MediaWiki-Core February 2015

mediawiki-core@lists.wikimedia.org

6 participants
4 discussions

Wikidata and Truth
by Nikolas Everett 24 Feb '15

24 Feb '15

Folks: so Stas and I've spent two days talking to the wikidata folks and I've learned some fun stuff. I'm sending this email to this mailing list, because, well, I just have to write this down and this list cares about things. Maybe they'll care about this thing. I'm not sending this to wikidata's mailing list because I'm not really confident enough to send this to experts yet. Anyway, the most interesting bit that I learned so far is that the Wikidata team claims that Wikidata doesn't describe truth. That might seem like a silly difference at first but you start to get into trouble when you want to query it and don't understand that. Think about it this way: there are multiple values for the Jesus's birthday <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q302#P569> and wikidata actually doesn't claim that either of them are true, just that they are *according to some sources*. Look also at George Washington's spouse <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q23#P26>. She has a qualifier - the date of their marriage. These qualifies are like preconditions to the truth. Kinda. They aren't always used that way but you can sort of pretend. But we can emerge from Cartesian doubt! Wikidata has some concept of "true enough for most uses" called "best rank" <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Ranking>. Its a reasonably simple concept that amounts to "the community decides". So the plan is to implement queries against that first. This should be good enough for wikigrok initially and faster to implement and query because it allows us to ignore things like qualifiers and references. Nik

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Extracting unit tests from mediawiki test suite
by Antoine Musso 04 Feb '15

04 Feb '15

Hello, The MediaWiki core tests are a bit of a mess, tends to be slow and require a working MediaWiki installation. We could certainly extract tests that exercise a single function and do not depend on having mw installed. Ie unit tests. Doing so, we could have devs and CI run the lightweight/fast unit tests and skip the slow tests, hopefully saving a lot of time. Another interest, is that the resulting unit tests suite will give us a good overview of our code coverage. We could probably generate a coverage report quite fast tricking people in writing more unit tests to enhance the metric. I am not sure whom to bring the subject to nor how to get a champion elected to pursue that Augeas cleaning. I am sure MediaWiki Core team will have some good ideas :-] There is a task https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T87781 cheers, -- Antoine "hashar" Musso

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Possible OAuth focus
by Bryan Davis 03 Feb '15

03 Feb '15

Chris has an epic in the mw-core backlog tracking OAuth fixes that we could focus on instead of SOA Auth. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T86869 There are a few things that are compelling about considering a shift of focus to this for me: * We already have a list of things to work on! * Erik is *really* interested in improving OAuth * We started this project and know that there are things we'd like to polish up * This has a more visible impact than core code cleanup * We can probably come up with metrics to go along with it The down sides: * Authn/z will need work eventually * We need to keep working on SOA Auth RfC either way Thoughts? I'd be happy to have a conference call with the current team and anyone else who is interested to discuss this if it seems like that would be more efficient. Bryan -- Bryan Davis Wikimedia Foundation <bd808(a)wikimedia.org> [[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] Sr Software Engineer Boise, ID USA irc: bd808 v:415.839.6885 x6855

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Having a phab ticket associated with all commits
by Bryan Davis 02 Feb '15

02 Feb '15

I was in a meeting with Damon today and he brought up something that might be interesting for us as a team to try out. He suggested that all gerrit commits should be traceable to a phabricator ticket. This is something that I have actually done at other companies to the point of having it be required for git to accept the patch. The point wouldn't be to have a direct one-to-one correlation between phab tickets and each commit, but to have some traceability about the larger goals that each unit of work is intended to serve. Obviously when we are fixing things in response to open issues this is easy. It takes a bit more practice to make sure that the spontaneous "I have to clean this up because my eyes are bleeding" commits have something in phab to associate the commit to. Thoughts? Bryan -- Bryan Davis Wikimedia Foundation <bd808(a)wikimedia.org> [[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] Sr Software Engineer Boise, ID USA irc: bd808 v:415.839.6885 x6855

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MediaWiki-Core February 2015