My main work was on TranslateSvg, a project I started several years ago as part of a Google Summer of Code project. Admittedly it is annoying not to have the extension live (although Brian tells me that the feature we did eventually manage to land is actually being used, so that’s something). On the other hand, I can understand why Wikimedia now demands high quality code (see below), and in particular good unit tests. I simply haven’t been able to put in the time required to deliver those (except in very short bursts), and that’s fundamentally my fault.
Anyhow, to focus on the positive, I used Lyon — and in particular the train back — to commit a load of patches. These get test coverage up to about 50% on a line-by-line basis, and, more importantly, led me to uncover a bunch of bugs I hadn’t found before. I also re-ran an analysis I first conducted almost 3 years ago and found that TranslateSvg was performing worse now than then! As ever, uncovering the bug was 90% of the challenge and the project is now back to where it was in August 2012 on that particular metric.
I guess my other contribution during the Lyon Hackathon was a question to Lila Tretikov, ED of the Wikimedia Foundation. Someone else had asked by the relative balance between professional and volunteer developers had (it seemed) shifted away from the latter to the former. Other people had quite rightly pointed out that the WMF had hired many of the former volunteers, and, in particular, had hired many of the most “omnipresent” volunteers.
The point I wanted to make, however, is that MediaWiki as a platform has come a long way. It is a lot more professional, and that means standards are higher. By definition, you make it harder for part-timers (many of whose skillsets are understandably incomplete or out-dated) to contribute on a level footing. FOr example, a move from CSS to LESS reduces overhead for “experts” but makes it harder for those who just know CSS (i.e. most developers) and do not have the time to retrain to contribute. It was also pointed out that moving to a system of pre-commit review (as MediaWiki did in March 2012) encourages high standards: you’re not able to join the elite club of MediaWiki contributors without having your commit peer-reviewed first, whereas before you just had to fix it later (and even then you had status quo bias working with you rather than against you).
Lila’s response was to point to the ongoing work moving MediaWiki from being a monolithic pile of code, to something much more modular and service oriented so newcomers. I think this goes both ways: yes, it means newcomers can find a happy corner that they can work in, but it also allows our increasingly professionalised developer base to fulfil their burning desire to ditch PHP in favour of their own preferred language, with unintended consequences for the volunteer community.
]]>As has become traditional, Wikimania proper was preceded by a two-and-a-half day hackathon, with entry at slight additional cost. While there had been concerns from hackathon organisers about what percentage of those registered would actually attend, it was clear from the word “go” that it would be alright on the night: the introductory session on Wednesday morning was packed, and numbers remained high throughout Thursday and into Friday. For attendees it was an opportunity to get in some ‘hacking’—any coding of an interesting nature, including work on tools, gadgets, MediaWiki and its extensions—meet other developers, and enjoy the comfortable (if slightly unusual) surroundings of the Barbican’s tropical conservatory and garden room. On a warm summer’s day, it felt like a greenhouse—not least because, in a very real sense, it was.
Nevertheless, the social atmosphere was Wikimania at its best: light, enthusiastic and welcoming to those more unfamiliar with the movement and its goals, here including an impressive assortment of journalists. Staff proved approachable, mixing freely with volunteers—indeed, the sessions served as a reminder that Wikimedians are peculiarly lucky in that regard. Such positivity even crept into sessions as potentially fraught as that led by the Foundation’s Fabrice Florin, a presentation and chat about the development direction of the controversial Media Viewer extension. Although there were minor quibbles, like the sprawling Barbican making it difficult to move from registration (floor: -1) to venue (floor: 4), or the deployment of sandwiches at lunch (“originally supposed to be lasagne”, Ed noted critically) and nothing at dinner, it was an uncomplicated unconference executed well. Even the WiFi held up, as it did throughout the conference—more or less.
The opening session of Wikimania, held alongside a welcome drinks reception on the Thursday evening, could roughly be divided into two halves. The first consisted of four speakers (Ed Saperia, Wikimedia UK Chief Executive Jon Davies, Jimmy Wales and Lila Tretikov) enlisted to give short welcome speeches. Apart from an off-the-cuff remark from Wales that he wished the press would talk “less about the monkey” and more about the substantive issues raised in his pre-Wikimania press conference, the burden of getting the packed auditorium to tear themselves away from their phones/tablets/buzzword bingo cards fell to Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International and sole keynote speaker of the Thursday evening session. Though many of Shetty’s remarks fell on sympathetic ears, it was his allusions to certain problems of scaling—the forced creation of staff headquarters in developing nations; the difficulties of running a global institution alongside local chapters—which stood out and it was a shame that Shetty did not share more of his considerable experience during the keynote itself.
