ばか！バカ！　馬鹿ー月！

Hey folks,

I've been busy updating the various aspects of the site. Some are invisible, others are very dramatic. As always, this annual maintanence/cleanup is a continuous process, so expect more new stuff in the coming week.

One of the topics I was working on are the extensions. As you know, Baka-Tsuki doesn't offer much technical support to users. The new extensions should aid in migrating this issue.

Here is a quick overview of the improvements:

1. New Entry points
The new version of Mediawiki has provided multiple APIs to access various components of the wiki. In particular, http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/api.php allows anyone to build a functional client (such as BakaTsuki Ex reader) without parsing though the messy CSS/html.
http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/api.php

2. Complete SSL support
https://www.baka-tsuki.org is fully operational. Most security concerns have been fixed.

3. Collection (ie. build PDF support)
One of the oldest requested features is back. As some of you might remember, BT at one point had to disable Collection due to performance issues with site crawlers. After some testing, the extension is deemed suitable for production usage. Note that it might freeze with large pages. The issue is fixable, but it's lower on my priority list right now.
Another interesting feature from this extension is the ability to construct a virtual book made up of wiki pages. I will leave how to use this to you guys.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Collection

4. Poem
A small extension that formats poems.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Poem

5. Translation
It's the center piece of the entire update operation. I've been following this extension for a few years already. At its current state I am confident enough to install it on BT. This extension is a collections of various tools that are very useful for translators.
I recommend all translators/editors to take a detail look at its documentation.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Translate
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special: ... :Translate
A test page has been setup to demonstrate some of its abilities.
A note is that I believe this extension can be useful to the ideas proposed in the Improving BT Quality Discussion thread. I am still trying to come up with a suitable approach to the proposal.

That's all for now. As always, questions, feedback, and concerns are welcome.

May be a bit off-topic, Big Boss, is there anything that can be done about the forum spam? I think it's a rather critical issue.

thelastguardian wrote:1. New Entry points
The new version of Mediawiki has provided multiple APIs to access various components of the wiki. In particular, http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/api.php allows anyone to build a functional client (such as BakaTsuki Ex reader) without parsing though the messy CSS/html.
http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/api.php

This was supported in the last version; it's how I generate my PDFs. Unfortunately raw access to the wiki text I've found is harder to handle then the actual html output, since you have to write a full wiki-text parser, which is... interesting. >.< You have to account for all the wonkyness that humans create, rather then somewhat more elegant formatted html.

Hrm... I wonder how helpful that 'translator' extension would be for editors too? For me, 90% of the pain points of editing is either having to read the text entirely in the edit-view, or reading through in the web-view, then having to search for the relevant text in another tab with it open in the edit view. If this allows you to read it in the rendered view, along with being able to quickly edit, it might make it much less fiddly to be an editor around here.

thelastguardian wrote:1. New Entry points
The new version of Mediawiki has provided multiple APIs to access various components of the wiki. In particular, http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/api.php allows anyone to build a functional client (such as BakaTsuki Ex reader) without parsing though the messy CSS/html.
http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/api.php

Aren't you worried that this feature can potentially open up new ways to abuse the wiki?

joay_b wrote:

thelastguardian wrote:1. New Entry points
The new version of Mediawiki has provided multiple APIs to access various components of the wiki. In particular, http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/api.php allows anyone to build a functional client (such as BakaTsuki Ex reader) without parsing though the messy CSS/html.
http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/api.php

Aren't you worried that this feature can potentially open up new ways to abuse the wiki?

This API is a godsend and, as denormative correctly stated, has been open for a while now. In my case, it helps me turn ~130 Requests a day into 3 or 4. ;) Besides, there are limitations that help prevent abuse.

Regarding the translation plugin: I'm looking forward to a concrete proposal on how to use it. Right now, I honestly don't see any value in a feature like that, since it would IMO only complicate the process and I'm generally against line-to-line translations (although I guess you could also declare translation sections). That being said, I'm curious about how it could be used.

joay_b wrote:

thelastguardian wrote:1. New Entry points
The new version of Mediawiki has provided multiple APIs to access various components of the wiki. In particular, http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/api.php allows anyone to build a functional client (such as BakaTsuki Ex reader) without parsing though the messy CSS/html.
http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/api.php

Aren't you worried that this feature can potentially open up new ways to abuse the wiki?

