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User:Pelagic/Journal/2020/05

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May 2020.

Sunday 31 (kinda)

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Still dark outside, so I can get away with calling it Sunday, not Monday. (06:08 Mon 01, AEST)

OMG, there was an update about the WMF rename at meta:Requests for comment/Should the Foundation call itself Wikipedia#May Update. A new project page is at meta:Communications/Wikimedia brands/2030 movement brand project (talk).

There's a meta:MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group.

I might have to start watchlisting on other projects.

Tuesday 26

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Ideas from MW

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MMiller makes the distinction between personalized and customized at mw:Talk:Growth/Personalized first day/Newcomer homepage#"My work" [1].

iPad keyboards and wikitext

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English keyboard changed somewhere around iOS 11 or 12. [These notes could possibly be developed into a full standalone user page.]

There are still 4 modes, which I’ll call lc, caps, num, extras. Getting from letters to extras takes two taps.

When you hit space bar, it takes you out of the current mode back to lc. This is a royal pain if you have a sequence of numbers and symbols to enter.

The new keyboard introduced a drag-down feature where you pull down on a key to access an alternate. From lc and caps, you can pull down to get get nums (including common symbols); from nums you can pull down to get extras. But I find the swipe down mechanism hard to activate at speed: I tend to flick the key and not pull it far enough. Also, it’s clunky for doubled symbols like [[ – is faster to quick double-tap.

symbol(s) used for old new comment
= headings extras nums moved from upper-right to bottom middle
* bullet list extras nums
/* section in edit summary different modes (num–ext) same mode (num) easier to type in new

Sunday 24

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Seaside photography

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Visited the coastline yesterday, over an hours' drive, for a small photo session. As luck would have it, spitting rain and high tide when I got there, so only animals from the high-littoral and splash zone were accessible.

Challenge with the SLR was that my stock zoom lenses don't focus very close and aren't good for small subjects. I could get much closer with an iPhone, but inspecting the photos after the fact discovered they are a lot less sharp. Dodging the periodic waves and placing tripod added to the fun.

In future, some kind of glass-bottom container (or a dive mask in a pinch) might help with reflections for underwater subjects. Or a linear polarising filter.

Next challenge is identifying the species. There wasn't a lot of variety in the narrow range of depth on this exposed shelf. I didn't photograph all these, but here's a list of the common ones seen at high water:

Blue periwinkle, with coin to show scale.
  • Austrolittorina unifasciata, called blue periwinkle though I'd maybe say mauve. These tiny shells are common around Sydney, occurring in the highest stratum. I sometimes wonder how they get by, with many out-of-water above the high-tide mark. Couldn't find in Sea Shells of NSW, but found name due to [2]. It's kind of satisfying that the AG article is illustrated with a photo from Commons, less so that the en-wp article doesn't include photos which show the colour well.
    • My shots are photographically no better than the the ones already in Commons, though I did take some alongside a 10¢ coin for scale: . I like the close view, sharp focus and shallow DoF of this c:File:Austrolittorina unifasciata 003.jpg. Museums Victoria has a couple of very good photos that are CC-BY [3].
  • Nerita melanotragus. [4] has N. atramentosa. "According to Wikipedia", the two were formerly considered conspecific, but the on the east coast would be N. melanotragus I noticed a lot of tiny juveniles in addition to the adults. Didn't bother with photos because this species is dead common, but we don't have any live shots on commons.
  • Austrocochlea porcata, the zebra top snail.
  • Tenguella marginalba, the mulberry whelk. Have been working on the taxonomy of these and their relatives. One of the reasons I made the trip.
  • Red waratah anemone, Actinia tenebrosa. Spotted one green anemone, but the red ones were common. The existing photo on that article is heaps better than what I could achieve.
  • Various limpets. Barnacles on more exposed rock faces. A species with striped conical shell that I haven't yet identified. Briefly spotted a small crab but a wave came in before I could snap it. Some neptune's necklace, Hormosira banksii, that stuff washes up everywhere.

Friday 22

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Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback currently has 35 sections and 6 replies. (07:35 Fri 22, AEST)

Thursday 21

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mw:VisualEditor/Feedback#Does VE munge white space?

Wednesday 20

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Comparing use of headings in discussion spaces

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@JKlein (WMF) Your phrase “more similar to email than comments” raises a thought that I'd like to unpack. I'm interested to know if it is something that your team has discussed?

