User:NeilK/Worklog/2011-02-22 to 2011-02-28

From mediawiki.org

Did not keep daily notes, here is just a summary:

- Continued to work on various UploadWizard issues, especially with Kaldari.

- Met with Mark Hershberger, Alolita Sharma, Ryan Kaldari re: bugmeister role, how this relates to WMF projects and those that aren't official products. MH was changing our blocker bug for UploadWizard 1.0 which we felt was a bit of an overreach.

MH asserts Rob Lanphier wants Bugmeister to essentially act as development manager for all the bugs, actively follow everything. (!!) Seems a bit impractical to me, instead Bugmeister should just attempt to ensure that issues aren't forgotten, not to manage their development. Setting aside that question, main question is how do we want Bugmeister to act with actively managed projects. No need for him to be "product manager", we have one. Chose to use Bugzilla assignment to some milestone to 'signal' whether bugs are being actively triaged. MH also suggested that he should take the Priority field as his own, across all bugs, to indicate how frequently the bugmeister should be checking in to see progress. Those of us working on UploadWizard think we are using Priority and Severity correctly, and want both, so Mark Hershberger said he may create a custom field for his own use.

- Got TrevorParscal to help with my issues with the Javascript PEG parser. He spotted the cause of the infinite loop bug. Pretty soon after that committed the library, although it is not yet hooked up to UploadWizard or RL. Worked on it in IE7 and now all tests are passing. Jasmine test suite is also looking good.

- Attended preso on Korean Wikipedia from visiting member RyuCh

- Researched Sitemaps, figured out what the status is on sitemaps in entire Wikimedia world. We have not done them for some time for a number of reasons. Meeting with Google Image Search representative on Monday, he is interested to get us on Sitemaps. However according to others in the know, Google has some custom thing (we don't know what) to crawl MediaWiki / Wikimedia (??) sites already, possibly using RecentChanges.

- Cataloged all bugs with UploadWizard to figure out how long it will take to get to 1.0 (people are understandably anxious to see it released). Estimate looks like 20 to 40 days. Large uncertainty at this moment because I spent a lot of time in Dec-Jan fixing underlying architectural issues without closing related bugs, and Kaldari is finding most assigned bugs to be already fixed before he even works on them. So many bugs may be zero effort. Also, I strongly suspect all "error" related bugs can be solved at once, but this may not be the case.

- Tried to do some blue-sky figuring about the whole new Product White Paper we have at the WMF, particularly with how that relates to Commons. MultiChil has interesting proposals re: Categories, which are a pet peeve of mine. Kaldari & I discussed tagging systems.

- Moved work logs to mediawiki.org. MZMcBride moved another page of mine here and that inspired me to move everything here, as most of it is related to MediaWiki development anyway.

- Did meeting with Google re: sitemaps, turned out to be a non-event. Nontechnical dude at Google just wants us to know about Sitemaps and their new extensions to the sitemaps protocol for images. These are good for us because the protocol now includes things like license, or geocoding. But we can't easily generate such a sitemap since such properties are only available by (expensively) parsing the wikitext. Perhaps should be tied to Roan & Krinkle's ideas about putting license and such in the database.

- triaged bugs again for UploadWizard 1.0. Eliminated just one (calendar day-of-week locale). However, it is a pretty important bug still.

- Mini-uproar on IRC when I tried to create milestones for UploadWizard 1.1, 1.2, and it was pointed out by MZMcBride, with some justification, that this isn't really done for any other project and every tracking bug generates multiple emails.

- Integrating new language library into UploadWizard for reals