Posts Tagged ‘wiki’
July 12th, 2010
First off, fonts. The Fedora Project has used MgOpen Modata for a while now as its official font. It’s a free font and loosely resembles the font in our logo.
We just have a few issues with it — namely, it doesn’t support a lot of glyphs needed to even spell some of our contributors’ names, let alone speak in other languages. Here’s a few examples of where MgOpen Modata fails:
The top two are names of Fedora contributors. The accents versions of letters above are not available in the font, so in Inkscape, they are replaced by the system default font (which I believe is DejaVu). Those are highlighted in red. The third line is a line in Russian, nabbed from the Russian translation of the wiki’s home page. The only character in that line rendered as Modata is the question mark at the end of the line.
Mo kicked off the discussion on finding a new font a little over a week ago. As the discussion continued, it was decided that the best candidate for the font was Comfortaa, a font licensed under a CC BY-ND license, which is not permissible for inclusion in Fedora. Mo sent an email to the font author asking for the license to be changed, and we received wonderful news back.
That’s not to say the search is over — we still need your feedback and suggestions. We don’t plan on using Comfortaa as a body text font, only as a headline font; the front runner is Droid Sans (Droid Serif for print). If you can suggest a better typeface for either the headline or body text fonts, please let us know! Either comment on this blog post or send an email to the design-team list.
Edit: Here’s some samples of Comfortaa, as suggested by Nicu.
Second, datanommer. (om nom nom) A couple of weeks ago, I posted to the datanommer list a totally new way forward for the datanommer project, based on feedback from the target audience to datanommer as well as members of the Infrastructure team.
The new new master plan is to provide a simple executable, aptly named “datanommer”. It reads a configuration file which specifies queries to be run on different applications. Here’s an example query file, currently checked in to the git repo:
[memcached]
servers = 127.0.0.1:11211
[module:wikipedia]
path = mediawiki.MediaWiki
api_url = http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php
[data:wikipedia.recently_active_editors]
grapher = matplot.bar_chart
grapher.ylabel = Edit count
num = 10
[module:fedorawiki]
path = mediawiki.MediaWiki
api_url = https://fedoraproject.org/w/api.php
[data:fedorawiki.recently_active_editors]
grapher = matplot.bar_chart
grapher.ylabel = Edit count
num = 10
Now, what on earth does this do? It fetches up to the latest 1000 edits on a MediaWiki, specifically the Fedora Project’s wiki and Wikipedia, determines the top ten editors, and places them on a bar graph created with matplotlib. The Fedora Project graph looks something like this. Neato!
Next up — the part I’m planning to work on this week — is the part that creates an HTML presentation for the data. Of course, totally configurable. After that, it’s the endless process of writing code to pull data from miscellaneous applications. Which you, of course, can help with. (Documentation coming soon!)
Tags: comfortaa, datanommer, fedora, fonts, mgopen modata, wiki | 3 Comments »
June 23rd, 2010
OK, here’s the important half: Translations on the Fedora Project Wiki are about to become more friendly — to viewers and translators both.
If you’ve been to the main page of the wiki in the last two hours or so, you’ll have noticed the shiny new “In other languages” box at the top of the page.
All of the translated versions of the main page that I could find that seemed remotely up to date were added to that template. There’s other translations of this page on the wiki, but they haven’t been touched since the transfer from MoinMoin.
So: instead of doing anything related to my goals at Red Hat, I decided that today would be a great day to fix the fact that we don’t have a standard way to do translations on the website. We have current instructions that contains a lot of old cruft from MoinMoin and uses a lot of MediaWiki features in a way that can be bettered.
I borrowed some template code from meta.wikimedia.org — big ups and shouts out to all the folks over at Meta-Wiki who produced those templates.
Quick summary of how it works:
- Add
{{autolang|base=yes}} to the top of the English version of a page, save
- Click the set up link for the lang box, don’t touch the pre-filled code, and hit save
- Click [edit] and add the language codes for the page’s translations, save
- Click the red links to create the pages, adding
{{autolang}} to the top of each one
The full details, which you should read if you’re interested in doing this, are over at [[FedoraProject:Translating]] (or if you like neat shortcuts, you can remember [[FP:LANG]]).
An email has been sent to trans@ to get suggestions from translators within the project and see if there’s anything we need to fix/improve. You can also provide your suggestions as comments to this blog.
