Hi All,
Welcome to the monthly MediaWiki Insights email!
First of all, many thanks and congratulations to Harshrathod50 and Ahecht
who got their first patch merged in MediaWiki core, extensions or services
deployed in Wikimedia production during the month of June!
As we concluded the Foundation’s fiscal year 2023/2024 on June 30, 2024,
it’s also time to share the final stats for contributions to MediaWiki core
over the past year: We’ve achieved a 25% increase in the number of authors
who have committed more than 5 patches! The overview
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Contributor_reten…>and
celebration
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Contributor_reten…>
pages now include the updated count and authors. Thank you all so much.
Project snapshots: Migration to Prometheus reaches milestone, work in
flight on REST API, and updates to Wikimedia password storage
The Observability team has completed the migration of MediaWiki core
metrics to the Prometheus-capable library StatsLib and made significant
progress overall
<https://grafana.wikimedia.org/d/nCxX65cSk/mediawiki-statslib-migration?orgI…>
(tracking task: T343020 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T343020>). This
marks a key milestone on the path towards using Prometheus as the standard
metrics infrastructure in Wikimedia production. The migration to Prometheus
will continue over the next year with the goal to be able to sunset
Graphite. Many thanks to the Observability team and everyone who has helped
with this migration so far!
The MediaWiki Interfaces team has been working on improving the experience
of REST API endpoint creators and callers through multiple related
initiatives:
- Ability to specify REST modules in an OpenApi-like JSON syntax
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T366837>
- Ability to define JSON schema definitions for body param validation
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T362108>
- Ability to generate request body specs from param settings
<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/1017343>
- Exposing a Swagger-UI view of MW REST endpoints
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T362006>
Putting all this together, REST endpoints can be specified and defined in
ways that not only support better namespacing, versioning, and parameter
validation, but which also feed directly into generation of an OpenAPI spec
which can be viewed on-wiki in an interactive sandbox. Some of this work is
still being completed – but these changes should benefit both endpoint
creators and endpoint callers. The work has been done in a
backward-compatible way, which means we've just introduced the ability to
do these things. More work remains to actually realize the benefits of
these changes. Many thanks to the MediaWiki Interfaces team and Daniel
Kinzler for driving much of the vision for this work.
The MediaWiki platform team worked on the completion of the Less.php
upgrade work for Less.js 3.0 compatibility, with the release of Less.php 5.0.
The release notes are at
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/mediawiki/libs/less.php/+/v5.0.0/CHANGES.md.
Before we can enable use of new CSS "slash" features in Less.php 5.0, a few
extensions and components have to first prepare themselves. Maintainers and
contributors are invited to help with this, details are at T368921
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T368921>. Many thanks to Hannah,
Dringsim, Piotr, Timo and Bartosz for their work!
More highlights from work done to improve security, ease of use,
maintainability and overall code health:
Zabe updated Wikimedia’s password storage: All passwords are now encrypted
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T150647> and we use the stronger Argon2
hashing algorithm <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T216682> instead of
PBKDF2, which together adds an extra layer of security. A big thanks to
Zabe for this important work & to the MediaWiki platform team for code
reviews!
Rdbms library: We shared about the efforts to improve consistency, security
and ease for getting database connections and performing common queries
already in the October
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Reports/October_2…>
and April
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Reports/April_202…>
MW Insights editions. Over the past weeks, work continued on removing or
deprecating methods <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T363839> that are no
longer needed after the introduction of the new APIs. To date, 19 methods
have been removed, the remaining are deprecated or marked internal.
The related work to update WMF-deployed extensions to use SelectQueryBuilder
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T311866> was completed in May, and the
work to migrate WMF-deployed extensions to use expression builder
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T350075> made substantial progress over
the past months! A huge thanks to Amir Sarabadani for leading on this work,
Umherirrender for taking on many updates to extensions, and everyone else
who helped make this happen.
TK999 refactored redirect storage to follow modern architecture standards (
T290639 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T290639>) - many thanks for
working on this :-)
Umherirrender worked on removing inline namespaces across core and
extensions over the past months (example
<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/OAuth/+/1042353>) -
many thanks for this impressive long tail of work to ensure consistent
usage of namespaced classes across MediaWiki. A big shout out also to
Danny712 for supporting this effort with code reviews!
The Wikimedia *interwiki-map on Meta* was migrated from a wikitext table to
a machine-readable JSON format (T365803
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T365803>). The map is now maintained as
JSON at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_map/list, with the former
page rendering this into a table for reading convenience, powered by a
Scribunto Lua module. Many thanks to Reedy for carrying out this work, and
to Pppery and Timo for supporting it!
Last, many thanks to the Kiwix team for their work on migrating from Mobile
Content Service (MSC) to its replacement, the Page Content Service
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Content_Service> (PCS). This enabled
us to set the sunset deadline for the Mobile Content Service
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T328036#9930794> for the end of July,
2024.
Outlook: We just started with the new annual plan
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2024-2025/…>
(July 2024-June 2025) and will share more about this work in the upcoming
Insights email.
Thanks all for reading!
