Note: If there is anyone reading this who knows about how many public
access keyboards we plan for the Maker Faire booth this year, please
let me know. Stephen: I really need your help with the bylaws as soon
as possible and bookmark handouts later in the week. I also want to
encourage all the GSoC student applicants who weren't accepted to
apply for a self-study grant at
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Special:AddData/Grant_Application to
do the work you proposed over the summer. For the benefit of the
chapter, I have included a list of some of the proposed software
projects below. Thank you!
Johan, it's possible that less than half the Foundation engineers knew
squid logs are aggregated on the toolserver. You and Laszlo (and
possibly other student volunteers) are both way ahead of schedule,
even though you weren't accepted into the program. This should not be
a problem because I will see that you are reimbursed for your good and
helpful effort. According to the instructions on Meta and from the
Foundation, the correct way to do that is to form a chapter, so that's
what I'm working on. That and handouts for Maker Faire, which may or
may not have keyboards and displays this year.
Good news, Meadowlark was accepted into Berkeley, and he might need to
take a transfer-in class over the summer, so that means I'm going to
try to do his project. If you or Laszlo as non-monoglots can help and
check my and Meadowlark's work, that would help a lot.
My first question is how do you feel about the plan: How do you feel
about modifying the Mediawiki Quiz extension --
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Quiz -- with regular
expressions upon reading from a Gift: namespace (do you recommend
using the ArticleViewHook hook?) to turn things like...
:: Question 2
:: What's between orange and green in the spectrum?
{=yellow # correct! ~red # wrong, it's yellow ~blue # wrong, it's yellow}
...into...
{'''Question 2''': What's between orange and green in the
spectrum?
|type="()"}
+ yellow
|| correct!
- red
|| wrong, it's yellow
- blue
|| wrong, it's yellow
}
...in the default namespace for quizzes? I've been looking through
things like...
http://www.php.net/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.modifiers.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.syntax.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/pcre.examples.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.pcre.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php
... so I realize the properties of the task require me to offer it to
a non-monoglot such as yourself if you want to attempt it.
Bad news, I didn't get in under the deadline yesterday for adding all
of the subcategory criteria in
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_California/projects#Budget_br…
(it and the following sections like success criteria have comments)
for the things on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_California/projects
Good news, we can also apply to fund those projects though
applications at
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Special:AddData/Grant_Application
So I have four action items now: GIFT conversion (unless Johan or
Laszlo or someone else wants it), bylaws for wikiBusinessMeetings
(Stephen promised to help with the bylaws), grant application success
criteria, and MakerFairePedia handout instructions and forms (Stephen
was going to help copy the bookmark handouts on cardstock and slice
them up at Fedex Kinkos.) Since you're way ahead of schedule even
though you weren't accepted, if you could help with GIFT conversion
now that would be awesome, and I will do what it takes to make sure
you get recognition and rewarded.
Best regards,
James Salsman
On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 5:53 AM, Johan Gunnarsson
<johan.gunnarsson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Interesting to hear. Did they elaborate exactly what
part they
believed was "impossible"?
Speaking of Wikitrends, I'm test running the new version on toolserver
now. It does monthly and weekly trends too (which imo are far more
interesting.) The total input size 400-500GB uncompressed, but thanks
to some clever filtering and caching a single update takes less than 5
minutes.
Link:
http://toolserver.org/~johang/wikitrends/english-uptrends-this-week.html
Feel free to spread the link around.
On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 18:29, James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I have asked the Chapters Committee, for those
Chapters who are
membership organizations, whether they are open to members beyond
the geographical designation of the Chapter -- I believe the Chapters
Agreement and process documents indicate that they must be.
On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 5:14 PM, Johan Gunnarsson
<johan.gunnarsson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Sorry for the late reply. Dunno really what this (I don't live in
California?) is but I want to say that I'm still interested in my
project (Popular related articles) but I'm busy atm.
Johan, on a personal note, your case was particularly disturbing to me
during the Google Summer of Code selection process, because multiple
mentors said that what you have already accomplished -- with
WikiTrends at
http://users.student.lth.se/dt05jg2/wikitrends/en/24h.html
for example -- was impossible, or harder than you could possibly
realize. You were clearly scored lower than you should have been
because of this mistake. Oddly, three members of the Foundation's
engineering and technical staff repeated the same mistake at a talk
they gave at Xerox PARC last week. I will do what it takes to see
that this mistake is corrected.
