User talk:Mglaser

Hi this is Jesse - please drop a line re: MW RSS extension. I'm working on a screen-scraper approach for generating feeds. Jdz 00:31, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Friendly reminder: 1/13 @ 19:00 UTC - MediaWiki Workshop: Preparing extensions for MW 1.19 in #wikimedia-dev
Thank you for your interest in the MediaWiki Workshop, Preparing extensions for MediaWiki 1.19!

As a friendly reminder, the workshop is being held being held in about 12 hours - 13 January, 2012 at 19:00 UTC - in IRC (#wikimedia-dev).

This workshop will be an opportunity to share information about changes in MediaWiki 1.19 that may require revisions to extensions or skins. Also an opportunity for developers to ask questions regarding extension development.

Look forward to seeing you in IRC. :) --Varnent 06:20, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Usurpation request / SUL unification
I certify I made the ursupation request on en:Wikipedia:Changing_username/Usurpations. Thanks for your help! --Mglaser (talk) 09:21, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

GSoC 2014 Talk
I have submitted my proposal for Catalogue for MediaWiki extensionsfor GSoC 2014. Need to talk to you about the project. Please tell me how can i contact you.--mecyborg (talk) 5:30, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Wikimania Submission Acceptance
On behalf of the Wikimania 2014 program committee, I am very pleased to inform you that you that your Wikimania submission "How about a MediaWiki Consortium?" has been accepted PENDING CONFIRMATION OF ATTENDANCE.

Please reply promptly to wikimania2014programme@undefinedgmail.com quoting this message to accept and confirm your attendance by Thursday, 5 June or your submission will be considered withdrawn.

We have reserved a 30 minute slot beginning at 15:30 on Sunday, 10 August for your session. You'll have access to an internet-enabled terminal, a projector, and a microphone; if you need additional support, please let us know. You can bring your own laptop, or share the slides with us ahead of time.

By agreeing to present during Wikimania 2014, you agree that video recordings may be made of your presentation by The Wikimedia Foundation or the organisers. You hereby give permissions for those recordings and any associated presentation materials, including slides, to be broadcast live, recorded, made available for later download, or otherwise redistributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 or a compatible license. If you object to any part of these requirements (for instance, if you would prefer not to be recorded), please let us know before accepting this offer.

We look forward to your reply and hope to see you in London!

Sincerely,

Edward Saperia, Chief Coordinator Wikimania London

Hi
I read your Wikimania page. I would like to suggest that you use if not already: I could not find you in there. The channel would make use of extra support from knowledgeable people, from what I could see.

On a related note, I believe Wikimedia Foundation is interested in third parties — unlike what you are saying in your presentation abstract at Wikimania. A part of this interest is their desire to develop new extensions by Wikimedia Engineering. These extensions are undergo code review, and some of them become built into mediawiki. They feel that such extensions are easy to install. Some of their such thoughts can be seen here: they say


 * [By writing UploadWizard in wiki markup,] we would lose a lot of the benefits we get from having UploadWizard be an extension: It gets proper code review, it can be configured (and the configuration also gets code review), it can be distributed to third party sites, and so on.

During this process, they also manage to, in my personal view, fail to meet the needs of Wikimedia projects themselves. This is caused by, at least, these issues.
 * They do the decision-making and don't ask community what it wants. What it does in fact need is universal means of easing routine work. The software should be easily scriptable by end users, and this should be doable by means other than manually editing a file with importScript lines (which lack information about maintainer, a description, or a link to documentation).
 * The gadgets tab is half-way there. But everyone should be able to make them. Sysops should be actively making them.
 * Gadget kitchen should be more systemized and localised.
 * Some feel that wiki markup should be more flexible and should allow JavaScript-y things: n:Help:Wndialog. This would allow interactive wizard kind of things on-wiki without resorting to extensions.
 * Unregisterd contributors’ life is getting harder with each step of the Engineering team, but they are the majority of contributing force. I had written an essay at Meta about this, and helpful people added some more things I didn't even know about: Musings about unregistered contributors.

--Gryllida 11:20, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi Gryllida, thanks for sharing your thoughts. A few remarks and answers:
 * I do not think (and did not mean to state) the Foundation is not interested in 3rd parties. It's just that their focus is not on 3rd party use. As they do have sparse ressources, this naturally leads to less attention to 3rd party issues.
 * As the recent discussions about MediaViewer have shown, there's a big issue we need to tackle. That is: moving code that is meant to be essential to the user experience from the scope of site developers to the scope of site admins. While this gives more power to the admins, it also means more responsibility for them. As you have pointed out, this is putting decision making about site behavior on a new level. In 3rd party wikis, this question makes a big difference: how much of the site customisation can be done on-wiki, without permission to access the server scripts (which usually means involving the IT department)? I feel that MediaWiki, with its Common.js and other js articles, is quite unique among other software in empowering site admins. Now, on Wikimedia sites, we can and must find good policies that can serve as a role model for 3rd parties. Having said that, I do not have a solution ready :/
 * re:Javascript-y things. Do you feel that Lua is a way to resolve this?
 * re:Unregistered contributors. I like the essay and the issues you pointed out are very vaild. However, I tend to think these are not major issues in most 3rd party wikis, as they run in corporate or otherwise closed shop contexts which require log in anyways.
 * In case you are interested in helping 3rd parties, you could have a look at MediaWiki User Group Wiki Co-op. I am very interested in your thougts! --Mglaser (talk) 22:53, 15 August 2014 (UTC)