Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-09-13/Technology report

Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Google Summer of Code: Sanyam Goyal

We continue a series of articles about this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) with Indian student Sanyam Goyal, who describes his attempt to overhaul the JavaScript component of the "Semantic" series of extensions, along with the core product itself, the "Semantic MediaWiki" extension. The extensions aim to realise the goals of the Semantic Web, where meaning is overlaid on top of content, allowing machines to more easily interpret it, but have not yet been approved for use on Wikimedia projects. Whilst somewhat controversial, the idea of a Semantic Web is considered by some including Tim Berners-Lee to be the future of the Web.


In brief

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

  • It is now impossible to commit changes to the Wikimedia/MediaWiki SVN repository without providing a description on those changes (bug #25025).
  • The Wikimedia "Office IT" team, responsible for "things like fixing the printers, getting new workstations online, as well as just making sure the internet stays up", have begun to blog on the Wikimedia Techblog.
  • Alolita Sharma, Features Engineering Program Manager for the Wikimedia Foundation has confirmed the transition of the remaining 689 mostly smaller wikis to the new "Vector" skin (Wikimedia techblog).