Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2011/May

edits to published pages by unconfirmed users
It would be useful to allow monitoring of edits to published stories by unconfirmed users To do this, create an edit filter with the following (article_namespace == 0) & !("autoconfirmed" in user_groups) & lcase(article_text) rlike "\[\[category:\s*published" I suggest adding a warning "This story has been published; please dont make significant changes." It would also be useful to throttle these edits so new vandals can't make a mess of published stories. John Vandenberg (talk) 01:20, 5 May 2011 (UTC)


 * FlaggedRevs prevents vandals from making a mess of published stories. Their edits are not published until peer-reviewed.


 * It's also worth noting that significant changes to a published article are allowed for the first 24 hours after publication &mdash;subject to peer-review by a reviewer&mdash; and after what is *supposed* to be 24 hours (but may be less, since the software upgrade), there is an edit notice that says not to make substantive changes anymore. --Pi zero (talk) 01:44, 5 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the info re Flagged Revs. Its good to know you have a notice already.  I still think an abuse filter will be useful, as it will create a dedicated log of these changes (and only those changes), and it can automatically block users who make lots of undesirable edits. John Vandenberg (talk) 02:13, 5 May 2011 (UTC)


 * My concern here is that published articles, as mentioned above, can be changed completely within the first 24 hours of publication. Unless a time limit can be imposed on the filter based on the date first published and sighted, then I doubt this would be desirable. After 24 hours I believe an automatic warning kicks in already at the top of the edit window. Thankfully, vandalism etc levels tend to be fairly low and can be dealt with individually. Blood Red Sandman  (Talk)   (Contribs) 16:39, 5 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I can see that automatic blocking isnt possible. AbuseFilter also allows automatic throttling to reduce the speed with which a vandal can operate.  I have added 28844 to add limited ability to build rules with temporal conditions. John Vandenberg (talk) 02:45, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

HackPad/Collaborative editing
The people at HackPad have done some experiments with collaborative editing - http://hackpad.posterous.com/live-editing-mediawiki-with-hackpad. Its now installed as an experimental gadget. Bawolff ☺☻ 21:39, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Yay!!! ☺☺☺☺☺☺ :D --Patrick M (TUFKAAP) (talk) 00:51, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I tried it on enwiki, but it didn't work for me. It also fails here, with the same "The page isn't redirecting properly" message. Do I need to enable third-party cookies or something?  — fetch · comms  01:38, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't know. It seems to only work for me when I have firebug open, which is super weird. Even when it does work, it clearly needs much polish. Bawolff ☺☻ 01:44, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
 * It only seems to work in Vector, too. I haven't tried Monobook, but the tab simply doesn't appear in other skins, such as Modern. DEN  DODGE  17:14, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

lqt css
A while ago it was brought up trying to make LQT be less ugly, and especially make it very hard for the user to miss where s/he's supposed to vote. I have some css to try out. Its the lqtAlt gadget (make sure to disable the retro comments gadget if you have it enabled, first). Feedback welcome. Bawolff ☺☻ 02:31, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Since no one complained, now enabled globaly. Bawolff ☺☻ 00:56, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

GoogleNewsSitemap
I just noticed that the sitemap extension is now live at Special:NewsFeed. Thanks to everyone who helped get this done! Is there anything we need to change in our practices on-wiki now, or is it all set up to work already? (Apologies for my absence recently, I've been moving house). the wub "?!"  17:15, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * It went live very early today. I was just checking if it had been announced yet. I do not believe the community has figured out how it will implement this yet. -  Amgine | t 17:31, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Well as it stands, you can already use it for RSS feeds - |disputed latest news, |disputed&categories=Published|Education latest education news, etc . Actually using it for google, requires us submitting it to google, and stuff like that. Bawolff ☺☻ 18:15, 24 May 2011 (UTC)