Strainu onLine

Danese Cooper is the new CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation

Posted by Strainu | Filed under Open Source, Wikipedia

The Foundation announced yesterday that the new CTO is Danese Cooper. For those of you who were at eLiberatica in 2009, she was the one hosting the “lightning talks” session, which was a huge success. For the others, she is a FLOSS evangelist which worked for SUN, Intel and the less-known REvolution Computing.

What struck me in this choice is the change in profile from the previous CTO, Brion Vibber. Brion was the main code maintainer and submitter for Media Wiki for years. Without being totally sure, I think Danese is not very familiar with web programming, so she will likely be more of a supervisor and a coordinator than an active participant. This is somewhat normal and marks an evolution to a more organized, enterprise-like foundation.

This also means that most probably, the main code maintainer will continue to be Tim Starling, which hold the job since Brion left, last October. Good luck to both of them!

Tags: Danese Cooper, mediawiki, Wiki

Planeta Wikimedia is up!

Posted by Strainu | Filed under Open Source, Romana, Wikipedia

După mai bine de jumătate de an de probleme, Planeta comunităţii româneşti Wikimedia este în sfârşit disponibilă. Puteţi citi despre Wikipedia la http://ro.planet.wikimedia.org/ şi puteţi cere ca blogul vostru să fie adăugat punând un tichet aici la meta. Nu uitaţi să precizaţi adresa blogului şi a feedului ce conţine articoele despre Wikipedia.

Tags: planet, Romana, Wiki

Wikipedia now available for Amazon WebServices users

Posted by Strainu | Filed under Wikipedia

All the Wikimedia wikis are now available for Amazon users. The team took the decision to push the data monthly in order to allow for scholars an inexpensive way to analyze the huge amount of data that Wikipedia has to offer. Is anyone from Romania interested? Neah, didn’t think so either…

You can find more details on the AWS Blog or the Wikimedia Techblog.

Tags: Amazon Web Services, data mining, Wikipedia

MediaWiki Contributor

Posted by Strainu | Filed under PHP, Programming, Wikipedia

A while ago I submitted a patch to the New User Message extension of MediaWiki. The code was submitted in r51297, so I guess you could say I’m now a MediaWiki Contributor

Hopefully, pretty soon this extension will be activated on the Romanian Wikipedia.

Tags: contributor, mediawiki, My Projects, PHP, Software, Wikipedia

Just bragging…

Posted by Strainu | Filed under Open Source, Personal, Wikipedia

I haven’t written anything on the blog in a while, so I thought it’s time to brag a little about the latest developments

I’ve been to eLiberatica to meet people from other open-source communities. It’s been a nice experience, that you can read and see pictures about it here (in Romanian). Things are actually going pretty well with the openSUSE community. I’m going to the openSUSE conference in September, and Alex will probably come too.

On a more personal note, the last 4 months of running are beginning to show, and I’m confident that I’ll be ready to run 8 km at Tusnad Marathon.

The rest of my life isn’t going that well though. I want to post some weekend trips to the site, as well as some new (or rather old) code, but between school and work, I just don’t find the time for it. I’m also looking for some summer holiday ideas, but it seems my friend group has pretty much split apart.

I’m going through a wiki-phase, characterized by the despair of writing for the 20-30 people who participate on ro.wp actively. Therefore, I’ve decided to take a break, read their blogs and see what happens.

Anyway, I haven’t given up on any of these issues yet, so I’ll eventually write those posts and go back to Wikipedia.

Tags: bragging, opensuse, Personal, plans, updates

Wikipedia Română cu diacritice corecte

Posted by Strainu | Filed under JavaScript, Romana, Wikipedia

Începând de astăzi, utilizatorii Wikipediei în limba română care utilizează Linux, Windows Vista sau au ultimele actualizări de fonturi de la Microsoft pot vizualiza articolele folosind diacriticele corecte (cu virgulă, nu cu sedilă).

Pentru a realiza acest lucru, mergeÈ›i în pagina de preferinÅ£e, tabul Gadgeturi È™i bifaÈ›i opÈ›iunea numită “Diacritice corecte”. Trebuie să aveÈ›i activat È™i Javascript.

Scriptul are și unele limitări, cauzate de performanța sistemului. Pentru a reduce durata de încărcare a paginii, nu sunt transformate decât diacriticele din articol, nu și din interfață. De asemenea, sunt ignorate literele din formulare (formularul de editare a paginilor, inclusiv legăturile de sub el şi formularul de căutare), paginile conținând javascript și paginile speciale.

Pentru cuvintele în turcă, care TREBUIE să conţină litera Ş (S cu sedilă), am pus la punct un mecanism de ignorare a acestor cuvinte. Pentru amănunte, vizitați pagina aceasta.

Sursa programului este disponibilă la diacritice.js.

Tags: diacritice, JavaScript, My Projects, Programming, Wikipedia

QuickTemplate

Posted by Strainu | Filed under JavaScript, Software, Wikipedia

QuickTemplate is a JavaScript script that can be used by Wikipedia users to add several new links under the edit window, so you can quickly add useful templates. The script allows the user to configure different parameters. You can show the following templates:

• image copyrights;
• maintenance templates;
• delete templates;
• disputes;
• messages.

(more…)

Tags: JavaScript, Software, Wikipedia