TheDJ writes

As most people know, Wikipedia usually runs the bleeding edge code of MediaWiki. Currently new versions are deployed every 2 weeks. This is great, necessary and sometimes annoying for Wikipedians. There is a common complaint that MediaWiki treats Wikipedia as it's experimentation grounds. On the other hand MediaWiki is overly focused on Wikipedia. Without Wikipedia, I think that the default MediaWiki would look a lot more like Wikia than like Wikipedia. In my opinion, if MediaWiki treats Wikipedia as it's sandbox then it does so because the only sandbox that compares to Wikipedia is Wikipedia itself. There ARE no other viable experimentation grounds that compare to the distorted reality of Wikipedia. So how bleeding edge is bleeding edge? Code is deployed almost every 2 weeks, yet HTML5 has been the default for MediaWiki for over 3 years now , but has still not made it to Wikipedia for all sorts of compatibility reasons and accommodating to the volunteer tech community...

Been a while since I wrote here. I wanted to discuss a great change that has come to MediaWiki , and it is the adaptation of  Git  and Gerrit  over our old Subversion system. It has been discussed at length already, but I wanted to discuss the actual switch process and what it meant for me as an individual. TLDR version: Little time, big switch, Gerrit needs lots of work, more coherent documentation needed and stay vigilant. Bad or Good cannot be stated yet. Where I'm coming from First of all, I should clarify that I already used Git quite a bit. We used it within  VideoLAN  and I use it myself almost on a daily basis as a wrapper around some of the Subversion repositories I use. So you could say that using it should not be too troublesome to me. I already know the commands and the principle ideas behind git and how they differ from other SCM systems . The only new addition is Gerrit... I have little time on my hands to work on Wikimedia and MediaWiki th...

Wikipedia birthday cakes during the celebrations  in Amsterdam (Derk-Jan Hartman, CC-BY-SA 3.0 ) So here we are... One day after the 10 year anniversary of Wikipedia and I think that I'm not the only Wikipedian who will testify that it has been a great couple of days. Lots of online friends meeting in real life at one of the 450 or so events , lots of very nice press attention for our once so humble project and just all out fun. Myself I participated in the first Dutch Hackathon . The day kicked of Friday 14th, at 10 in the morning in the offices of Kennisland in Amsterdam. Since I was working on friday, I joined in on the fun at around 18:30 during pizza-time. There were about 15 or so developers as well as a dozen or so Wikimedians and people from a Wikipedia editing workshop that took place during the day. They assisted in the brainstorming, provided feedback and were kind enough to drink beers with us :D Several projects had been selected in advance and a great deal ...

Last year saw the launch of book printing for Wikipedia articles. A very nice feature that allows you to create a collection of articles and print them as a book. Since yesterday you can even get hardcovers . There is also a wonderful "Print to PDF" feature that piggybacks on the book rendering technology. Printing webpages has long intrigued me and the results have always been suboptimal, especially with something as complex as Wikipedia articles. However, the web is moving forward and the printing options for the web are getting better with every browser release. The past few days I was revisiting this issue and I have now added some new CSS to the print stylesheet of MediaWiki which should help browsers detect proper spots to insert pagebreaks and more importantly, where to avoid them. Before pagebreak CSS After pagebreak CSS When your browser supports it, it will try to avoid pagebreaks in images, wikitables and right after headers. It will also try to avoid lo...

I have been filing and maintaining bug reports in MediaWiki for a while now, trying to communicate issues found by the editor community back to the developer community. Over time, increasingly I have been submitting patches to fix some of the bugs that I find. I never really had the intention to become a MediaWiki developer to be honest, but I guess I filed enough patches that people suggested to me that I should request commit access myself. So last week I sent off an email to Tim Starling and last night I was granted commit access to MediaWiki. I'll be taking this slow, because much of what interests me (the media and file repository work) is unfortunately not well tested on a day to day basis by others, while still able to create quite the havoc if you make mistakes. In other news, I also recently became an administrator on Wikimedia Commons . I'm reasonably active on Commons due to image moves from Wikipedia to Commons and recently I fixed up Cat-a-lot , which is a v...