I was talking with Tim Starling about the automation of the wiki creation, renaming (locking, removing). In theory, this should be the first and the most important step.

I am in favor of giving the button to stewards, as LangCom should stay clearly a non-executive body in relation to the Wikimedia web projects. However, it shouldn't be a big deal if we have the button, as well.

I would like to know what do you think, as well as what do stewards think (so, MF-Warburg, may you talk with stewards about that and give us their opinion). After we articulate our own opinions, this should be put on Meta for wider community discussion and decision.

At this moment we don't have ETA for the application, but I suppose something between the next couple of months and the end of the year should be reasonable to expect, as Tim has taken that to do.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: tstarling <no-reply@phabricator.wikimedia.org>
Date: Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 4:51 AM
Subject: [Maniphest] [Created] T158730: Automate WMF wiki creation
To: millosh@gmail.com

tstarling created this task.
tstarling added projects: Services, Release-Engineering-Team, MediaWiki-Configuration.
Herald added a subscriber: Aklapper.

TASK DESCRIPTION

Wiki creation is quite an involved process, documented on wikitech. I think, at least for certain common cases, the task could be almost completely automated.

For uncomplicated creation of new language editions under existing projects, with default configuration, the following tasks need to be done, none of which require complex human decision-making:

Reconfigure many services by pushing configuration changes to Gerrit, and deploy those commits
- mediawiki-config: wikiversions, *.dblist
- WikimediaMessages
- DNS
- RESTBase
- Parsoid
- Analytics refinery
- cxserver
- Labs dnsrecursor
Run addWiki.php. This script aims to automate all tasks which can be executed with the privileges of a MW maintenance script.
Run Wikidata's populateSitesTable.php. It should probably be incorporated into addWiki.php.
Run labsdb maintain-views
Update wikistats labs

So at a minimum, you need to write and deploy commits to 8 different projects, run three scripts, and manually insert some rows into a DB in a labs instance.

Despite there being no human decision making in this process, the documentation requires that you involve people from approximately four different teams (services, ops, wikidata, analytics).

In my opinion, something is going wrong here in terms of development policy. The problem is getting progressively worse. In July 2004, I fully automated wiki creation and provided a web interface allowing people to create wikis. Now, it is unthinkable.

Obviously services are the main culprits. Is it possible for in-house services to follow pybal's example, by polling a central HTTP configuration service for their wiki lists? As with pybal, the service could just be a collection of static files on a webserver. Even MediaWiki could profitably use such a central service for its dblists, with APC caching.

So let's suppose we could get the procedure down to:

Commit/review/deploy the DNS update
Commit/review/deploy a configuration change to the new central config service.
Run addWiki.php

Labs instances needing to know about the change would either poll the config service, or be notified by addWiki.php. WikimediaMessages could be updated in advance via translatewiki.net.

(Thanks to Milos Rancic for raising this issue with me.)

TASK DETAIL

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T158730

EMAIL PREFERENCES

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/

To: tstarling
Cc: mobrovac, Reedy, demon, millosh, tstarling, Aklapper, Liudvikas, Luke081515, Eevans, Hardikj, zeljkofilipin, Jay8g, Krenair, Legoktm, greg