quality and reliability of this year's live video feeds provided by the iStream.pl company – for instance, User:Bodnotbod commented that "most talks had multiple camera set-ups and live cutting to keep it more visually engaging. It really made me feel a part of the conference". However, User:Gmaxwell criticised the choice of an Adobe Flash-based mechanism for displaying them. Flash, developed commercially, has wide support among operating systems and web browsers but remains proprietary: this conflicts with the Foundation and community-at-large's vision of a world based around open source software. An open source alternative exists in the form of the Theora OGG format (.ogv), though support for OGG remains patchy despite Wikimedia and other groups pushing for its adoption.

Last year, there was almost no live streaming, with just about all video converted to OGG format overnight and relayed via Wikimedia Commons and other sites. This time round, it seems unlikely that OGG files will be available for several weeks, but they could potentially be of a more professional standard. In the meantime, slideshows and PDF versions of the presentations are already available.

Import of French books begins

In April this year, the French chapter of the WMF, Wikimedia France, announced it had reached an agreement with the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF) to import about 1400 French public domain texts primarily for use on the French Wikisource (see Signpost coverage). This week, the technical work began. This involved first downloading each text from the BNF in DjVu form on July 7, and reuploading it directly into the system, the following day. It is not known how complete the transition is.

[Update: See the talk page of this section for some corrections and additional information]

In brief

Note: 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.

Two fixes for the mwEmbed JavaScript library have been produced: the resolution of bug #20962 allows plural forms of words to be translated and used in interface messages and that of bug #24268 fixes functionality when working alongside Twinkle.
Bug #24196, referring to problems with Special:ValidationStatistics (itself related to pending changes), has been fixed.
The first support for "Special:" namespace pages has been added to the MediaWiki API, namely the ability to check their existence and other basic properties (bug #24185).
The Wikipedia pageview statistics visualiser http://stats.grok.se has suffered from intermittent readings. The cause is thought to be an underlying one in the data itself supplied by the software.
A dynamic recent changes feed for the latest web browsers has been created and is available on the Toolserver. More details, including how to embed it as a user script, are available.
The option "Mark all edits minor by default" is soon to be removed from Special:Preferences, because "users often set it and forget it, causing non-minor edits to be marked minor." (bug #24313).

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12 July 2010 (all comments)

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The multi-cam work was just great for the Q and A sessions—it gave us a sense of being part of the audience. I'm interested to know who owns the live stream / vid. Is it freely available for use on en.WP? Tony (talk) 14:11, 13 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As written in the article the recording and streaming were done by iStream, which seems to be a Polish company based in Poznań: http://www.istream.pl/ According to Manuel Schneider the recordings will be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in the Theora format [1], but I presume it may take some time for the company to do the Theora-encoding of the many hours of recording. — fnielsen (talk) 10:48, 14 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
About the BnF partnership, I am afraid this report is largely inaccurate (probably because we did not communicate much on it, true :-). The early preparations of the technical work were done in late March. It really started in early May, just after the announcement. This work was done by a core team of three volunteers of Wikimédia France, with much help and input from fellow members and experimented contributors to Commons and Wikisource who brought their expertise of the projects.
The BnF did not provide any DjVu. The technical challenge was precisely to build the best DjVus possible from what they gave us, while keeping as much metadata as possible and making the future work of the Wikisource folks as easy as possible.
Finally, we requested a server-side upload on July 2, which was performed by Tim Starling on July 10. The associated Wikisource pages were initialised by bot later this day, live from Wikimania in Gdańsk.
Thanks for reporting on this project! Jean-Fred (talk) 20:31, 14 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Also, the upload is complete for the moment: all the books provided by the BnF as part of this partnership are now on Commons. Jean-Fred (talk) 20:38, 14 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for filling us in! Be sure to keep us updated :) - Jarry1250 ^{[Humorous? Discuss.]} 21:24, 14 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No problem :-). For reference, we have set up a page at Commons: Commons:Bibliothèque nationale de France. More should come in the future (maybe on the Outreach wiki). Jean-Fred (talk) 23:37, 18 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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