All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXX

[robkelk]

Anybody know who maintains the Babel extension? I want to file a bug report about it - userboxes are being created with consistent Lint Errors.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Babel

It's a Wikimedia maintained extension, so reporting bugs should be done here:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniph...ions-Babel

Thanks, Geth.

It isn't a holiday here today, so the bug report will have to wait until the weekend.

[robkelk]

Why is Agent Isai asking whether somebody has donated enough to Miraheze to "cover a salary" (direct quote)?

Note that this came from Agent Isai, who still carries a lot of weight among the userbase as a former Director. It did not come from Reception123, NotAracham, Harej, Universal Omega, or Labster, the current Directors.

I wouldn't have even noticed the comment if I hadn't been visiting Meta in order to look at the fundraiser page.

I'm thinking that if it's now Miraheze's policy to link promptness of service with size of donations, then it's to our benefit to pass the hat, make a single donation identified as coming from All The Tropes, and donate a lot. That, or spend the money on self-hosting. If Miraheze's policy has not changed, then never mind.

(Oh, yeah - the banner for the annual fundraiser just popped up on Meta and KanriKyara. It's only a matter of time before it shows up on ATT.)

[robkelk]

Anybody know who maintains the Babel extension? I want to file a bug report about it - userboxes are being created with consistent Lint Errors.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Babel

It's a Wikimedia maintained extension, so reporting bugs should be done here:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniph...ions-Babel

Thanks, Geth.

It isn't a holiday here today, so the bug report will have to wait until the weekend.

I've filed WikiMedia Phabricator task T381209 about this.

Assuming it gets fixed, do we need to ask Miraheze to update our copy of the extension, or do we need to update it ourselves?

[MilkmanConspiracy]

Why is Agent Isai asking whether somebody has donated enough to Miraheze to "cover a salary" (direct quote)?

Note that this came from Agent Isai, who still carries a lot of weight among the userbase as a former Director. It did not come from Reception123, NotAracham, Harej, Universal Omega, or Labster, the current Directors.

I wouldn't have even noticed the comment if I hadn't been visiting Meta in order to look at the fundraiser page.

I'm thinking that if it's now Miraheze's policy to link promptness of service with size of donations, then it's to our benefit to pass the hat, make a single donation identified as coming from All The Tropes, and donate a lot. That, or spend the money on self-hosting. If Miraheze's policy has not changed, then never mind.

(Oh, yeah - the banner for the annual fundraiser just popped up on Meta and KanriKyara. It's only a matter of time before it shows up on ATT.)

Shoot, I donated a tenner earlier today. I’d be willing to donate again of course

[robkelk]

Shoot, I donated a tenner earlier today. I’d be willing to donate again of course

No worries. Labster's already pointed out that Agent Isai wasn't speaking for Miraheze when he made that comment.

[Labster]

Agent Isai launched the fundraiser without consulting the board, so there is not a fundraiser started.  I would encourage that, in the future, you consider his comments to not represent Miraheze or WikiTide unless confirmed by a secondary, reliable source.  Unfortunately, that source does not include global site announcements, which are apparently now suspect as well. <grumble>

Also WMF want a link to a lint error, so link a page on ATT to demonstrate it.

[robkelk]

Agent Isai launched the fundraiser without consulting the board, so there is not a fundraiser started.  I would encourage that, in the future, you consider his comments to not represent Miraheze or WikiTide unless confirmed by a secondary, reliable source.  Unfortunately, that source does not include global site announcements, which are apparently now suspect as well. <grumble>

Joy. I assume he needs the rights to issue global site notices...?

Also WMF want a link to a lint error, so link a page on ATT to demonstrate it.

Thanks. I've passed them three examples in three different languages, one of which is written right-to-left instead of left-to-right.

[GethN7]

Anybody know who maintains the Babel extension? I want to file a bug report about it - userboxes are being created with consistent Lint Errors.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Babel

It's a Wikimedia maintained extension, so reporting bugs should be done here:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniph...ions-Babel

Thanks, Geth.

It isn't a holiday here today, so the bug report will have to wait until the weekend.

I've filed WikiMedia Phabricator task T381209 about this.