Shetty was arguably the most prominent of the non-Wikimedia names on the list of featured speakers—surprising, perhaps, for a conference that had won the bidding process promising speakers including Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig and even Stephen Fry (see related Signpost coverage). Nevertheless, the speakers eventually organised proved sufficient to regularly fill and continuously entertain the cavernous Barbican Hall. The final lineup thus included Danny O’Brien (along with Wales, one of the two survivors of the original London bid), Jack Andraka, and, able to draw on the UK’s well developed civil society infrastructure, representatives of the thinktank Demos, Code Club and Young Rewired State among others: an admirable and effective lineup, if not quite the “VIP speakers (academics, politicians, media, entertainment)” originally described by Jimmy Wales in July 2012. In a Wikimania first, all of the featured speakers’ presentations were reliably streamed live and recordings rapidly made available online, a real boon considering Wikimedia’s global appeal and the months-long delays from previous Wikimanias.
In total, Wikimania 2014 claimed some 200 sessions over 8 simultaneous tracks, replete with the inevitable scheduling and organisational headaches. The organisers will be pleased with the variety they achieved: notable themes including open access, open data, technology, GLAM and diversity were all well-represented, while smaller topics (the legal aspects of Wikipedia, for example) seemed neatly stitched into accessible 90 minute blocks. The Barbican’s cavernous layout and the comfort of its designed-for-purpose auditoria thus conspired to make these blocks, rather than individual sessions, the primary unit of time management—to the benefit of some of the more niche interest talks on the programme. Each talk seemed ably staffed by the conference’s apparently vast team of volunteers, both technically and in terms of sticking to their timetables. The blocks were then in turn punctuated by coffee breaks, lunch, and on some days (but confusingly not all) dinner. Although hackathon attendees quickly got used to the “packed lunch” format, it was the dinners that particularly stood out, including bitesize burgers, skewers and sea-bream tacos (to name a few), served in reasonable quantity but alas with the purity of queuing to which many native Britons (the author included) are accustomed.
Aided by the high overall attendance (an estimated 2000, making London the largest Wikimania to date) all the sessions seemed to receive good levels of participation; there were not enough chairs, for example, to incorporate everyone attending an event on copyright, not usually a floor filler. Saperia added that hundreds of those tickets had been sold in the final days before the start of Wikimania proper—a reminder that it was not just hardcore Wikimedians in attendance. For those unable to attend a talk that they would have liked to—and with eights tracks, that included many attendees—slides and numerous recordings are now available. The quality of the talks varied, but around a high mean; early evidence suggests numerous standout sessions (the author would recommend Brandon Harris’ unique performance style, though his two talks were of very different kinds). Unsurprisingly many attendees also turned to Twitter to add their comments to those of a hyperactive Wikimania social media team, with an estimated 21,000 tweets using the #wikimania or #wikimania2014 hashtags over the course of the three day conference.
After a brief video in support of the students of Sinenjongo High School in their WMF-supported campaign to get Wikipedia Zero more widely adopted in the Global South, Jimmy Wales once more took to the stage to give his “state of the wiki” remark. Most pertinent of these was his comment that too often what is intended as a minimum bar serves to define the normal and thus to hive off as supererogatory many of the virtues for which Wikimedia ought to strive: not just mere civility, Wales suggested, but “kindness, generosity, forgiveness, compassion”, a “morally ambitious” programme he said, but an achievable one. He also noted YouGov research that indicated the British public trusts Wikipedia more than both the tabloid and quality press.
Wales’ annual Wikimedian of the Year award went this year to Ihor Kostenko, a prominent Ukrainian Wikipedian and journalist tragically killed in the civil unrest that engulfed the capital Kiev earlier this year (see Signpost special report: “Diary of a protester—Wikimedian perishes in Ukrainian unrest“). It was a poignant and appropriate choice, although in a hat-tip to potential future controversy over the awarding of the honour, Wales promised to ensure a more “democratic” process was in place ahead of Wikimania 2015. After presenting some of the hosting chapter (Wikimedia UK)’s annual awards of their behalf, attention turned more fully to next year’s event, with a brief introductory video shown by the Mexico City team. Of its slogans, “our venue: Vasconcelos library” and “gay friendly” received the most enthusiastic support among the thousand-strong audience.
