The Jackal Rants

There’s an interesting gem on the wikien-l mailing list:

This is one of the older ideas that’s been drifting around WP for years. Trouble is, we don’t have the developers to work on this problem. This isn’t like policy; we can’t be bold and write it. Oh, technically we can, except most of us lack the technical prowess to do it, and those who have it are already working on MediaWiki

This is in response to a suggestion to create “a new kind of block”, or some other option, which would keep users out of the main namespace.

I don’t recall a recent feature request or discussion on wikitech-l about whether or not this is feasible (it is, and quite straightfoward) or a request to have it done.

We (the development team) do not have the mind-reading capabilities some users would like us to have, and cannot respond to queries we’ve never been asked.

In idle browsing of MeatballWiki, which is something I never do often, I came across an interesting statement on http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiCreole:

Several wiki engines have agreed to jump on board (including MediaWiki and the Ward’s original WikiWikiWeb).

This is news to me, I have to admit; from what I can recall, in a mailing list thread sparked off with an announcement that WikiCreole was ready, I’m pretty sure several developers expressed doubt as to whether or not it was worthwhile implementing.

WikiCreole is dumbed-down and doesn’t support quite a lot of what MediaWiki’s native parser does. The WikiCreole people have so far failed to see the light in defining the parser behaviour, which is one of the biggest mistakes made in the history of MediaWiki development.

It’d be interesting to know whether or not I’m on crack, and if it has been agreed that we’ll implement this, why we felt it was appropriate, and who’s doing it.

Update: Following some comments from Brion, it seems that someone got the wrong impression after he expressed some initial support and made a tentative offer to experiment with an “alternative editing mode” supporting WikiCreole. On the whole, it’s not something we have a roadmap to support. 

Just thought I’d take a minute or two to showcase Mayflower, an excellent search engine specifically for the Wikimedia Commons, developed on the toolserver by Tangotango.

I don’t think I can praise this enough, to be honest. The interface is clean and professional, the engine itself is quite fast, and effective, and the whole experience left me quite satisfied as a user. This is a fantastic piece of work, and I wholeheartedly congratulate the developer for putting in some obvious hard work.

This is exactly what the toolserver was for, and I’m thoroughly pleased that our community is producing such innovations.

Just to follow up from the teaser screenshot I posted a short time ago, the forthcoming Screenshot extension is now demoing at http://wiki.anubite.co.uk/view/Slideshow.

It requires JavaScript, but will now show a decent fallback message if the client doesn’t support this, and messages (including button labels) can now be localised as normal.

Dubious innuendo from Little Britain aside, the results of the Board vote are in, and I’m disappointed, in part.

The top three, in order, were Erik Möller (Eloquence, 1671 votes), Kat Walsh (Mindspillage, 1427 votes) and Frieda Brioschi (Frieda, 1254 votes). Oscar van Dillen (Oscar, 1234 votes) came fourth, losing his seat. The Board of Trustees has endorsed the result, and offered the position to Frieda.

There were a lot of prospective voters demanding some explanation from Erik as to how he felt he kept his promises from the previous election campaign, although on the whole, I didn’t expect him to lose a seat in this election. I was quite confident of Kat’s continued position on the Board, but the final result is something of a disappointment.

I’m not concerned that Oscar lost his seat, although I do sympathise with him for a brief moment; no doubt Wikimedia will begin treating him as “old hat” – rather, I’m disappointed that the final opportunity has been wasted. I have no doubt that Frieda is a wonderful person and will do her best, but I’m not at all convinced she brings sufficient qualifications to the table at a fairly crucial time, and would much rather have seen Michael Snow or Danny Wool in her position.

It’s interesting to look at those who fell towards the shallow end of the voting pool; perhaps Kelly Martin was right in her estimation of some of them as “popularity contest entrants”, and River Tarnell’s platform of closing non-Wikipedias apparently did her no favours with those projects.

Well, well, well, Wikimedia have new general counsel, in the form of Mike Godwin. Allow me to extend the warm welcome Mike’s getting, and to throw in the obligatory pun about Wikimedia wanting to invoke Godwin’s law more often from now on.