Hello All,
Welcome to the second edition of the monthly MediaWiki Insights
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Reports> email!
Since the beginning of July, the Foundation has dedicated MediaWiki product
leadership and a new MediaWiki engineering group
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Engineering_Group>.
In August
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Reports/August_2023>,
we’ve shared a broad overview on the focus for the next few quarters:
1. Building up the new MW Engineering group and MW Product function
2. Developing a strategy for MediaWiki - by June 30th, 2024 [WMF Annual
Plan, WE3
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024/Product_%26_Technology/OKRs#Bucket_1:_Wiki_Experiences>
]
3. Reaching a 20% increase of authors to selected MediaWiki repositories
deployed in Wikimedia production - by June 30th, 2024 [WE3.2]
4. Investing in developer experiences and reduce fragmentation of
developer workflows [WE 3.1] - continuous work with specific deliverables
in 2023/24
5. Exploring and resolving a set of questions around stewardship and
Open Source strategy (goes beyond MediaWiki) [WE3.3]
We’re still in the process of “settling in” (1.), but also made progress on
a few things that we wanted to start tackling early:
Stewardship
We’ve had conversations within the MediaWiki Engineering group
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Engineering_Group> on which
components we should prioritize initially/own directly and what the things
are that we’d primarily provide guidance on. While this is work in progress
and also touches on bigger questions, one notable decision is that MW
Engineering takes on stewardship for the authentication-related components
(in MW core and extensions), with support from the Security team. We’ve
resolved outstanding code stewardship requests for the CentralAuth
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T252244> and Oauth
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T224919> extensions as a consequence of
this decision. These changes and other updates are reflected on the developers
and maintainers page <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers>
on
MW.org.
MediaWiki within Wikimedia’s ecosystem: Update on interviews
So far we’ve interviewed about 40 people on their experiences with
MediaWiki within Wikimedia’s ecosystem and plan a few more interviews. We
expect to be able to wrap up this first round of research in October and to
share the outcome and conclusions in November. These conversations have
been incredibly helpful - many thanks to all the people who took the time
to share their thoughts or still will do so <3
You can find a tentative timeline and overview on research planned
throughout the next few quarters on this page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights#Research_pillars_and_timeline>
.
Project snapshot: Source Maps and top-level autologin
Over the past few weeks, the MediaWiki Engineering group has been working
on a mix of onboarding tasks (i.e. ResourceLoader, ActionAPI, CentralAuth),
production errors, long term initiatives (Parsoid Read Views, RESTBase
deprecation), consultancy, code review for staff and volunteers’ patches,
and completed projects that had been in the making for a while. A few
snapshots:
Source Maps <https://web.dev/source-maps/> aim to make debugging in web
development easier. It’s a technique for mapping combined and minified
JavaScript back to the original files. Support for source maps is now
implemented in ResourceLoader
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader>, to aid with debugging
ResourceLoader in production. You can learn more about this work in this
ticket. <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T47514> <3 to Tim, Timo and
others for their work on this!
Browsers increasingly roll out anti-tracking measures and limitations on
third-party cookie use. An unfortunate side effect of this is that it also
impacts CentralAuth autologin. One way to mitigate the effects and to allow
auto-login when the browser blocks third-party cookies is to attempt
central auto-login via top-level navigation. This has been enabled in
September. You can learn more about this work in this ticket
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T326281>. <3 to Gergö and others for the
work on this!
Onboarding, among other means, has continued via the weekly Code Mob
sessions: Check out the recordings on this page
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:BPirkle_(WMF)/Code_Mobs_2023> if you
want to follow along.
Next: Enable more people to know MediaWiki and contribute effectively
A key question this year is how we can grow the number of people willing
and able to contribute to MediaWiki. So far we’ve explored approaches and
focus areas, turned some aspects of this already into active practice
through code review and consultancy for teams whose projects touch
MediaWiki core; and came up with first ideas that may help new MediaWiki
contributors (example <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T347347>).
We’ll be sharing more about this work and possible initiatives in October,
which is when we “officially” start with working towards an increase of
authors across a specific set of MW repositories that are deployed to
production (WMF Annual Plan, WE3.2
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024/Product_%26_Technology/OKRs#Bucket_1:_Wiki_Experiences>
).
Thanks all for reading! - Have a great weekend,
Birgit
--
Birgit Müller (she/her)
Director of Product, MediaWiki and Developer Experiences
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>