The speeches (including brief remarks by WMF Chair Jan-Bart de Vreede) were followed by the Wikimania closing party, an event backed by reasonable but not excessive amounts of free alcohol, and a selection of musical accompaniments in a variety of styles. Indeed, such entertainment was provided on each evening of the conference, interspersed with comedy performances on a technology theme. The latter especially was a brave choice, and the organisers will be forgiven if the jokes fell a little flat, or the dancefloor was a little empty. Patrons were also able to take advantage of the hackathon rooms—left open well into the night—or escape outside where attractive fountains punctuated the cold brutalist structure of the Barbican estate. The more adventurous tried the City of London’s wallet-busting public houses, if only for novelty value.
For some, the impact of Wikimania will be direct: a bustling community village featured an array of chapters eager to sign up new members, as well as a variety of non-WMF projects looking for exposure. For most, however, the effect is more subtle, subsisting in a set of renewed relationships, vague recollections and hearsay. It is difficult to see how Wikimania 2014 could have failed to impress the casual onlooker, with its sheer scale an obvious statement of intent. Of course, such a statement must also be paid for, and the debate over the financing of Wikimania, which necessarily took a backseat role for the duration of the conference, may yet cloud what should be enjoyable memories of an enjoyable Wikimania.
The same is true of the announcement, on the final day of the conference, that the WMF would be using technical measures to override local administrators on the German Wikipedia: as one European chapter member remarked, “at least it will give us something to talk about [at the closing party]”. Such worries aside, it was an impressive conference that promised the moon but had to settle for the stars.
Alternatively, in true British understatement, it was “not too bad, actually”.
]]>I also attended the Open Ceremony last night. Unfortunately it was not as interesting as I thought it might, consisting mostly of lists of “thank you”s repeated ad nauseam. Wikimania coordinator Ed Saperia will have been glad just to have got through; WMUK CEO Jon Davies was at least brief and the only really novel contribution – a keynote from Amnesty International CEO Salil Shetty – was weirdly out of place. Thankfully, more seasoned Wikimanians pointed me to a suitable ‘buzzword bingo’ grid, to help keep my attention on the selection of speakers, suggesting this was not the first slightly tedious opening WIkimania ceremony. Nevertheless, I think, were I to run a Wikimania, I would probably scrap it altogether: there was ultimately very little that needed to be said at all — everyone just wanted to get on with it.
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Featured speaker: Lydia Pintscher, Project Manager Wikidata (10:30, Barbican Hall)
Highlights: Two themes dominate the pick of Friday’s programme. The first is interface design, a key area in which the Foundation’s ambitions are yet to be realised (Interface Vision, 16:30, Auditorium 1). In particular, prototypes for a new skin – codenamed Athena – which caused a splash when aired at Wikimania 2014 (see Signpost Op-Ed) make a return in a talk by WMF Senior Designer Brandon Harris (The Athena Project: Where are We?, 17:30, Auditorium 1). Not only do such design proposals intimately affect readers and editors alike, the five years since the creation of Vector (see previous Signpost coverage) have seen dramatic changes in the web design landscape, not least those stemming from the responsive web design (“mobile first”) initiative that Athena seeks to build upon.
The second theme is multimedia, another area where progress has been tantalisingly slow. Fresh from recent controversy over the Media Viewer (see previous Signpost coverage), WMF Product Manager Fabrice Florin gives an overview of where the Foundation’s plans are heading (Multimedia Overview, 11:30, Auditorium 2). Florin and Andrew Lih then focus in specifically on video, and Brion Vibber on video and audio (The State (and Fate) of Video in Wikimedia, 12:00, Auditorium 2; Freedom in motion: the state of open video and audio at Wikimedia, 12:30, Auditorium 2), a fascinating area as Wikimedians – but Wikipedians in particular – struggle to break free from their original text-centric paradigms.