It all depends which conventions you are used to:

  • Web forums almost always(?) have a subject/topic heading/title for a new post/OP/thread/topic/discussion in a category/board/discussion/topic. (“Topic” and other words are variable and overloaded, which makes it really hard to talk about the, ahem, topic in general terms. But that's a whole separate discussion.)

Usually the top post is a fairly plain question or observation with an unhelpful heading like “help needed”, but sometimes it could be a complete how-to, walkthrough or FAQ that has a different character from the plainer commentary posts that follow: compare news sites and blogs below. Apart from the heading, there's usually no software-enforced specialness about the top post, but social conventions attach to the OP (original post / original poster) within a thread.

  • On Twitter, at the other end of the spectrum, you just throw your 160 characters into the aether and hope The Algorithm shows it to somebody. Hashtags and at-mentions started as user conventions that were then turned into clickable search facets. Reply threading didn't really exist and there was definitely no concept of a coherent conversation to attach a heading or summary to.
  • News sites, blogs, YouTube have a separation between the main content and the comments. To what extent is The article/page definitely does have a subject heading (and by-line, date, etc.). Traditionally the comments appear ...

This is getting too long. I want to copy-paste what I've written to preserve it somewhere else, so that I can simplify this post and make it more readable. BUT I CAN'T COPY PASTE IN THIS GODDAM S.D. EDITOR ON AN IPAD! (In either visual or markup mode. IIRC, applies to Visual Editor also.) I'm going to have to commit this reply, then copy it, then come back and edit it. If you're reading this in the interim, hold off replying as this post will change.

(First save 06:33 Wed 20, AEST. Original post.)

Sunday 17

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Alt text

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The current WHATWG HTML Standard section 4.8.4 has guidance on using alt text when an image has a caption. In their case, it's HTML5+ figcaption, but the principle also applies to our [[File:|…|captions]]. Short answer: do provide a non-empty alt when a caption is present, even though the image might not require one if it was uncaptioned.

Lightbulbs

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Don't think I've seen Wikipedia:How many Wikipedians does it take to change a lightbulb? before. Of course there's a navbox Template:Wikipedia essays.

Wikipedia Library Card Platform

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meta:The Wikipedia Library/Building a Digital Library looks promising, until you realise the page hasn't been edited since 2017, and the talk page is a redlink. Did the things expected "within 6 months" ever eventuate?

Last year, Sam Walton wrote I’m happy to say that the more comprehensive solution to this problem is finally right around the corner! While the development on authentication-based access and the Library Bundle was unfortunately delayed for quite some time due to legal discussions, we’re now moving ahead with technical implementation and are currently scheduled to be up and running before the end of the year. (VPP at 18:19, 2 August).

Related links: https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org, WP:TWL, WP:RX, phab project …

I created an account via OAuth, but still not clear if the bundle is available. phab:T235262 would suggest not. The main paywalls I would butt into from the Apply list would be Elsevier (waitlisted), JStor (avail), and maybe Cambridge (waitlisted).

More: external articles from the newsletter

Saturday 16

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HTML spec

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From section 2.1.8 Conformance classes:

Authoring tools are exempt from the strict requirements of using elements only for their specified purpose, but only to the extent that authoring tools are not yet able to determine author intent. However, authoring tools must not automatically misuse elements or encourage their users to do so.

<dd> for indenting, anyone?

Wednesday 13

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Annotations

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I've been reading about W3C Annotations (data model, protocol, etc.). An unfortunate limitation is they require standalone Annotations service that hands out JSON-LD. It would be cool if you could embed annotation data using HTML+RDFa. Note that an explicit aim of the recommendations it to not require complicated RDF graphs or inference and query engines.

By coincidence, I just stumbled on T149667 Amazing Article Annotations (2016–2017). Wouldn't it be awesome if Wikimedia had an Annotations project akin to Wikidata? It's not just about storing the annotations, but also a UI for creating and displaying them.

Who would police that for slander and other inappropriate content? Where would you draw the line between genuine criticism, calling bullshit for what it is, versus outright attacks? Would each person own (and be responsible for) their note content, or would the wiki way be that notes are community-created? Would the service host note-content or just annotation links? Even if the latter, you could still cause mischief by mis-linking a comment to a target not intended by its author.