Birgit
--
Birgit Müller (she/her)
Director of Product, MediaWiki and Developer Experiences
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
I am upgrading to version 1.42.1 and am getting the following error:
...cargo_tables_template_id key doesn't exist.
Running
D:\...\extensions\OATHAuth/maintenance/updateTOTPScratchTokensToArray.php...
An error occurred:
Error 1044: Access denied for user 'db_username'@'%' to database 'virtual'
Function: Wikimedia\Rdbms\DatabaseMySQL::doSelectDomain
Query: USE `virtual`
Notes:
$wgDBuser = is _not_ in the form of an email address (xxxxx(a)yyyyyy.zzz)
db_username (above is a replacement for the actual db username).
Any ideas on how to overcome this?
-Brian
Greetings, MediaWiki users and developers!
We are now accepting contributions for the 2024 MediaWiki Users and
Developers Conference [0], which will be held April 17-19 in Portland, OR,
USA. The deadline to submit a proposal is March 22. Sign up as soon as
possible at [1].
This will primarily be an in-person conference, however we will consider
remote presentations on a case-by-case basis.The first two days of the
conference will be reserved for presentations. The third day of the
conference will be a Create Camp, which will include tutorials, hands-on
presentations, and small group hacking sessions.
The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, formerly EMWCon, brings
together the community that makes up MediaWiki – those who develop for
MediaWiki, those who deploy MediaWiki, and those who use MediaWiki and are
enthusiastic about the software. MediaWiki is used every day in a variety
of contexts – educational projects, corporate knowledge bases, even online
hobbyist communities – all valuing MediaWiki for its flexibility and its
openness. By meeting together we can learn from our experiences and
continue to build a true community of support for MediaWiki.
Looking forward to seeing you in Portland!
- The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Organizing Committee:
James Hare - Conference Chair
Cindy Cicalese - Program Chair
Bryan Hilderbrand - Registration Chair
Jeffrey Wang - Social Chair
Ike Hecht - Sponsor Chair
Ryan Schmidt - Technology Chair
[0]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Users_and_Developers_Conference_20…
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Users_and_Developers_Conference_20…
Hello,
I recently configured my MediaWiki instance to pull data from a mySQL server using the External Data connector. It was a bit tricky, and I couldn’t find any existing tutorials, so I decided to create one.
https://youtu.be/4LV0X5M5Kts
This page has the step-by-step instructions: https://mshell.net/wikidemo
I hope you find this helpful!
Matt
As per the MediaWiki version lifecycle[1], I would like to announce the
formal end of life (EOL) of MediaWiki 1.38 as of today, Friday June 28,
2024.
1.40.4 is expected to be the last release for this branch.
This means that MediaWiki 1.40 will no longer receive maintenance or
security backports. It is therefore strongly discouraged that you continue
to use it.
It is recommended to upgrade either to MediaWiki 1.41, which will be
supported until December 2024, or 1.42, which will be supported until June
2025.
Thanks!
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Version_lifecycle
I've installed, ConfirmAccount, but what I really need is a bigger
stick: remove all occurrences of the link "Request Creation", so I
don't have to deal with the email messages associated with
ConfirmAccount. It's a Special page, so it's not something I can edit.
I expect disabling that page to be temporary. If I need to, I can
create an account as an administrator, so it's not a total loss.
Please help.
--
_______________________________________________________________
Bob Smith - bsmith(a)sudleyplace.com
http://www.sudleyplace.com - http://www.nars2000.org
Hello all,
The Code of Conduct Committee is a team of five trusted individuals (plus
five auxiliary members) with diverse affiliations responsible for general
enforcement of the Code of conduct for Wikimedia technical spaces.
Committee members are in charge of processing complaints, discussing with
the parties affected, agreeing on resolutions, and following up on their
enforcement. For more on their duties and roles, see
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct/Committee.
This is a call for community members interested in volunteering for
appointment to this committee. Volunteers serving in this role should be
experienced Wikimedians or have had experience serving in a similar
position before.
The current committee is doing the selection and will research and discuss
candidates. Six weeks before the beginning of the next Committee term, they
will publish their candidate slate (a list of candidates) on-wiki. The
community can provide feedback on these candidates, via private email to
the group choosing the next Committee. The feedback period will be two
weeks. The current Committee will then either finalize the slate, or update
the candidate slate in response to concerns raised. If the candidate slate
changes, there will be another two week feedback period covering the newly
proposed members. After the selections are finalized, there will be a
training period, after which the new Committee is appointed. The current
Committee continues to serve until the feedback, selection, and training
process is complete.
If you are interested in serving on this committee or like to nominate a
candidate, please write an email to techconductcandidates AT wikimedia.org
with details of your experience on the projects, your thoughts on the code
of conduct and the committee and what you hope to bring to the role and
whether you have a preference in being auxiliary or main member of the
committee. The committee consists of five main members plus five auxiliary
members and they will serve for a year; all applications are appreciated
and will be carefully considered. The deadline for applications is *the end
of day on June 25, 2024*.
Please feel free to pass this invitation along to any users who you think
may be qualified and interested.
Best,
Amir Sarabadani, on behalf of the Code of Conduct Committee