Also available: Structured Wikiquote • CirrusSearch: How we’ve replaced a great search engine with an awesome search engine • Human-centered design for free knowledge • Fixing grammar errors semi-automatically • Machine aided article translation
Featured speaker: Brandon Harris, WMF Senior Designer (14.30 Barbican Hall)
Highlights: No such unifying themes dominate Saturday’s offering. In the morning, Ask the developers (10:30, Auditorium 2) will rightly prove a popular favourite as the tech-savvy crowd take advantage of the annual opportunity to quiz the WMF’s development team, here represented by Siebrand Mazeland and a yet-to-be-announce lineup. In the afternoon,, the of the Foundation’s biggest success stories, Wikipedia Zero – providing free Wikipedia access to hundreds of millions of people across the globe – arguably deserves more attention than it gets (Access to Knowledge and Wikipedia Zero, 14:30, Fountain Room). The relatively uncontroversial nature of the Zero project contrasts sharply with the VisualEditor team’s experience. But such controversy should not occlude what could be a very productive avenue for all involved, especially new editors (VisualEditor — helping users edit more easily, 16:30, Auditorium 1; for a more technical discussion see also VisualEditor — engineering against the odds, 12:30 Sunday, Frobisher 123).
Looking further into the future, an extension of the VisualEditor to real-time collaboration of the sort found on Google Docs or Etherpad is the subject of a talk by WMF Deputy Director Erik Moeller (It’s Alive! The Joy of Real-Time Collaboration, 17:00, Auditorium 1; see also Real-time Collaborative Editing with TogetherJS, 17:30, Auditorium 1). Although unlikely to be deployed any time soon, the continued interest in the project by senior developers hints at its future adoption by the WMF; Moeller’s talk should at least prove sufficient to whet the tastebuds. Those feeling more overwhelmed may want to try another of his contributions, Join the technical community – an introduction for absolute beginners (09:30, Barbican Hall).
Also available: Replaying Edits & Visualising Edit History • Finding and fixing software bugs for the Wikipedias • Showcase ALL the (cool) things! • Unmasking anonymous editors on Wikipedia • Parsoid: Dealing with Wikitext so you don’t have to • FastCCI: Taming the Commons Category Tree • Testing internationalized applications for Wikimedia content
Highlights: For those who miss Lydia Pintscher’s featured address on Friday morning, Wikidata – current state and Q&A (09:30, Frobisher 123) could provide a useful introduction to one of a handful truly successful chapter-led development projects, though Pintscher suggests the latter talk is likely to be targetted at an audience more familiar with the site. With often very significant communities, bot-related talks always prove popular, and a trend set to continue with Bots and Pywikibot (11:30, Fountain Room) given its onwiki support. Staying in the Fountain Room yields two other talks (What’s this volunteer support all about anyway?, 12:00, and The Wikimedia open source project and you, 12:30), which may also prove of interest.
Walking around a conference so dominated by Wikimedians, it is easy to forget that the work of volunteer – and sometimes staff – developers need not be focussed on Wikimedia projects. In How about a MediaWiki Consortium?, Markus Glaser and Mark Hershberger discuss the options for ensuring reusers of the MediaWiki platform (of which there are hundreds), though often far from developers’ minds, remain represented at the negotiation table (11:30, Hammerson Room). Likewise, Wikisource technical infrastructure: what we have done and what we could do (15:30, Fountain Room) promises to give a flavour of the technical support smaller projects receive, well away from the controversy and hubbub of the larger Wikipedias.
Also available: A data and developer hub for Wikimedia • How we’ve grown mobile into something that everyone does • Big in Japan: Combating Systemic Bias Through Mobile Editing • Context visualization for Wikipedia articles • Wikidata Toolkit: A Java library for working with Wikidata • JavaScript and long-term relationships • User interface: Consistency • Tech news • Open Scholarship Tools – a whirlwind tour. • The Full OA Stack – Open Access and Open Source
]]>Wikimedia UK is pleased to announce the creation of https://planet.wikimedia.org.uk – a blog “planet” (combiner) that allows visitors to see the total blogging output of the UK’s Wikimedians and open content advocates in a single easy-to-bookmark feed.
This new project mirrors a longer-established programme of the Wikimedia Foundation to create a Wikimedia planet for every language. By comparison, the UK blog planet benefits from a more restrictive geographical emphasis on the United Kingdom, providing an outlet for topical commentators from across the country, regardless of the language they choose to blog in.
