Blog/2016-10

Release: NONE (2016-10-30 22:00 Sun)

I'm skipping the release this week. I have a few minor fixes, but it doesn't warrant a new release.

Otherwise, I uploaded Polish this past week and am working on Swedish now.

Release: v3.10.4.1 (2016-10-24 21:00 Mon)

The PC version is a minor release. It adds filtering to Download Central, better support for English Wikivoyage, and fixes errors in the Import Offline page

The Android version is a minor release. It also adds filtering to Download Central.

(Wiki) Release 2016-10 English and German wikis (Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikivoyage, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikinews)

The 2016-10 versions of the English and German wikis are up. You can get them at Download Central, or through these pages:

• Wiki_setup/English_wikis
• Wiki_setup/German_wikis

(PC / Android) Allow filtering wikis by language / type in Download Central

Download Central now has a lot of wikis. I added some basic filtering to allow selection by language or wiki type. I'll be adding more customization to Download Central as time goes on, but hopefully this should make the list more manageable.

(PC) Add better support for English Wikivoyage

I discovered a number of issues with 2016-10 English Wikivoyage:

• Quickbar script errors: There was a lot of script errors in the Quickbox due to a Wikibase error with renderSnak. This was fixed in this release
• Kartographer: There was also a lot of "stray" text due to new extension tags <maplink> and <mapframe>. This release takes the simple approach and just hides them
• Assessment text at bottom of page: This was also due to a new extension. This too is suppressed in this release.

In addition, there were issues with Chinese pages on English Wiktionary due to an obscure LuaJ error. This too was resolved in this release.

(PC) Fix import errors in Import/Offline

Dashboard/Import/Offline was broken due to the recent changes in the Category system. In addition, there were a few other minor fixes.

Next release: v3.11.2

• Wikis: I'm generating the wikis for the 2016-10 French wikis (Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikivoyage, etc). Afterwards, I'll work on updating the Polish set.
• Light schedule: The schedule will probably be lighter for the next month. I'll still be producing wikis on a weekly basis, and resolving issues as they come up. However, I'm going to keep new development initiatives to a minimum.

Release: POSTPONED (2016-10-23 21:30 Sun)

v3.10.4 is postponed for at least one day. I'm planning to have something up tomorrow night, but it may go to mid week.

Release: v3.10.3.2 (2016-10-17 16:00 Mon)

The PC version is a minor release. It now shows the 2016-10 entries for English and German Wikipedia in Download Central.

Thanks to Ope30 for reporting the bug (https://github.com/gnosygnu/xowa/issues/90).

Release: v3.10.3.1 (2016-10-16 20:00 Sun)

The PC version is a major release. It adds better category support, fixes a Scribunto "Script error out of bounds", and a new custom scripting system.

The Android version is a minor release. It has a possible fix for some devices failing to load XOWA when permissions are revoked and then regranted.

(Wiki) Release 2016-10 English and German Wikipedia

The 2016-10 versions of both wikis are up. You can get them through:

• Wiki_setup/English_wikis
• Wiki_setup/German_wikis

(PC) Multiple category changes, including performance, international sorting, numeric sorting, and HTML database loading

First, round of thanks to Ope30 who noticed a number of issues with the category system as decribed in https://github.com/gnosygnu/xowa/issues/87

This particular release has a lot of changes based on the bug reports:

• Improved performance on SATA drives, especially for large categories: The category system in v3.9.4.1 worked okay on SSD drives, but did poorly on SATA drives. Large categories (2,000+) like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2001_albums would take 20-30 seconds to load. Now they take 4-5 seconds.
• Next 200 / Previous 200 would not work on English Wikipedia for large categories: English Wikipedia recently changed their sorting collation from "uppercase" to "uca-default-u-kn". As a result, a number of entries no longer sorted correctly, and pressing "Next / Previous" would break. As an example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:All_stub_articles now works correctly navigating forward
• HTML dumps now show wikitext HTML: Category pages sometimes have a letter index at the top of the page, or other information. For example, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mann has a large table of contents listing many 2-letter combinations. This information didn't appear in the HTML dumps before. Now they do
• Other minor changes: There are a small number of other changes as well which are covered more in the Change log

(PC) Fix for "Script error: index out of bounds" on 2016-10 enwiki pages

A number of pages in 2016-10 English Wikipedia would should "Script error: index out of bounds" in the Infobox area near the Coordinates. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris This was fixed in this release

(PC) Add custom scripting support through standalone javascript / lua files

This was a feature requested at https://github.com/gnosygnu/xowa/issues/88

Basically, v3.10.4.2 allows changing XOWA pages through custom Javascript. This is intended for non-Wikimedia wikis (such as Wikia) which use custom extension that are not supported in XOWA. A user can add this missing custom extension by writing an extension in Javascript.

More information is at App/Xtn/Scripting

Next release: v3.10.2

• Wikis: I'm generating 2016-10 French Wikipedia now, and should have it uploaded in the next day. Afterwards, I'm going to go through the English sister wikis (Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikivoyage) and then hopefully the German ones.
• Dynamic update of wiki pages: Between categories and scripting, I didn't get a chance to work on this feature

Release: NONE (2016-10-02 21:30 Sun)

There's no release this week. I'm working on a category performance enhancement before starting on 2016-10 wikis.

I did create a deletion database for English Wikipedia. It will reduce the size of the images datases from 101 GB to 90 GB.

The link is here: https://archive.org/download/Xowa_enwiki_latest/en.wikipedia.org-file-deletion-2016.09.xowa The instructions are here: Dashboard/Files/Deletion

Thanks.