Assuming it gets fixed, do we need to ask Miraheze to update our copy of the extension, or do we need to update it ourselves?

Babel is continuously updated, any updates to the master will be checked daily and added to the backend on all wikis that use that extension.

[robkelk]

the links to the templates above are old templates that Babylon should replace. You can see the plan on how to implement this: T228598

If I'm reading T228598 correctly, we'll still need to remove the existing user language templates after this is implemented.

[Bob Schroeck]

<sigh> ATT (and the KanriKyara wiki) briefly disappeared about an hour ago, and when it came back, search was (partially) broken. Progressive search no longer functions, nor do link suggestions while editing.

EDIT: No sooner do I post that than progressive search suddenly reappears. I am torn between gratitude and annoyance.

[GethN7]

<sigh>  ATT (and the KanriKyara wiki) briefly disappeared about an hour ago, and when it came back, search was (partially) broken.  Progressive search no longer functions, nor do link suggestions while editing.

EDIT:  No sooner do I post that than progressive search suddenly reappears.  I am torn between gratitude and annoyance.

One of the problems we have when it comes to MediaWiki, and indeed all wiki software, so another would not necessarily be an improvement, is that we are at the whims of not our hosting, but the updates they pull from extension developers. Many of our most crucial extensions are also used by the Wikimedia Foundation, and they are set to the continuous update model, as they are constantly being refined and improved on because they keep discovering all sorts of edge case bugs due to their high usage and thus constantly getting updated nigh daily. The knock-on effect of these always being bleeding edge is we are also at the mercy of any issues. Ergo, if Wikipedia has a cold, ATT will start to sneeze until they pass out the sinus medicine, which we will get secondhand since our updates descend from their testing.

That said, MediaWiki is always going to be the most reliable wiki engine out there if only because the WMF is bent on ensuring the least downtime possible and have the staff and scale to push out fixes the fastest. I've used others like DokuWiki and *shudder* PmWiki, and they are far worse.

[Bob Schroeck]

Well, last I heard, PMWiki's developer wrote it off years ago as obsolete and unfit for use, so god knows who if anyone is actually supporting it outside of TVT's in-house team.

Anyway, I suppose I should be grateful that most problems seem to quickly resolve themselves. I was just in a bad mood yesterday for various reasons and feeling irritable especially since I was in the middle of an edit when the whole thing happened.

[Labster]

PmWiki's original developer has been retired for over 10 years and pretty much not programming these days.  It's had the same maintainer for like 15 years though, and is still getting regular releases.  The last I saw it so many years ago (I have never visited TVT since the year we forked), TVT had significantly diverged from upstream that I'd consider it a different wiki software by then.

Most of our extensions are not on continuous updates, but on versioned branches, which means that someone has taken the time to backport a new feature off the development branch; in Gerrit, the development branch runs MW 1.43, which hasn't been released yet.  Some of them are set to pull from a master branch when an appropriate version branch isn't available, but I believe that none of this is fully automatic, someone has to run the command to update extensions.

I guess the thing is that Miraheze has, from its beginning, decided to be on the bleading edge.  Probably because it was founded by developers who like doing this kind of stuff.  I've wondered if it would be a better idea to stick to the long-term support releases, which update every two years or so.  People say that it would just be 4x the work at one time if we switched to this schedule, rather than doing 4 incremental updates, but I'm not sure about that.

But I don't think the updates have anything to do with downtime, honestly.  It's either not enough servers, or inexperienced volunteers pushing the wrong button, and mainly just lack of redundancy and lack of people paid to keep servers in tip-top shape.  Our just (re)launched fundraiser plans to increase our servers by 50%, which will help, for a little while anyway.

I also disagree that Mediawiki is the most reliable engine out there.  It's slow, it has some crazy extensions, and it has a lot layers like Varnish and ElasticSearch that can get out of sync.  I mean, it even runs a mysql variant! (which doesn't lose as much data as it used to, but still.) Nah, Mediawiki's strength is that it's powerful.  You can do crazy things like process external JSON into layers of semantic data templates, and it all mostly works.

[MilkmanConspiracy]

For what it’s worth, the idea of using Media Wiki as the software was something that attracted me as a Wikimedian.

