Hello. I'm planning to shut down stat1010 tomorrow, to allow DC Ops to
connect power to its GPU card for T336040
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T336040>. We tried to do this work a
couple of weeks ago, but it turned out that the cable had not arrived.
We're pretty confident about it this time.
I expect that it will be around 13:30 UTC and the outage for stat1010
will last up to 30 minutes.
If you can plan to use a different stat100* server while the work is
carried out, that would be very helpful.
On the other hand, if this planned maintenance will impact your work and
you can't work around it, please let me know and I will defer the power
down.
Kind regards,
Ben
--
*Ben Tullis*(he/him)
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hi everyone,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed tomorrow Wednesday,
April 17, at 9:30 AM PST / 16:30 UTC. Find your local time here. The
theme for this showcase is Supporting Multimedia on Wikipedia.
You are welcome to watch via the YouTube stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpSQD9Bc8Ek. As usual, you can join
the conversation in the YouTube chat as soon as the showcase goes
live.
This month's presentations:
Towards image accessibility solutions grounded in communicative principles
By Elisa Kreiss
Images have become an omnipresent communicative tool -- and this is no
exception on Wikipedia. However, the undeniable benefits they carry
for sighted communicators turns into a serious accessibility challenge
for people who are blind or have low vision (BLV). BLV users often
have to rely on textual descriptions of those images to equally
participate in an ever-increasing image-dominated online lifestyle. In
this talk, I will present how framing accessibility as a communication
problem highlights important ways forward in redefining image
accessibility on Wikipedia. I will present the Wikipedia-based dataset
Concadia and use it to discuss the successes and shortcomings of image
captions and alt texts for accessibility, and how the usefulness of
accessibility descriptions is fundamentally contextual. I will
conclude by highlighting the potential and risks of AI-based solutions
and discussing implications for different Wikipedia editing
communities.
Automatic Multi-Path Web Story Creation from a Structural Article
By Daniel Nkemelu
Web articles such as Wikipedia serve as one of the major sources of
knowledge dissemination and online learning. However, their in-depth
information--often in a dense text format--may not be suitable for
mobile browsing, even in a responsive user interface. We propose an
automatic approach that converts a structured article of any length
into a set of interactive Web Stories that are ideal for mobile
experiences. We focused on Wikipedia articles and developed
Wiki2Story, a pipeline based on language and layout models, to
demonstrate the concept. Wiki2Story dynamically slices an article and
plans one to multiple Story paths according to the document hierarchy.
For each slice, it generates a multi-page summary Story composed of
text and image pairs in visually appealing layouts. We derived design
principles from an analysis of manually created Story practices. We
executed our pipeline on 500 Wikipedia documents and conducted user
studies to review selected outputs. Results showed that Wiki2Story
effectively captured and presented salient content from the original
articles and sparked interest in viewers.
--
Kinneret Gordon
Lead Research Community Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
Hello. I'm planning to shut down stat1010 later today, to allow DC Ops
to connect power to its GPU card for T336040
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T336040>.
The exact window will depend on when they are available, but I would
expect that it will be around 13:30 UTC and last up to 30 minutes.
If you can plan to use a different stat100* server while the work is
carried out, that would be very helpful.
On the other hand, if this planned maintenance will impact your work and
you can't work around it, please let me know and I will defer the power
down.
Kind regards,
Ben
--
*Ben Tullis*(he/him)
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hi everyone,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed on Wednesday, March 20, at
9:30 AM PST / 16:30 UTC. Find your local time here
<https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1710952200>. In line with Women's History
Month, the theme for this showcase is *Addressing Knowledge Gaps*.
You are welcome to watch via the YouTube stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6wrr9WShTk. As usual, you can join the
conversation in the YouTube chat as soon as the showcase goes live.
This month's presentation:
Leveraging Recommender Systems to Reduce Content Gaps on WikipediaBy *Mo
Houtti*Many Wikipedians use algorithmic recommender systems to help them
find interesting articles to edit. The algorithms underlying those systems
are driven by a straightforward assumption: we can look at what someone
edited in the past to figure out what they’ll most likely want to edit
next. But the story of what Wikipedians want to edit is almost definitely
more complex than that. For example, our own prior research shows that
Wikipedians prefer prioritizing articles that would minimize content gaps.
So, we asked, what would happen if we incorporated that value into
Wikipedians’ personalized recommendations? Through a controlled experiment
on SuggestBot, we found that recommending more content gap articles didn’t
significantly impact editing, despite those articles being less “optimally
interesting” according to the recommendation algorithm. In this
presentation, I will describe our experiment, our results, and their
implications - including how recommender systems can be one useful strategy
for tackling content gaps on Wikipedia.Bridging the offline and online-
Offline meetings of WikipediansBy *Nicole Schwitter*Wikipedia is primarily
known as an online encyclopaedia, but it also features a noteworthy offline
component: Wikipedia and particularly its German-language edition – which
is one of the largest and most active language versions – is characterised
by regular local offline meetups which give editors the chance to get to
know each other. This talk will present the recently published dewiki
meetup dataset which covers (almost) all offline gatherings organised on
the German-language version of Wikipedia. The dataset covers almost 20
years of offline activity of the German-language Wikipedia, containing 4418
meetups that have been organised with information on attendees, apologies,
date and place of meeting, and minutes recorded. The talk will explain how
the dataset can be used for research, highlight the importance of
considering offline meetings among Wikipedians, and place these insights
within the context of addressing gender gaps within Wikipedia.
