The Jackal Rants

So, the United States has joined the rest of the world in dealing with climate change. I suppose there’ll be a lot of sniping and accusations of hypocrisy and so forth over the next few weeks.

Why bother? The fact is that, now the US recognises that, whether or not we caused it – and while we might not have caused all of it, we certainly haven’t been helping the situation – climate change is going to affect us in an adverse fashion…now we have another collaborator that’s going to help us work towards a sensible resolution that benefits the ecosystem we all live in.

I’m on a break from development work for the foreseeable future; a few weeks off (minimum) ought to allow me to sort out various pressing issues and calm down again. There’s a lot of flak associated with being a developer, which isn’t helped when one has an aggressive personality.

Excellent little find for Apache HTTP server administrators and advanced web developers; the mod_rewrite cheat sheet is a free, single-page helper that’s available in both PNG and PDF formats and crams a wealth of useful reminders and basic information about rewriting URLs with mod_rewrite, which some consider to be Apache’s answer to Sendmail in terms of power and ease of configuration and use.

That is, the 27th of June; for that is the date upon which Tony Blair will stand down as Labour leader, and with it, relinquish the position of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, with a lack of any significant opposition candidates, now that John Reid has announced he’ll be stepping down from the Home Office, this means Gordon Brown will basically ascend to the throne in a glorified coronation.

The big one-oh; MediaWiki 1.10.0 is out, bringing with it the newest stable release branch of MediaWiki. As usual, I recommend that all wiki operators begin plans for upgrading.

If you’re running MediaWiki 1.7.x or above, then you’re already configured to use PHP 5, and the regular upgrade instructions will work a treat. If running MediaWiki 1.6.x, then you should still consider upgrading, but you will need to ensure that PHP 5 is available, and either upgrade to it, or pester the appropriate people to do so. This can be a problem for users of a shared hosting environment.

I’ll leave you with a short piece of “advice” from a friend, who, upon hearing that 1.10 was “out”, screamed, “RUN FOR THE HILLS”.

Well, just to make it official; I’m no longer a toolserver root, having resigned from those duties as of early this month for various reasons. Don’t come running to me with requests to have users, processes or queries killed, or packages or other things installed or compiled, ’cause it ain’t going to happen.

While a lot of people know what Wikipedia is, or at least, know it exists, a lot less people know that behind the Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia, Wikinews, Wikibooks, etc.) sits the Wikimedia Commons, which aims to become a repository of free media, including all manner of graphical goodies, audio and video. Commons is driving much of the need to develop better media support in MediaWiki, as referenced in a previous post.

The administrators on the Commons work damn hard to ensure that the content uploaded is free, and for the most part, do a good job. The main problem that seems to be developing right now is the deletion of images on Commons, and the reason that’s a problem is because when Commons sneezes, Wikimedia gets a cold, or less metaphorically, if Commons deletes an image, that image stops being available to all the Wikimedia projects, and a bunch of pages including that image breaks.

Of course, some of this deletion is needed, but there’s also a lot of carelessness going on. While I appreciate that we do need some sort of tracking mechanism to keep tabs on pages using those images, I think it’s important to note that applications such as InstantCommons, which is under development, and aims to allow third parties to use the Commons repository, depend on that project not deleting a ton of images.

One example that sparked this little rant is http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Bug.png – it’s a little cartoon bug, and we use it on the MediaWiki BugZilla. We’ve been asked to change this, although we haven’t been given a good reason. I rather suspect that, sooner or later, the image is going to be deleted, although as of writing, it isn’t tagged for deletion. All this does is break a bunch of links to the image and causes some inconvenience.

Now, if InstantCommons starts being used (and I gather an alpha or beta of some sort is not far off), then it’s going to be useless if stuff gets deleted. If wiki operators notice that images can’t be relied upon to be in one place, then they’ll just stop using the Commons.

The Commons, as a project, needs to wake up and realise that it’s responsible for providing images to more than just Wikimedia now, and as far as I can tell, this was always the case. If they start breaking stuff, then we might as well abandon the idea altogether.

Right, well, this’ll be brief, but succinct. I doubt any volunteer working with the Wikimedia Foundation can have failed to notice the recent debacle over the new Board resolution mandating confirmation of identity and imposing a minimum age on volunteers working with “sensitive data”, which is poorly defined as “developers with access to sensitive data”, as well as CheckUsers (which makes sense) and OTRS volunteers, which makes less sense.

Daniel Kinzler put together a +1 insightful post for his blog, which summarises a lot of the major concerns I’ve seen over this proposal, including the lack of research beforehand, the lack of thinking regarding an effective implementation and the lack of communication to the people it affects.