#Wikidata - #Death is taking a break

It has been my pleasure to kill of many of the people who died in 2014 in Wikidata. It has been a struggle to keep up; they never stop. I use a tool to find most of them. It died on me and now I am taking a break.

The tool was developed by Magnus and like all the other tools of him it serves a purpose, it is even important, there is no alternative. When it breaks, there is the convenient excuse: "it is not official".

It is convenient and it ignores how important these tools are. Both the Wikimedia foundation and the chapters know how important these tools are and find it inconvenient when this is pointed out to them. Do they have a responsibility in this; is it important that the GLAMS are supported in their need for statistics?

This self absorption means that only their own stuff is deemed worthwhile enough for support never mind that it does not have the oomph to deliver, never mind that their alternative is only a mirage in a developers mind.

In the end it takes a Magnus to support many of the tools that make a difference in the real world. Magnus is taking a needed break. I wish him health, joy and happiness for the coming year. He is my Wikimedian of the year.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Dear #Wikimedia chapters; a request for funding

#ttfautohint is a tool that helps people who design fonts. It removes a part of the design process that is a mystery to many font designers, it is boring and it is one part of what makes designing fonts expensive. This software provides functionality to Windows, Apple and Linux. It works well for the Latin script and it will provide prototype support for Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. It will provide hooks to other font design tools.

When you look at the Arabic example, you will notice that the characters do go from top right to bottom left. This is how I am told Arabic looks like when a "proper" font is used.

Santhosh is enthusiastic about ttfautohint; he pointed it out to me. When you watch the video, you will learn that a sum of $ 30K is needed to improve the system. They are looking for the full funding by October first.

This is the kind of investment that will lift the look and feel of all of the Internet. It is open source. It plays nice with the development of the MediaWiki WebFonts extension. It is something that any chapter flush with cash can support. When a chapter like the English chapter has given their excess cash to the WMF, it is likely that they may consider such a request from the English chapter positively.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Want to crash your browser ?

One of the best images at #Wikimedia #Commons contains five images of the scull of a male Chlorocebus sabaeus. 

Want to crash your browser ?

The picture is gorgeous, the toothy grin of the skull shows off really well that this beastie has what it takes when your fingers come to close. When you read the Commons page of the picture you are warned..

Some browsers may have trouble displaying this image at full resolution: This image has a large number of pixels and may either not load properly or cause your browser to freeze.

There is even a link to a non-Flash tool that complained to me that it is not "a valid JPG file". There are open source tools that do a credible job paging through a big file like this one (35.56 MB). It is not even a genuinely big file. Many maps are much larger..

Why not choose a program that does a splendid job so that we do not have to warn people that they might crash their browser when they want to see pictures like this in all its glory?
Thanks,
       GerardM

Good news and bad news; #Wikimedia strategic planning

Werdna pinged me that my problem with the strategic planning process has been solved. It took a concerted effort by several of our best and brightest developers to come up with a solution.

The good news is, indeed it has been fixed. The bad news is, I now have 318 new messages to read.

Should I try and cope with such a load of data that no longer represents the current thinking. What is a good stategy out of this potential time sync?
Thanks,
      GerardM

PS LiquidThreads IS a great tool !!

Eating our own dogfood

In order to do the localisations at translatewiki.net, we run on the very bleeding edge of the MediaWiki development. This means that when buggy code is submitted to SVN, the users at translatewiki.net suffer the consequences.

There are two powerful consequences of running ahead of the pack.

• software is internationalised and localised before it goes live elsewhere
• it provides powerful quality assurance on our bleeding edge software

Typically things are fine, sometimes things go wrong.. Today we could no longer sign on. Merlissimo signalled the problem on our IRC channel and, one of our developers was available to roll back several revisions.
Thanks,
GerardM

Youtube ... but which one?

YouTube is a video sharing website. It is probably the most widely used, it has a wide variety of stuff including pop songs, comedy or TV shows from my youth. There is also a large amount of useful stuff, like a howto do the Rubik cube ... The real cool thing of the YouTube videos is that you can embed them in a website. It is for this reason that many people want to include YouTube into MediaWiki and, it shows. There are currently seven extensions known at MediaWiki and I have been reliably informed that there are more.

So what extension to choose? What makes a YouTube extension the best? It is a bewildering choice; do you want YouTube only, what other video sharing sites are supported, is it localised, is it supported and most importantly will it work for me ???

The answer to these questions take time to answer, and then the apparently best choice may still leave things to be desired. A friend of mine has to answer these questions. How to YouTube is not the only functionality that he has to decide on. He will like many others, have the extensions tested, maybe fixed for documentation and function.

As we are certain that this is an often repeated excercise, we want to do it in a way that provides more benefits; a way that helps people to understand what extension, what version for what MediaWiki release and how to install and use it.

Our current thinking is to test it on a virtual server and publish the results. We have not decided on the precise details. Suggestions are welcome.
Thanks,
GerardM