In fact, the blog planet itself was very easy to set up, and I wasn’t even the one responsible for flicking the switch (for the record, it uses MoonMoon, a much lighter piece of software than Project Venus, the software the Foundation uses).
My involvement was mainly via the Wikimedia UK Technology Committee, which meets roughly 8-12 times a year. It barely seems a year since the Committee was first met last January; the latest meeting was today. During that meeting, the Committee agreed (among other things) to continue in its role of “judging the beauty contest” that is the world of micro-technology projects in need of support. Getting a so-called “planet” up and running was one such problem.
In time, the Committee ought to have influence over bigger projects. For the moment, I’m happy we can say we’ve supported a project (however small) from start to finish.
]]>In the end, it hasn’t been a difficult process, though there are still some bugs outstanding and there are still a couple of tools I know people use — and I’ll feel a bit guilty if I don’t migrate them.
One thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve managed to avoid any use of the replicated database so far, sticking to Tools which prioritise the API instead. Although there were some initial claims that improvements to the API had made replicated databases obsolete, these are tools which require searching database of page links/transclusions, so I think database work is probably going to be necessary, and I’ll have to bite the bullet on this soon.
On the tools I’ve migrated, what’s taken the time, in fact, is simply updating the code. Looking back on my older tools — written 2, 3 years ago, they really look their age. So much so, in fact, I haven’t been able to stop myself rewriting them in new and better ways. Oh, and giving my whole collection a nice fresh lick of paint.
]]>The theory behind this seems straightforward. On the English Wikipedia, there are categories for British sportspeople; American Ivy League universities; economic terminology. These are clearly useful, no?
Well, yes. But to understand the development of the present category system, you have to understand that, historically, category intersection was impossible. What this means is that you can’t just say tell Wikipedia that Jessica Ennis-Hill has the properties of being a sportsperson and British, and expect her to appear in the category for British sportspeople automatically. Rather, a volunteer has to (a) make that link and (b) believe it’s a significant intersection.
When people asked to say what you knew about someone or something (in this case Ms Ennis-Hill), they say things like “she’s English”, “she’s a heptathlete”, “she’s 27”, “she won a gold medal in the Olympics” — in other words, they name properties. As above, however, Wikipedia’s categorisation system doesn’t record properties, it records intersections. Thus her article ends up with this spew of permutations, including bother “British heptathletes” and “English athletes“.
Suppose I now decide (as someone did in the past) that her ancestry is an important characteristic (a point I’ll come back to momentarily). Instead of just adding one statement about her nationality, I have to consider adding a multitude of possible categories that relate her ancestry to other characteristics about her: in this case, Black English sportspeople and English people of Jamaican descent.
Underdescription: One the one hand, this system clearly risks underdescription. Since adding a ‘n’th property requires the addition of n categories, an editor simply may not bother.
Overdescription: On the other, editors are tempted to leave a parent category (e.g. “English athletes”) when adding a more specific category (“English heptathletes”), to avoid losing any information — in this case, that Ennis-Hill is not just a heptathlete. [She hurdles, she high-jumps; in the former case editors can be bothered to list her as a hurdler, but her high-jumping does not seem to warrant a separate category.] The result is overcategorisation.
Selectivity: The element of selectivity (working out which intersections deserved categories) creates controversy, as when the creation of a “women novelists” category rightly caused a media storm earlier this year. That was despite the two individual properties the category intersected (women and ) being uncontroversial.
Emergence: Wikidata’s Denny Vrande?i? (ever keen to show just how much he deserved his PhD in the subject!) argued recently, strong classification of the kind that categories lead to seems to hit a nerve in the human psyche. (The title of this blog post is borrowed from Denny’s.) To take the classic example, was George Washington “an American” anything? Why? Was Tesla a Serb? Russian? Something else?
Ambiguity: Categories can be ambiguous. Can you be a “LGBTQ blogger” without blogging about LGBTQ issues? Does a “Russian statesman” have to practice his craft in Russia? And so on. Properties (sexuality, place of birth, occupation) are rarely as ambiguous.
