TheDJ writes

Do you recognize these boxes ? Most likely you do. These are the very recognizable "amboxes", which is a short for " Article message boxes ". They are often visible at the top of articles in English Wikipedia and one of the most recognizable elements of those articles. Today I noticed that these boxes are now just over 5 years (and a month) old. They were first introduced to the general public starting from September 2007 . Their features are in short; a single consistent design, color coded for severity and purpose, dynamic but consistent in width (stackable), IE 5.5 and IE 6.0 compatible and a consistent parameter setup for its content. And that is a big deal, because I still remember what it looked like before when it had none of that. There were dozens of templates with different widths, different colors, different spacing and they all had different parameters. [I've been trying to find an image from back then, but I haven't been able to find one.

As most people know, Wikipedia usually runs the bleeding edge code of MediaWiki. Currently new versions are deployed every 2 weeks. This is great, necessary and sometimes annoying for Wikipedians. There is a common complaint that MediaWiki treats Wikipedia as it's experimentation grounds. On the other hand MediaWiki is overly focused on Wikipedia. Without Wikipedia, I think that the default MediaWiki would look a lot more like Wikia than like Wikipedia. In my opinion, if MediaWiki treats Wikipedia as it's sandbox then it does so because the only sandbox that compares to Wikipedia is Wikipedia itself. There ARE no other viable experimentation grounds that compare to the distorted reality of Wikipedia. So how bleeding edge is bleeding edge? Code is deployed almost every 2 weeks, yet HTML5 has been the default for MediaWiki for over 3 years now , but has still not made it to Wikipedia for all sorts of compatibility reasons and accommodating to the volunteer tech community

Been a while since I wrote here. I wanted to discuss a great change that has come to MediaWiki , and it is the adaptation of  Git  and Gerrit  over our old Subversion system. It has been discussed at length already, but I wanted to discuss the actual switch process and what it meant for me as an individual. TLDR version: Little time, big switch, Gerrit needs lots of work, more coherent documentation needed and stay vigilant. Bad or Good cannot be stated yet. Where I'm coming from First of all, I should clarify that I already used Git quite a bit. We used it within  VideoLAN  and I use it myself almost on a daily basis as a wrapper around some of the Subversion repositories I use. So you could say that using it should not be too troublesome to me. I already know the commands and the principle ideas behind git and how they differ from other SCM systems . The only new addition is Gerrit... I have little time on my hands to work on Wikimedia and MediaWiki these days. 3 hours to

So you have this well known security issue called content sniffing in MS IE 6. No one really cares about that anymore right? Unfortunately, when you are a top 5 website, then you kinda have to care, since 3,46% of the readers of Wikipedia, so a whopping 13.88 million of the unique monthly visitors  still use Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. You try to fix this bug. Three times , causing three software releases ( 1.16.3 , 1.16.4 , 1.16.5 ) in 4 weeks. And then by accident, it becomes so strict that it breaks many of the requests for all Internet Explorer versions , simply because the url contains a dot. Sigh.... THIS is why you should help all your friends to get rid of IE6 .

Wikipedia birthday cakes during the celebrations  in Amsterdam (Derk-Jan Hartman, CC-BY-SA 3.0 ) So here we are... One day after the 10 year anniversary of Wikipedia and I think that I'm not the only Wikipedian who will testify that it has been a great couple of days. Lots of online friends meeting in real life at one of the 450 or so events , lots of very nice press attention for our once so humble project and just all out fun. Myself I participated in the first Dutch Hackathon . The day kicked of Friday 14th, at 10 in the morning in the offices of Kennisland in Amsterdam. Since I was working on friday, I joined in on the fun at around 18:30 during pizza-time. There were about 15 or so developers as well as a dozen or so Wikimedians and people from a Wikipedia editing workshop that took place during the day. They assisted in the brainstorming, provided feedback and were kind enough to drink beers with us :D Several projects had been selected in advance and a great deal

Last year saw the launch of book printing for Wikipedia articles. A very nice feature that allows you to create a collection of articles and print them as a book. Since yesterday you can even get hardcovers . There is also a wonderful "Print to PDF" feature that piggybacks on the book rendering technology. Printing webpages has long intrigued me and the results have always been suboptimal, especially with something as complex as Wikipedia articles. However, the web is moving forward and the printing options for the web are getting better with every browser release. The past few days I was revisiting this issue and I have now added some new CSS to the print stylesheet of MediaWiki which should help browsers detect proper spots to insert pagebreaks and more importantly, where to avoid them. Before pagebreak CSS After pagebreak CSS When your browser supports it, it will try to avoid pagebreaks in images, wikitables and right after headers. It will also try to avoid lo

For the past few weeks, I have been fixing problems that I run into while testing some of the new video tools that Michael Dale has been developing for the Wikimedia Foundation. As with any new software, especially Javascript tools, there are plenty of issues and since I can find them, I might as well fix some of them, instead of throwing it all back at Michael. This week I ran into one particular annoying issue. For some reason the menu in the new mwEmbed mediaplayer ( Demo of the player ) was flickering under certain conditions on Safari. I created a video that demonstrates the problem. So I was looking trough the code of the player, trying to come up with a reason on why this would behave like this and why only in Safari. I spent a few hours tracking all the events, assuming that some event (like mouseover) for some reason was incorrectly telling the menu to hide itself. I was validated in this line of thought by observing that manipulating some of the Javascript events of th

