Grants:PEG/Menner/Improve SVG rendering

statusDRAFT

Menner/Improve SVG rendering

SVG is an important file format for graphics on Wikipedia and is used in thousands of science articles but has many problems.

targetAll Wikipedias

strategic priorityImprove quality, Increase participation

start dateJanuar 1

start year2015

end dateJanuar 1

end year2020

budget (local currency)28000 €

budget (USD)32000 USD

grant typeother

creator• Menner

contact(s)• Menner

give feedback

endorse

created on19:05, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

friendly space expectations

view all PEG requests

Goal

SVG is an important file format for graphics on Wikipedia and is used in thousands of science articles. And this also the underlying software libRSVG has many problems with rendering SVG even the article about force in german (de:Kraft) is affected (Third pic has bug #5792).

The issue arises since libRSVG was programmed by the Gnome project to render scalabe icons for their desktop environment. Graphics that contain text was not goal and activities around libRSVG are limited to maintenance today. Because of that important features required for usage inside Wikipedia are buggy or missing. Some bug reports and feature requests by our community are undone since nearly ten years. A test of my own showed that required work often takes only few days (see bug #5792).

SVG is important to Wikipedia but without our intervention the underlying software stays error prone.

Plan

Activities

Find a software developer that spends one month per year (0,083 FTE) on improving libRSVG over four years. (Alternativly two month every two years.)

Tasks for the developer come from the community and solve problems relevant to articles in Wikipedia.

Workflow:

Review missing features and open bugs and balance them between priority and effort
Contact software developer and assign tasks to him
Check results
Update review and repeat with step 2

Impact

Target readership

Everybody who is researching scientific or technical information on Wikipedia of any language.

Fit with strategy

Increasing participation:

Less errors in SVG rendering removes pitfalls for authors without experience in limitations of libRSVG. As consequence less distraction is created and new authors keep contributing.

Increasing quality:

Less errors in SVG renderer switches focus from workarounds to content.
Simplifying re-usage and translation of content by promoting SVG instead of binary PNG

Usage

To get an overview about the importance of a file format some statistic is useful. Based on database dump dewiki-20150302-pages-articles.xml.bz2 of german language Wikipedia the following estimation can be done. (No deep evaluation about systematic errors has been done.)

SVG: 56k
PNG: 92k (similar scope as SVG)
JPG: 1104k (mostly pictures)
GIF: 10k (similar scope as SVG)

Results have been gained with Linux tool en:grep. To change to another file format adapt the following command line call.

date && grep -o -E "(gif|GIF)\|(thumb|mini)" ./dewiki-latest-pages-articles.xml | wc -w && date

Measures of success

Less warnings about limitations of SVG renderer on related meta pages of Commons&co.

TODO exact places

About ten bugs and features are finished afterward.

Resources and risks

Resources

Active supporters

Active supporters review missing features and open bug and put them onto the task list and finally check results.

TODO mobilize others

Risks

Some of the requested features might be difficult to implement and should be discussed or omitted.

Budget

Project budget table

Number	Category	Item description	Unit	Number of units	Cost per unit	Total cost	Currency	Notes
1		Software developer	FTE/year	${\frac {\text{4 month}}{\text{12 month}}}$	84000	28000	EUR	Skills: XML, C, Pointers, OOP and Git. Experience with software of moderat complexity.

Total cost of project

28000 EUR

Total amount requested

28000 EUR

Additional sources of revenue

None

Discussion

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