The API was there since long ago. As I can remember.

But at least the encrypted connection works without problems. Which is nice.

Regarding the translation plugin: I'm looking forward to a concrete proposal on how to use it. Right now, I honestly don't see any value in a feature like that, since it would IMO only complicate the process and I'm generally against line-to-line translations (although I guess you could also declare translation sections). That being said, I'm curious about how it could be used.

For Chinese->English translators who use text on the internet as their primary source (like Kira082 and me), we tend to copy-paste the entire Chinese text, and then translate side-by-side. Example:


For me, this would actually be kind of useful. Technically it would also make TLC-ing easier if it were ever to be done. IDK about the legality of hosting the original source material on the Wiki though. Hosting the Japanese is probably a no-no, I think. IDK about Chinese.

denormative wrote:Hrm... I wonder how helpful that 'translator' extension would be for editors too? For me, 90% of the pain points of editing is either having to read the text entirely in the edit-view, or reading through in the web-view, then having to search for the relevant text in another tab with it open in the edit view. If this allows you to read it in the rendered view, along with being able to quickly edit, it might make it much less fiddly to be an editor around here.

This would also be beautiful.

cloud wrote:

Regarding the translation plugin: I'm looking forward to a concrete proposal on how to use it. Right now, I honestly don't see any value in a feature like that, since it would IMO only complicate the process and I'm generally against line-to-line translations (although I guess you could also declare translation sections). That being said, I'm curious about how it could be used.

For Chinese->English translators who use text on the internet as their primary source (like Kira082 and me), we tend to copy-paste the entire Chinese text, and then translate side-by-side. Example:D

Won't work due to Section B of TLG Translation Common Agreement

Does the new pdf feature have anything to do with the removal of the Toaru Majutsu no Index PDFs? I´m not sure if they´re really gone, but I can´t find them and I didn´t have all of them! By which I mean I wasn´t done reading every volume yet (currently on NT 4) so I don´t have the rest of the PDFs!

handsfeet wrote:Does the new pdf feature have anything to do with the removal of the Toaru Majutsu no Index PDFs? I´m not sure if they´re really gone, but I can´t find them and I didn´t have all of them! By which I mean I wasn´t done reading every volume yet (currently on NT 4) so I don´t have the rest of the PDFs!

Unlikely. Usually if they're 'removed' it's because the links expired on the file sharing site they're on, so they're not available for download. I'm in the process of building the PDFs of it at the moment; but probably only the main series for the moment since I've no urge to do 40+ volumes in a single day.

1. The side-by-side translation might be more useful to translators translating from English to other languages.

2. Even if the original text is in Chinese, you can ask the original Chinese translator for permission.

3. Another idea is to put the original Japanese phases side by side for problematic sections. We won't put the entire Japanese book in, but it would be nice to have something to compare the English translation with.

thelastguardian wrote:2. Even if the original text is in Chinese, you can ask the original Chinese translator for permission.

Um, with regards to the Chinese sources... very frequently, those sources will post licensed material (in China), and literally type up the official Chinese publication and put it on the internet. Anti-piracy is very poor in China, you know? In those cases... there wasn't really an original Chinese fan-translator. They just pirated the novel in the first place, typed it up, and put it on the internet.

So arguably, the pirated internet text is a no-no? While fan-translated texts are okay after permission?

cloud wrote:So arguably, the pirated internet text is a no-no? While fan-translated texts are okay after permission?

You should already know the answer, but I'll say this... The translation is your own work, for that you own only the effort of the translation. But the content, the meaning of the content, is the property of the original Author and is his intellectual property. That's what the German law says.

I made another proposal @_______@;

Here: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=8839

Actually, now that I think of it, I should have posted it here and not made a new thread. Can someone merge it to this thread?

Just a thought.

We could let the translators access the main page, and editors access page/en. So, we'll get source-based editing and just pure editing. This way the editors always have a easy way to reference of the translator's original text and we'll hopefully get less editing over edits.

PS. Global threads are defaulted to a locked subforum. People viewing this thread from "View new post" sees this thread as locked.