The solution to all these problems would be to move towards a system of recording properties directly, and there are signs that projects such as Wikidata are increasing interest in this “new” kind of system. Of course, it is not new. It’s called “tagging” and we’ve been used to it on the internet for a decade; but finally Wikimedians may be coming round to it.
The power of the Wikidata object-property model as well as refinements to search mean that tagging is becoming possible at last, so maybe the days of the category are numbered. Maybe. Here’s to hoping: tagging probably has its own problems; but it’s got to be better than categorisation.
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On 9 July 2011, South Sudan declared independence, and during that buzz, an Italian Wikimedian found his map showing the borders of the new nation had been translated into a dozen other languages, among them English, Greek, Catalan, and Macedonian. These copies were then uploaded onto Wikimedia Commons as separate files. Of course, one would expect the map to change significantly over the next decade. More often than not, these kinds of change are picked up first by editors of the larger projects, who rapidly update their own versions of the map. To do so takes, say, 20 minutes; but to replicate that same change across Catalan, Greek, Macedonian? Hours of work – and dozens of separate uploads.
My project, named “TranslateSvg”, aimed to change this workflow – for SVG format files at least – firstly by making it easier to translate those files (thus reducing the all-too-common sight of English-language diagrams in use on non-English wikis), and secondly by embedding the new translations within the same SVG file. When boundaries change, a single update will propagate to all language versions instantly. That was the intent, anyhow.
Overall, a lot has been achieved: a test wiki was set up, and, if I load the bleeding edge code onto it, the software is both feature complete and has been updated in line with user comments. The video at [1] gives a good idea of the current interface and how it works; I’ll send another message to this list when the test wiki reliably uses feature complete code.
The most pleasing (and indeed satisfying) thing, however, is that nothing I wanted to achieve was “left behind”. Admittedly, a few things aren’t quite as polished as I’d like them to be, and there are still a few weeks’ worth of code review left to do. But fundamentally, it is (or will be) what I want it to be. Mostly, I attribute this to some prototyping work I did before I pitched for GSoC, which allowed me to come up with a plan I knew to be doable (or more accurately, doable by me), which avoided the costs of running into deadends late in the process.
Once code review is complete, there’ll be at least one more testing phase, this time with specific questions, followed by a pitch by me to Wikimedia Commons. Only after that will I even utter the “d” word in the context of TranslateSvg.
I ended up with quite an unusual mentoring setup. In the end, the work of mentoring me ended up being split between my official mentor for the project, Max Semenik (MaxSem) and the original author of the Translate extension (which, early on in the project, I decided to use as a foundation for my work) Niklas Laxström. Both have been very helpful, especially with code review and generally “keeping an eye on me”, with Niklas (I think it’s fair to say) taking the lead in places due to his specialised knowledge. Actually, this worked out well, but my advice to potential applicants would be to think about mentor choice carefully, considering what support they’d need *from their mentor* and what they might instead be able to source *from the community in general* in order to avoid overloading their mentor. We have a great community, and thankfully I knew quite a few people already, so I could tap that more easily.
Of course, I am greatly indebted to both Max and Niklas, as well as the literally dozens of people who at some point contributed via IRC (there’s another protip—get on IRC early! *Such* a useful resource). Just off the top of my head, that list includes Andrew and Ryan for the Labs stuff (which turned out to be the most challenging aspect of the summer, mostly because I hadn’t considered it at all before [1]), Mark and Timo’s help with JavaScript stuff, Sam for his general omnipresence, especially when a quick review was needed, Federico, Amir and all the other potential users of the extension who tried it out, plus of course Sumana and Greg for keeping the whole thing going. There are plenty of other people I’ve forgotten, I’m sure: there are simply far too many to properly remember.
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Once again, thanks everyone and I hope to keep you posted over the coming months about further progress.
[1] I think this is particularly worth flagging up because I can’t be the only student whose experience lay with PHP (etc.) programming rather than system administration. Thus, it was probably worth thinking about this earlier and thus coming up with a considered plan of attack.
]]>Well, the short answer is “mostly code review”: getting my code tidied up, polished, submitted for review, reviewed and merged.
It’s not glamorous, and significant rewrites can take a great deal of time. But it’s working: I’m closing in on getting Translate’s translatesvg branch merged, and code for TranslateSvg proper is beginning to filter through the review system.
I’ve also been tweaking a few bits and pieces as a result of the testing phase, which began a week ago.
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