Hi All,

Welcome to the monthly MediaWiki Insights email!

First of all, many thanks and congratulations to Dragoniez, Anujagrawal, Nokib Sarkar, Agamya Samuel, Shy Blumer, AManWithNoPlan, Yejianfei and sunafterrainwm who got their first patch merged in MediaWiki core, extensions or services deployed in Wikimedia production during the month of July! 

One of the first merged patches in July was a project that Nokib Sarkar started at the Wikimedia Hackathon in Tallinn, developed further after the Hackathon and got deployed in July: A new language converter in MediaWiki. The added language converter from Meitei Script to Bengali Script replaces a previous prototype solution used on https://mni.wikipedia.org and enables speakers of the Manipuri language to read content on Manipuri Wikipedia in both scripts of the Manipuri language. Many thanks to Nokib for working on this and to Subbu, CScott, Amir Aaroni and everyone else who provided support!  

Simplify feature development: Exploring architectural patterns and opportunities in MediaWiki

The new annual plan kicked off in July and we started work on exploring ways to simplify feature development (KR 5.2).The work started with two parallel tasks: A survey overview of hooks, hooks handlers and extension registry parameters (5.2.1), and an exploration into unifying Echo and platform notifications into a platform-level architecture (5.2.2). Both tasks are planned work for this quarter (until the end of September) and hope to set the ground towards introducing new architectural patterns that simplify the way extensions interface with the platform. You can read more about the work and updates on the mediawiki page. The working group consists of principal engineers and members of MediaWiki and Feature Engineering teams. 

Project Snapshots: Parsoid deployed on first production wikis and a new way of provisioning on-demand test environments in the works

As part of our continued rollout of Parsoid Read Views, Parsoid has been turned on this week as the default read views renderer on English and Hebrew Wikivoyage. Here’s the rationale behind our confidence to roll-out this experimental feature and collect feedback. To report bugs and issues, please look at our known issues documentation, and if you find a new bug, please create a Phabricator ticket and tag the Content Transform Team in Phabricator. The rollout of Parsoid is part of 5.1 of the annual plan: Interventions to increase the sustainability of the platform. Many thanks to the Content Transform team for their work as well as to the people who report bugs!

In an earlier Insights email we shared about Huma, the new database to query dependencies in MediaWiki. Huma is now updated to use wmf.14 and 98% of the production classes are indexed. This improves the ability to run queries that find unused methods. Example: This is the query for unused methods of BagOStuff (you can replace the class name with any other class and check for that instead). "most used methods" of that class can be queried like this (giving insight on which methods to extract to a narrow interface). 

To facilitate the provisioning of testing environments for automatic and exploratory testing we will be soon introducing a new backend for PatchDemo that is backed by Kubernetes. This new way of provisioning on-demand test environments enables not just the provisioning of MediaWikis for testing but also the testing of custom services & extensions. Under the codename of Project Catalyst, we are beginning to create a rollout plan to make this new provisioning tool the default in Patch Demo. The first step of the rollout will be to enable full feature completeness with the current patch demo backend. Many thanks to the Quality and Test Engineering and Release Engineering teams for driving this work! A huge thanks also to the maintainers of the previous PatchDemo backend, Bartosz Dziewonski and Ed Sanders, for their invaluable contributions, spark and support in enhancing our confidence in delivering software changes <3. 

As part of the overall effort to improve the sustainability of MediaWiki, the Technical Documentation Team is starting a project to establish metrics that measure the health of the MediaWiki documentation. We’re looking into how we define documentation health and how we can use those metrics to drive documentation work. For more information or to share your ideas, visit the project page. For a preview of some of the data signals we’re considering, check out the experimental documentation metrics dashboard. (You can use PagePile ID 59125 to try it out!)

Up next: Wikimania: MediaWiki table and developer corner

Wikimania is approaching and some of us will be there! If you join the conference, please come say Hi in the Hackathon area at the MediaWiki table or the developer corner. This is also an opportunity to chat about the Product and Technology Advisory council pilot in person. If you are interested in applying or know someone who may be a good fit: Applications are still open through August 10, 2024. 

Hope to see some of you at Wikimania! 

Thanks all for reading,

Birgit