Topic on Project:Support desk/Flow

I've asked here if is trivial to retrieve the account information from the database instead of hardcoding the usernames and passwords in the LocalSettings.php.

In my computer I've a sort of "offline wikimedia editor". I first edit some pages locally (my connection speed is around 50kbps), then I "push" those edits to the destination wiki. The same accounts I've on the remote wiki (in that case: wikipedia, wikibooks), I've in the local wiki database. I would just need to specify that the information of accounts is inside the local database.

Going further

My access to the Internet comes from a cellphone (used as a modem). The network that I use, here, is called 2G (second generation). I live in Brazil, and if you see the news about Internet access, you will notice that more people is having Internet access. But from which way? Mostly through cellphone. Now think about other countries where rarely you see people with computer... how would be the "access" there? There are places that the poverty are even more present than what we see in the "Brazil"...

To be sincere I found very useful be able to make offline editions with my local mediawiki installation, and I say, that a lot of people around world would say the same. I say it because most still access the Internet with very low bandwith.

Requesting resources

I've noticed that the way we get "resources" from a mediawiki web interface is the problem (I just watched how many "request" it do to just fetch a page, and its a lot...). I known that I could be related to the caching system (sorry, my understanding is too little, I'm just guessing), but there should be another way to do it without compromising the performance from the server side...

You could say "there is a mobile interface". But that interface is very limited. If we talk about who has only access from just a cellphone, then there a problem...

Second: I don't believe that turning JavaScript off is the best solutions in that case, I believe that the system can be optimized.

Thank you, very much. I surely appreciate the MWF, what I'm doing is just suggesting improvements that could affect a lot of "poor" people. :)

A lot of work has already been put into optimizing the JS resources.

I do sympathize with your concerns about page loading, though. Five years ago, I saw how slow amazon.com was loading in Rwanda which, at the time, only had a connection to the Internet through satellite link in England.

I'm confused about your use case, though. If your local wiki is running on your local computer, there shouldn't be any page load time problems, and it sounds like that is where you are doing the editing.

Are you just talking about reading Wikipedia and that those pages are loading slowly? What is missing from the mobile interface in that makes it unusable for your purposes?

You said: I'm confused about your use case, though. If your local wiki is running on your local computer, there shouldn't be any page load time problems, and it sounds like that is where you are doing the editing.

Sorry for my poor English, I think you didn't understand. I'm not facing problems locally, the "slow" part is related to the "remote" access (again, not locally).

You said: What is missing from the mobile interface in that makes it unusable for your purposes?

If someone just access the Internet through a very slow connection, the mobile interface wouldn't help much: most features that we need is only accessible through the "normal" interface (something like vector skin).

Sure, a solution would be to deal directly with the MediaWiki API, but I'm talking something to be accessible to the people that don't have this knowledge.

Thanks for trying to help.

There is also Wikipedia Zero, but the focus there is just giving people access to the content.

It sounds like you want editing to work smoothly and, AFAIK, editing doesn't work on the mobile interface, yet.

I would file a BUGREPORT outlining your use case and how MediaWiki could be improved. I expect that if someone were interested in fixing this, they would want a way to simulate your connection and it looks like they could use this

Wikipedia Zero seems to be a interesting project, hope they can keep developing this.

You said: I expect that if someone were interested in fixing this, they would want a way to simulate your connection and it looks like they could use this

I think they should integrate a test like these in their testing framework. Its almost an obligatory test for whoever wants make their service accessible from the whole world.

Talking about tools, there is a lot of tools to do it (all related to traffic shaping). Take a look in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1094760/network-tools-that-simulate-slow-network-connection .

I opened a bug report to track the testing issue.

Thank you very much for making this. :)