Best regards,
James Salsman
--- example proposed California Chapter development tasks ---
http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/student_proposal/review/google/gsoc2010/mac…
study and implement co-process communication between Mediawiki and
RTMP server (microphone audio upload from flash)
Why it's likely to succeed: Maciej is a Red5 expert (I found him on
the Red5 mailing list) and within a day took the time to understand
the basics of the Mediawiki file upload API. He's capable with both
Red5 (Java) and rtmpd (C++) Flash servers, and without prompting
immediately understood the details about gathering the upload from a
PHP Mediawiki hook, converting it to ogg vorbis, and sending it to
Mediawiki. I doubt this will amount to a lot of work.
Why it's worth it: This would be the first Mediawiki extension with a
co-process, and it's likely to be useful to figure out the right way
to bundle that while the work on the extension manager is still going
on. Plus, it will enable easy pronunciation uploads for all of the
Wiktionaries, some of which could really use it. That's a direct user
and editor advantage. Did you know that en.wiktionary has audio for
"Hola" but es.wiktionary does not?
http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/student_proposal/review/google/gsoc2010/dee…
"GIFT Conversion" (for Quiz extension)
full version:
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2010_Proposal:_GIFT_Co…
Why it's likely to succeed: I've already met with Meadowlark twice in
person and several times online, discussing the architecture in
detail. He's an accomplished programmer, and while he's new to PHP,
he understands exactly what needs to be done and is highly motivated
and committed to accomplishing it. He's picked the minimum effort
necessary to enable Quiz extension service of GIFT quizzes, which can
be
Why it's worth it: 98% of the Creative Commons-licensed quiz content
from UK's Open University, which represents 5,000 hours of coursework,
can be exported as GIFT multiple choice questions and used directly in
Wikiversity content. What other effort could provide as much
legitimacy and utility to Wikiversity?
http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/student_proposal/review/google/gsoc2010/lko…
Releasing WikipediaVision as an open source package and further
visualization and data mining ideas
Why it's likely to succeed: The initial part of this effort is
already done, but unfortunately I think people got an impression that
it was only releasing existing work before Laszlo had a chance to
flesh out the proposal with the other aspects he included, involving
automated vandalism flagging (within the existing Abuse Filter/Edit
Filter framework) and other visualizations. Laszlo is a very advanced
PHP programmer who has already proven that he can make useful
Mediawiki extensions and it would be a shame to waste his talent.
Why it's worth it: The initial release of WikipediaVision has the
potential to be a decent tool, and with the proposed enhancement's I
suspect it would be a valuable anti-vandal (and vandal-fighter
recruitment) tool. The other projects Laszlo proposes stand on their
own merit and I urge people, especially those of you who might have
dismissed it early on, to read all of the investigations and efforts
which Laszlo has since proposed.
http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/student_proposal/review/google/gsoc2010/joh…
Most popular related articles
full version:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Johang/Most_popular_related_articles
Why it's likely to succeed: Johan has already been a Mediawiki GSoC
student, so he has that experience. He's also the author of
"Wikitrends" --
http://users.student.lth.se/dt05jg2/wikitrends/en/24h.html -- so in
fact he has already done the main part of the work of agregating the
squid logs. I am sure that those of you who ranked this down saying
it was too large of an undertaking must have missed that. Could there
be anyone more qualified for this project than the author of
Wikitrends who is already doing the statistical work involved? The
only remaining portion is to make a transcludable list of related
articles for each article's sidebar, and that only involves choosing
between several existing related article generation algorithms, and
simply sorting them by their tally in Johan's existing statistics
tables.
Why it's worth it: The motivation for this extension is this graph
from the strategy group's surveys:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:091207_QOTW.png -- Adding this
simple statistical information to the sidebar should help contributors
with those two largest hurdles shown in that graph.
http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/student_proposal/review/google/gsoc2010/cvi…
Confidence Assessment within Computer Adaptative Learning Environment
full version:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Cam_Vilay/Proposal
Why it's likely to succeed: This is a simple user experience protocol
analysis study. The only coding involved is making different mock-ups
of the various ways learner adaptivity in the Quiz extension could
measure the confidence of learner responses. The main effort is
videotaping kids and beginners to see how they react to the various
choices.
Why it's worth it: How many extensions to we have that provide a
valuable feature but aren't used because they aren't well designed? I
think it's important to show that we're capable of doing a bona fide
user experience evaluation for the kind of further enhancement of the
Quiz extension which would help make all that additional quiz content
in Wikiversity more useful.