As a bonus for reading this whole blog post, here’s some comments my blog’s spam collector caught that I thought were funny: one two three four
Tags: comments, fedora, i18n, internationalization, l10n, language, localization, mediawiki, things i did in one day that took me eighteen months to sit down and do, translations, wiki | Comments Off
May 27th, 2010
Is there something I told you to do and totally forgot about? Fear not! I’m keeping a list of stuff (again) on the wiki.
[[User:Ianweller/Summer_2010_to-do_list]]
It’s a wiki. Be bold ;)
Tags: fedora, summer, wiki | Comments Off
March 21st, 2010
After talking with a few people recently and doing some self-analysis, I feel like it’s time to make a major shift in what I do within the Fedora Project. My Fedora résumé so far has consisted mostly of wiki czaring,1 package maintenance and other odds-and-ends jobs others kindly ask me to do.
I’m presently concerned with the second in that list — a combination of increased stress and decreased time available due to school and the speed of discussion on package maintenance and release engineering is a losing game. In the next few weeks, I’ll be checking all of my packages and determining which ones have dead or slow upstreams or bugs that I can’t resolve on my own. Those packages will likely be orphaned, and if nobody wants to care for them, so be it.
The two others? Wiki czaring is fine, but I need to improve on it a bit (see the footnote), and I always enjoy the random problems that I can help quickly solve for people. This being said, development on mw, supybot-fedora and other convenient software is (hopefully) Not Going Away™ any time soon.
With the pushing away of my first Fedora love, package maintenance, I’ve found something new to focus on. Through my internship with Red Hat last year, I discovered that there is a large deficit of good statistics about our community. There’s a large deficit of good statistics about most free software communities, according to some random Google keywords I just tried, apart from “this is how many times our product has been downloaded.” I really loved the opportunity to combine my self-proclaimed mad Python skillz with answering other people’s questions, such as:
- How many contributors does Fedora really have? And according to these standards/filters?
- How often is the wiki edited and when?
- How many “things” has this random dude over here done? Do we consider that “active”?
- How many vague statistically-related questions can we come up with on devel@l.fp.o or during a marketing meeting?
Some of these, obviously, have no answer. Yet.
When I finally graduate from high school, I’ll be pushing full swing into answering these sorts of things. Until then, you can help me make Fedora a better place by simply telling us what you want to see tallied up. I asked this about 9 months ago and I got a lot of responses — thank you. But with recent discussions about the future of Fedora and a lot of claims about our user and contributor bases not being backed up (not pointing fingers), I think there are even more questions that can be answered. Please add your statistically-inclined questions to [[Statistics 2.0]] and I’ll do my best in the near future to get them answered with statistics on our community.
I also love help. (Shout out to joshkayse who is taking the lead on making it simple to find a single contributor’s actions within Fedora, taking inspiration from Mel’s FAS scraper.)
Quick summary: Maintaining packages is a drag (for me) right now. I like taking questions and answering with numbers. I graduate soon. Ask questions.
1 While writing this I decided to Google for “fedora wiki czar“. What I found was a mysterious character who was appointed as such in a community touting full transparency. Mel brought this to my attention the other day — I really suck at providing transparency into the process of administering the wiki. It’s pretty much on a whim. It shouldn’t be this way.
Tags: fedora, incoherent rambling, statistics, wiki | 1 Comment »
January 26th, 2009
The wiki tip of the week series by Ian Weller, published every Monday, is an effort to increase knowledge about useful features, policies, and other important things relating to the Fedora Project wiki. It is published weekly at its home page, Ian’s blog, and fedora-devel-list. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed of the tips.
With the new page naming and wiki structure policy in place, a lot of users on the wiki have recently been moving pages around, and often have been doing it the manual way: copy the source from one page to another, and make a redirect by hand. What most users apparently don’t realize is that there is a move button at the top of every page, and any logged-in user can use that button.
When moving your page it’s a very good idea to give a reason for doing so. You can also choose to move a page’s corresponding discussion page along with it too, if it has one. This is very useful for archiving pages (simply tack on Archive: at the beginning of the page name) or moving your old pages. And of course, please watch your pages.
Using the move tab automatically creates a redirect and can also fix other redirects to prevent double redirects.
Probably the most important part of using the move tab instead of a manual move is that page histories are kept across both pages, so it’s much easier to find who edited what and when.
However if the new page already has content (perhaps a #REDIRECT), MediaWiki won’t allow you to move the page (unless you have the power to delete pages). You’ll still need to move the page by hand, in this case.
Learn more: Help:Moving a page at meta.wikimedia.org
Original link to this wiki tip on the Fedora wiki
Tags: fedora, wiki | 1 Comment »
January 25th, 2009
Always use an edit summary when making a change to a page. It helps us understand why you’re making an edit instead of seeing absolutely no clues as to why you did that.