I have been filing and maintaining bug reports in MediaWiki for a while now, trying to communicate issues found by the editor community back to the developer community. Over time, increasingly I have been submitting patches to fix some of the bugs that I find. I never really had the intention to become a MediaWiki developer to be honest, but I guess I filed enough patches that people suggested to me that I should request commit access myself. So last week I sent off an email to Tim Starling and last night I was granted commit access to MediaWiki. I'll be taking this slow, because much of what interests me (the media and file repository work) is unfortunately not well tested on a day to day basis by others, while still able to create quite the havoc if you make mistakes. In other news, I also recently became an administrator on Wikimedia Commons . I'm reasonably active on Commons due to image moves from Wikipedia to Commons and recently I fixed up Cat-a-lot , which is a v

Wikipedia has developed this nice tradition that on April Fools' Day , content on the Main Page should be TRUE and link to actual encyclopedic articles, instead of being simple jokes. So today's Featured article , is on Wife selling  and although the practice might come across as unbelievable, awkward and unrealistic, it is all part of our history. The Topics in the news  are all recent news events, though not of the usual importance and the wording is more playful than on other days. Similarly,  Did you know  contains not a single lie. Lastly the Picture of the day , featuring a picture of a "GET FAT" advertisement campaign as a secret to beauty. Unthinkable perhaps in current times, but very real in 1895. Just cliches, obfuscation and wordplay are used to trick the reader into making assumptions, that though understandable, are simply incorrect. The page is probably one of the most carefully prepared main pages of the entire year. All selections have to adhere t

The Wikipedia Usability Initiative is finally making good progress on their template folding and template editor. Much of what the project has been doing with the edit screen has been in preparation of this work. The editor now folds complicated templates into a small block. One of the sandboxes the project uses now has the code deployed and it seems to be working quite well. Be aware that this is a development platform, and that browser peculiarities might not be fully dealt with yet. It is also NOT final. The wiki editor with folded templates. You can unfold the block, by clicking on the arrow to show the template code, or you can click the block and you are presented with a template editor that makes it easier to change the values of the template. This should be very helpful, because research showed that much of the trouble people had with editing Wikipedia, was the complex code on the edit pages. The template code is by far the most obscure and complicated code of all our wik

This week at SXSW (South by Southwest Conferences & Festivals), the Open Video Alliance presented a new campaign and portal for video on Wikipedia . The project is called "Let's get video on Wikipedia" and available at http://www.videoonwikipedia.org . The goal is to make it easier and more understandable how to upload video for usage in Wikipedia and is made possible by the Open Video Alliance , the Wikimedia Foundation , Kaltura , Miro and Mozilla Drumbeat . (Blog and press releases: Open Video Alliance , Miro , Wikimedia Foundation ) In some ways this project resembles a bit Wikiportrait , a project to help people upload their own portrait photo for usage in Wikipedia articles. Video On Wikipedia tells you what steps you need to take in order to create and upload a video for usage on Wikipedia. It also attempts to explain why uploading video for Wikipedia is different from uploading to most other places, a good bit of evangelism for Free and Open formats for

Michael Dale has been working hard on a new media player for the mediawiki projects. This media player is based on the HTML 5 <video> tag . You can compare it to the demo players of Youtube and Vimeo and DailyMotion . It should support Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome 3, Opera 10.5 and if you install the Xiph QuickTime components it works with Safari 4 for the Mac. If your browser doesn't support HTML5, the player will use the JAVA cortado player , like it does in the old version of the Ogg player. Recently both Apple and Firefox introduced Fullscreen support for the <video> tag in their development versions of the browsers, and these features can now be used with the new player for Wikimedia. The controls automatically show and hide, and you can even add and display subtitles with it. How do I test it ? It is rather easy, you go to this example video . If you want to enable it for all videos, you need to be registered on Wikimedia Commons or the English Wikipedia . You

As some may know, I have been working a lot on Wikimedia Mobile as of late. It's interesting to work on this software, because it has to support so many devices, languages and wiki's. So far the project hasn't been to good at informing the various Wikipedia communities, on how they can participate in making the mobile version of their community's Wikipedia. I have now started a draft of how to translate the software, create a mobile home page and how to do the redirects for supported mobile devices. When I have refined the information, I will probably move it to meta . If you have a better idea, please let me know. Also, take a look at the documentation for readers .

I have tried it many times before, but I guess you have to persist. I find blogging difficult. I often spend too long on writing it and don't post often enough. Twitter is more my thing, because it is just short blurps. Still lately I have found that Twitter is not enough. I have ideas and comments that I feel I need to write down in more than 140 characters and many of them have to do with Wikipedia. So I'll attempt it one more time. Topics will mostly be Wikipedia, online rights and software development, but other issues might come up. Welcome everyone.