Would you start fresh, or build it on top of MediaWiki, utilising WikiBase, namespaces, discussions, revisions, etc.?

Compare web snipping programs like Copernic or Evernote, where you're also capturing a snapshot of the content. For MediaWiki sites, you already have a permanent revision to link to, but what about the general case? Could you have a Annotation object reference both the live version and the Internet Archive copy? Or would you have one note body and two Annotion links to the two targets?

(04:12 Wed 13, AEST)

Mon 11

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Talk Pages project

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User testing
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  • T239175 Conduct a control test of as-is reply workflow Dec–Feb. 2 iterations of 5 subjects each. (a) 4 desktop, 1 mobile; 2/5 ESL; not logged in, sparse talk page. (b) 5 desktop; 1 ESL; talk page with many existing comments.
    • Unsurprisingly, signing & indentation were problems, and subjects viewed the history page as a confusing jumble. Interestingly, the test found that subjects had trouble finding their reply after they had published it.
  • T245798 Conduct a control test of as-is reply workflow (mobile). Planned, no action yet.
  • T236921 Nov–Dec. 5 desktop users.
    • Language used by subjects to describe the new reply experience was positive, in contrast with the history page. Surprisingly, still "Several participants took several minutes to find their reply on the page", despite the reply-in-place.
    • Several were unpleasantly surprised at having their IP address revealed. This raises a good point: once this makes it to prod'n, will logged-out users get the big scary warning?
    • Difficulties with history page are partly connected with the subjects not being logged in. I wonder if the other revisions had a good smattering of usernames, or just a sea of IPs? (Scrolling down, I see Pp suggested having them log in for future tests.)
  • mw:Talk pages project/replying#Usability testing

les Cafés

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French Wikipedia's Avenue of cafés & bistros has a table of .

They also have a jargon page translation. Wonder if we have an equivalent?

Reading their Bistro through machine translation is like viewing our fora through a distorted mirror. Despite being separate communities, we have so much in common.

Sun 10

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MediaWiki improvement projects

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The more I check my notifications, the more I digress into these areas.

Indenting with definition lists is evil

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Tue 5

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Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 180#New traffic report: Daily article pageviews from social media

Talk Pages

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Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 180#Parsoid's effects on talk pages post by WAID 10 Apr.

Dark themes

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Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 180#Excessive use of style attributes makes custom theme changes (e.g. dark theme) difficult-to-impossible 24 Mar.

Monday 4

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Zen Garden

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Is now live and linked from my sig.

Ideas:

  • René Magritte (page) is not René Magritte (Wikidata item), with pipe.
    • (update 06:28 Thu 14) Dammit, he died in 1967; the painting is unfree for another 17 years in countries that follow the Mickey Mouse law.
  • Blank page with just shortdesc "white space, raked pebbles".
  • Leonardo is not Michelangelo, with RDFa sameas assertion (lie).
  • Barbie knows Ken RDFa / FOAF claim, with photos as the visible content. Maybe "+" sign for knows, or to link to an RDF processor.
  • One hand clapping we will rock you.
  • Something about Isidore Ducasse?
  • Mu? Moo!
    • 💬 🐂
    • μ that makes moo or mew sound when clicked.
    • Seussy 1 mu, 2 moo, mew μ, moo μ; trout link to one fish two fish
  • Symbols: [5] ࿋

Approach: vary short descriptions; edit summary is title, same at commentary; vary display at Z; vary symbol/emoji in sig (for season or special occasion rather than target content, as sigs are subst'd); commentary permalinks to first occurrence, might rotate content back in.

(05:01 Tue 05, AEST / 19:01 Mon 04, UTC)

Echo chamber a.k.a. notifications overload

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I now have 44 notifications taunting me from the top of the page. I'm slightly afraid to click the icons to find out... (05:09 Mon 04, AEST)

Extended content

Details

  • Alerts
    • 2 from Sidebar RFC
    • 1 from VPT discussion tools
    • 1 from 6mo ago BLPN – is the "read" status stored locally on each device? Or did I intentionally leave this unread?
    • 4 "from 3 other wikis"
  • Notifications
  • 1 page reviewed
  • 1 thanks
  • 34 notices from MediaWiki – thanks, Structured Discussions!

Okay, over 3⁄4 of that is Structured Discussions from MediaWiki. Sigh. (05:25 Mon 04, AEST)

Sunday 3

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Misordered miscellany

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