That said, Instability is partly why I edit the way I do, piecemeal and frequently. This has more to do with my primary internet connection being quite unreliable for a while (before editing ATT) than server issues here, though I have certainly encountered that. The sting of loosing a paragraph or more of work is never fun, regardless of where or when it happens.

[Labster]

So long as you don't close the tab (or have a browser crash), you don't really lose the edit. You can resubmit later when it's online. Or you can open up the browser's developer tools, refresh/resend, inspect the POST request, and copy your data out. Admittedly the second one is not ideal but it always works.

[Bob Schroeck]

RE: "Ilovecake"

He's now On Notice. I didn't say anything about that state of affairs being permanent.

And he continues to use the wrong "Lilo & Stitch" link(s), assigning everything now to the movie instead of the redirect. It's time to act on that notice.

[robkelk]

RE:  "Ilovecake"

He's now On Notice. I didn't say anything about that state of affairs being permanent.

And he continues to use the wrong "Lilo & Stitch" link(s), assigning everything now to the movie instead of the redirect.  It's time to act on that notice.

That one's fair - we don't have a separate page for Leroy & Stitch yet.

This one, however, looks to me like a unilateral minor redefining of a trope. If it is, we can hit him with a tempban.

[MilkmanConspiracy]

Agreed, but for different reasons.

I think it’s fair to link to the movie page for that specific work since that’s currently the page that has lists the examples for the work in question due to multiple works being shoved in there before the import.

I don’t understand why they put it under Anime instead of film or western animation (As direct to tv animated movie). To me this is the most concerning if I’m not misunderstanding the work in question.

Edit: Rob pointed out the same regarding the works page, just saw after posting.

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, then, I withdraw the suggestion.

Regarding the change to "Light Feminine and Dark Feminine", though, there's definitely an intent to tweak the trope definition with the weasel word.

[MilkmanConspiracy]

There’s also a pending edit to The Unfettered that includes a change to the description. Content wise I don’t have a problem with it, but it was suspiciously similar to the TV tropes wording. I’m not sure if that’s just my own paranoia though.

[GethN7]

There’s also a pending edit to The Unfettered that includes a change to the description. Content wise I don’t have a problem with it, but it was suspiciously similar to the TV tropes wording. I’m not sure if that’s just my own paranoia though.

Considering this is a problem child we are dealing with, I say we regard everything with an Eye of Sauron and put the onus on them to prove otherwise.

[robkelk]

There’s also a pending edit to The Unfettered that includes a change to the description. Content wise I don’t have a problem with it, but it was suspiciously similar to the TV tropes wording. I’m not sure if that’s just my own paranoia though.

Considering this is a problem child we are dealing with, I say we regard everything with an Eye of Sauron and put the onus on them to prove otherwise.

Agreed. I'm already assuming based on past behaviour that he's a troll. Give this one zero benefit of the doubt.

[MilkmanConspiracy]

Rejected that edit. Noticed some similar phrasing again on Mistreatment Induced betrayal, but it is a common figure of speech.

[MilkmanConspiracy]

There’s also a pending edit to The Unfettered that includes a change to the description. Content wise I don’t have a problem with it, but it was suspiciously similar to the TV tropes wording. I’m not sure if that’s just my own paranoia though.

Considering this is a problem child we are dealing with, I say we regard everything with an Eye of Sauron and put the onus on them to prove otherwise.

Agreed. I'm already assuming based on past behaviour that he's a troll. Give this one zero benefit of the doubt.

Interestingly, one of their recent edits was on a piece of (What I hope is) fiction about an online troll bringing people to suicide. That’s not evidence of being a troll in and of itself, I wouldn’t advocate any administrative action solely on media analysis or consumption of something like that within the rules, but it’s something to consider alongside other factors.

[MilkmanConspiracy]

Can someone please provide input to the situation with user Weirdly Green? I initially rejected their edit because it was already on TV Tropes and the username didn’t match, but they claim to be the same person and pointed out that their edit on ATT 10:07 is before their TV Tropes edit (10:11:56). I’m not totally sure about some of the other things they’re saying, so I wanted to confirm first before going ahead and approving it. They also sent me a message about it on my user board page on ATT if that helps.