Best,
Kinneret
--
Kinneret Gordon
Lead Research Community Officer
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hello (especially to Superset users),
As you may know, the Data Platform SRE team is currently working on
migrating the Analytics Superset instances to Kubernetes (under ticket
T347710 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T347710>) and, happily, I can
report that we are making good progress.
This is just a courtesy email to let you know that we plan to switch our
staging instance (superset-next.wikimedia.org
<https://superset-next.wikimedia.org>) to over to Kubernetes over the
next day or two. This is unlikely to affect anyone's work at the moment,
given that both the staging and production instances of Superset have
been on version 3.1.0 for a while.
However, given that this staging instance is available for you to use at
any time, we thought it best to let you know that we are currently
working on it and that it may be in a state of flux for a while.
Once it is stable on Kubernetes, we may well contact you again and ask
you kindly to test superset-next for us and report your findings. At the
moment though, we're just working on the transition itself so there
won't be much for you to test.
As ever, if you have any queries or concerns, please don't hesitate to
let us know.
Kind regards,
Ben
--
*Ben Tullis*(he/him)
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
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Hello,
If you don't use the GPUs on the stat servers you can skip the rest of
this message.
If you do use stat1005 and its GPU, please be aware that we are planning
to move this GPU to a new stat server stat1010 as soon as it's feasible
to do so. Hopefully within a week or two.
Please could you let us know if this would be inconvenient for you and
we will try to accommodate your needs. We'll let you know a precise date
for the GPU move once we have assessed the current usage and have
planned the work with the DC Ops team in eqiad.
If you still need to use a GPU on buster, you can continue to use
stat1008 for now.
As ever, if you have any queries or concerns about these operations,
please do let us know.
Kind regards,
Ben
--
*Ben Tullis*(he/him)
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hello,
We are going to be carrying out a short maintenance operation on our
Presto cluster on Monday morning at approximately 11:00 UTC. There may
be a few minutes where Presto is unavailable and this may have an impact
on Superset dashboards that use Presto. We hope to keep this period of
instability to the region of 5-10 minutes.
Specifically, the work involves moving the presto co-ordinator role as
part of a server refresh. (T336045
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T336045>)
We have attempted to make sure that this is a non-breaking change,
especially for any users of wmfdata-python
<https://github.com/wikimedia/wmfdata-python>.
If this maintenance window is inconvenient for you, please do let us
know and we can look to defer the work. Similarly, if you notice
anything unusual afterwards, please let us know.
Kind regards,
Ben
--
*Ben Tullis*(he/him)
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hello,
Just a quick message to let you know that we have two new analytics
clients <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Systems/Clients>
(aka stats servers) ready for use.
These are:
* stat1010 <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stat1010> (replacement
for stat1005)
* stat1011 <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stat1011> (replacement
for stat1007)
Both of these servers run Debian Bullseye and you can see the specs on
the linked Wikitech pages.
These are the second and third Bullseye stats servers, so hopefully
there shouldn't be any surprises with moving your work to these hosts.
If you could start to migrate away from the old servers, that would be
very helpful, as we will shortly start to prepare to decommission the
older stats servers.
You may have read in another email that we plan to migrate the GPU from
stat1005 to stat1008 as part of this refresh. Please let us know if this
is likely to impact your work and we will try to take it into account.
As ever, if you have any queries or concerns, please let us know at any
time.
Kind regards,
Ben
--
*Ben Tullis*(he/him)
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hi all,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed on Wednesday, February 21,
at 8:30 AM PST / 16:30 UTC. Find your local time here
<https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1708533000>. The theme for this showcase is
*Platform Governance and Policies*.
You are welcome to watch via the YouTube stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1xYwRw1rHU. As usual, you can join the
conversation in the YouTube chat as soon as the showcase goes live.
This month's presentation:
Sociotechnical Designs for Democratic and Pluralistic Governance of Social
Media and AIBy *Amy X. Zhang, University of Washington*Decisions about
policies when using widely-deployed technologies, including social media
and more recently, generative AI, are often made in a centralized and
top-down fashion. Yet these systems are used by millions of people, with a
diverse set of preferences and norms. Who gets to decide what are the
rules, and what should the procedures be for deciding them---and must we
all abide by the same ones? In this talk, I draw on theories and lessons
from offline governance to reimagine how sociotechnical systems could be
designed to provide greater agency and voice to everyday users and
communities. This includes the design and development of: 1) personal
moderation and curation controls that are usable and understandable to
laypeople, 2) tools for authoring and carrying out governance to suit a
community's needs and values, and 3) decision-making workflows for
large-scale democratic alignment that are legitimate and consistent.
Best,Kinneret
--
Kinneret Gordon
Lead Research Community Officer
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>