Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-09-13/Technology report

Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Google Summer of Code: Sanyam Goyal

We continue a series of articles about this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) with Indian student Sanyam Goyal, who describes his attempt to overhaul the JavaScript component of the "Semantic" series of extensions, along with the core product itself, the "Semantic MediaWiki" extension. The extensions aim to realise the goals of the Semantic Web, where meaning is overlaid on top of content, allowing machines to more easily interpret it, but have not yet been approved for use on Wikimedia projects. Whilst somewhat controversial, the idea of a Semantic Web is considered by some including Tim Berners-Lee to be the future of the Web.

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I aimed to improve and extend the Javascript for Extension:Semantic MediaWiki and some of its spinoff extensions including Extension:Semantic Result Formats, Extension:Semantic Form Inputs, Extension:Semantic Drilldown and most notably Extension:Semantic Forms. This includes transferring over much of the Javascript to use the jQuery JavaScript library, which is now becoming a MediaWiki standard.

In terms of what was accomplished:

In the Semantic MediaWiki extension, I changed Special:Ask to use jQuery and add autocompletion to the top two input windows. Autocompletion is added to the property print-out input window using the jQuery UI autocompletion plugin.
In the Semantic Forms extension, I:
- changed the file-upload window to use jQuery instead of the Floatbox library; no syntax change. Kept the same functionality just using the jQuery library instead.
- changed autocompletion to use jQuery instead of YUI. This feature is based upon the jQuery-ui autocomplete plugin.
- made 'Special:CreateClass' pages more dynamic; users can now add more rows dynamically. A simple JavaScript script was written to implement this functionality.
- added an autoGrow plugin to text-area input; this allows text-areas to grow as more and more text are added to them, never requiring scrollbars. Syntax | input type=textarea|autogrow. It is based upon the textarea-autogrow plugin of jQuery.
In the Semantic Drilldown extension, I changed the 'combobox' input to use jQuery instead of ext. The feature is based upon the jQuery-ui autocomplete#combo-box plugin.
In the Semantic Results Format extension, added jqPlot and jqPie results formats similar to Google Pie and Google Bar.
In the Semantic Forms Inputs extension, I:
- changed the 'combobox' input to use jQuery instead of YUI, and added it directly in to Semantic Forms, whilst removing it from SFI. With the same syntax as |input type=combobox, it uses the jQuery-ui autocomplete#combo-box plugin
- created a new 'simpledatepicker' input which uses jQuery.T his feature is based upon the datepicker plugin of jQuery-ui. Syntax |input type=simpledatepicker.

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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.

It is now impossible to commit changes to the Wikimedia/MediaWiki SVN repository without providing a description on those changes (bug #25025).
The Wikimedia "Office IT" team, responsible for "things like fixing the printers, getting new workstations online, as well as just making sure the internet stays up", have begun to blog on the Wikimedia Techblog.
Alolita Sharma, Features Engineering Program Manager for the Wikimedia Foundation has confirmed the transition of the remaining 689 mostly smaller wikis to the new "Vector" skin (Wikimedia techblog).