#Wikidata - the #beta label lister

At the hackathon of #Wikimania2014, work was done on a new version of the label lister. It is a gadget that allows you to edit labels and aliases in other languages. It proved to be an indispensable tool to me. Today I learned that the new label lister is now available.

The most wonderful thing is that it became much more compact, you do not need to click as much anymore and it "just works". In the screenshot you see Mrs Bundschuh, she is a former member of the Landtag of Bavaria, and as you can see it is trivially easy to add a label in your language.

I hope that functionality like the label lister will make it into a core feature of Wikidata.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata gadgets - mouse over

I am tickled pink when writing on my blog has an effect. Yesterday I wrote about the "mouse over" gadget. Check out this bugzilla bug. It is now very much likely that it will become part of standard Wikidata functionality.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata gadgets

Wikidata has gadgets, several add functionality that make sense to have. One of them shows the description of a label or a property.

It improves the user experience a lot so much so that it might as well be turned on by default.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#WMDEVDAYS - Gadgets

Many of the gadgets people use in #Wikipedia are awesome. They make things possible. Once a good one is developed, they are copied to other wikis to do its job.

There are a few problems with this model.

Once a gadget is finding its use, it becomes more clear how to best use it. Some of the changes change the text used in the software others change the functionality itself. Because of this every instance of a gadget is different and consequently, when the MediaWiki software is updated, a gadget may or may not fail. This is not knowable in advance.

The next iteration of gadgets is going to bring three major improvements:

• A gadget can be enabled on any wiki but exists only in one place
• A gadget can be localised to support your language
• A gadget can be made more future proof by implementing the latest technology

Currently, Wikimedia developers visit wikis ahead of an upgrade of the MediaWiki software.  They check many gadgets and other local functionality to ensure that everything will still work after the upgrade.  Even though they make a darn good best effort, things still fail. Because of the numbers involved, there is no chance for them to succeed. With "Gadgets 2.0" gadgets will need to be checked only once and that gives them a fighting chance and our communities improved continuity.

Thanks,

     GerardM

#WCN11 - #MediaWiki gadgets

At the #Wikimedia Conference 2011, one of the best bits of news was in the presentation of Roan and Timo. They have been working on the rejuvenation of our JavaScript support, this brought us a lot of improvements in the past and now they have their sites firmly on the MediaWiki gadgets.

In summary, the syntax to support gadgets is worse then wikisyntax on steroids, the same gadget may exist in a gazillion manifestations on any of the 800 Wikis, internationalisation is a joke, gadgets as they are are awful. Awful because its infrastructure sucks not because of a lack of hard work by a community of people fulfilling a need.

Consequenrly the syntax has to be cleaned up, gadgets are to be shared among the many wikis, it should be able to use all the JavaScript improvements and as gadgets are to be shared, internationalisation is necessary in order for it to work well on all those Wikis.

The best news; Roan and Timo are already testing gadgets with many of the improvements in place. The gadgets are able to use MediaWiki messages and Siebrand and Roan are talking about implementing gender and plural support for JavaScript.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Where and when are people comming from

On our MediaWikiWave blog, Tom had added two nice little gadgets from FEEDJIT. FEEDJIT provides two tools that give a walking update of the visitors and, a map showing where visitors are coming from and what they are reading.

The map shows Europe and North America after less then one day of traffic. This is only the traffic from people who get directly to the blog.. Most of what I write is read through aggregators.

One of the interesting things I noticed is that old blogs are still read. So it is relevant to keep the history of the blog.
Thanks,
GerardM