What is this elusive edit summary? It’s the text input field just above the buttons to save the page. It looks like this.
There’s even a setting you can set in your preferences that will remind you to fill in an edit summary. Click on the “Editing” tab, then check the “Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary” box.
Tags: wiki | 4 Comments »
January 16th, 2009
Just a quick note that I’ll be checking each edit and making sure that it’s up to par with current policy. If you log in and see a little box that says “You have new messages”, that’s on your user talk page, where I’ll most likely discuss things with you.
Is this insane? Yes. Is this a good way to check that people know what they’re doing? Yes. :)
Tags: fedora, wiki | 1 Comment »
August 22nd, 2008
This week was quite an interesting one. Twas my first full week of school, with about 35 more to come… from just this year.
Tuesday, in English, we had tests over our summer reading (which I got about half done). Still got about an 80% on those, so I was ecstatic. Or maybe they were just simple. Whatever.
Physics on Wednesdays and Fridays is just tiring, because it’s 90 minutes of sitting in a classroom, not taking down notes about things I’ve learned four years ago, and watching it be reexplained forty or fifty times because each individual student has a specific way of having no clue what they’re doing. I wish I could sleep, I wish I could use my laptop… I wish I could ignore the world around me there. Something needs to give me the strength to sleep through not only the unwillingness to learn of the students, but the unwillingness of the teachers to teach us well. If I knew nothing about Physics, I wouldn’t get it either.
Speaking of science four years ago, the science teacher I had then is an assistant principal at my school now. Not sure how that happened, especially since I didn’t think she was even in the district for the last three years. Can’t remember.
Today, my colleague in debate and I taught the novices, because our coach apparently wanted to see our perspective on debate before he taught the next class, so he knew he was teaching us right. Uh?
And, we watched a movie in APAH today over a Native American tribe, and I found it somewhat boring since I was half asleep. Of course, it was interesting, just… not.
Oh well. An interesting week, nonetheless.
Props to the Fedora Infrastructure team for rebuilding a multitude of servers in about a week and catching an intruder before anything bad happened. We couldn’t have this great distro without you guys.
This weekend, I plan to work on the websites I need to get finished/fixed and work on fixing random wiki pages. Or perhaps I might work on adding some more random functions to my Pascal’s triangle generator in the ianweller-misc repository. Or, perhaps, I want to catch up on sleep. Maybe I’ll do all three. Or, I can quite possibly do none of these things. Instant gratification is what I absurdly rely on, and it’ll push me through this weekend and many more weeks to come.
Tags: apah, boredom, debate, english, fedora, physics, school, websites, wiki | 3 Comments »
July 27th, 2008
A fun personal project of mine, fuse-mediawiki, has been pushed to 0.1. It’s most likely still very broken, but it’d be nice if people would be able to test it a bit, submit patches, whatever.
Fetch the source with
$ git clone git://repo.or.cz/fuse-mediawiki.git
and play around. This’ll get you started with the Fedora Project wiki:
$ mkdir ~/wiki/
$ python fuse-mediawiki.git https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php ~/wiki/ --auth-basic -u FAS_USERNAME
$ mkdir -p ~/wiki/content/User:Ianweller/
$ vim ~/wiki/content/User:Ianweller/fuse-mediawiki_playground.wiki
and a :wq and changes will be committed to the wiki. Exit the filesystem with
$ fusermount -u ~/wiki/
Do NOT, under any circumstances, use this for real work and blame me for any damage caused. However, please do test it in places where it doesn’t matter what happens, and let me know what breaks.
There is currently nothing to prevent you from overwriting somebody else’s changes. There is currently nothing that clears out the cache of a page unless you remount it.
I have no clue how this works in Emacs, or gedit, or anything else. Patches welcome to fix it. :)
If you’re trying to debug something, pass the -f option to the end of the command line; it’ll put the program in the foreground and print fun debugging information. Read the README for more info.
This may be a personal project, but if somebody would like to work on this with me, that’d be great! Shoot me an email.
Edit: I fail. The correct option for auth_basic is --http-basic.
Tags: fuse-mediawiki, python, wiki | 2 Comments »
May 27th, 2008
The new Fedora Wiki, powered by MediaWiki, is now finally complete! Well… on the infrastructure side, that is.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Main_Page
Wiki editors: see the Wiki migration to-do page on what you can do to help make this migration even better.
Tags: fedora, wiki | 2 Comments »
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