MediaWiki 1.28 introduced an optional pingback feature [0][1]. This feature is disabled by default.
The pingback feature allows MediaWiki anonymously to report back information about its installation to help developers: the MediaWiki version, database type, PHP version, operating system, system type (32-bit or 64-bit), machine hardware, web server software, and memory limit.
Aggregate pingback data collected since March 2017 is now viewable at https://pingback.wmflabs.org in graphical and tabular form. While this data only includes sites that opted in to data collection, it shows over 40,000 unique installations of MediaWiki in the last year in a variety of different configurations.
Enjoy exploring the aggregate data!
[0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgPingback [1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Pingback_Privacy_Statement
______________________________ Cindy Cicalese Product Manager, MediaWiki Platform Wikimedia Foundation
<quote name="Cindy Cicalese" date="2018-03-07" time="22:12:36 -0500">
Aggregate pingback data collected since March 2017 is now viewable at https://pingback.wmflabs.org in graphical and tabular form. While this data only includes sites that opted in to data collection, it shows over 40,000 unique installations of MediaWiki in the last year in a variety of different configurations.
I've said it before but: this is great Cindy!
Thank you!
Hey,
This is really nice.
As an extension maintainer I am particularly interested in the used MediaWiki and PHP versions. Is there a way to combine those two? For instance to show the PHP version distributions for people using MediaWiki 1.29 or later.
Cheers
-- Jeroen De Dauw | https://entropywins.wtf | https://keybase.io/jeroendedauw Software Crafter | Speaker | Student | Strategist | Contributor to Wikimedia and Open Source ~=[,,_,,]:3
Great suggestion. I'm working on adding some graphs that will show that now.
Cindy
______________________________ Cindy Cicalese Product Manager, MediaWiki Platform Wikimedia Foundation
On Fri, Mar 9, 2018 at 6:54 PM, Jeroen De Dauw jeroendedauw@gmail.com wrote:
Hey,
This is really nice.
As an extension maintainer I am particularly interested in the used MediaWiki and PHP versions. Is there a way to combine those two? For instance to show the PHP version distributions for people using MediaWiki 1.29 or later.
Cheers
-- Jeroen De Dauw | https://entropywins.wtf | https://keybase.io/jeroendedauw Software Crafter | Speaker | Student | Strategist | Contributor to Wikimedia and Open Source ~=[,,_,,]:3 _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
You can now see the PHP version distribution for each MediaWiki version, e.g. https://pingback.wmflabs.org/#php-version/php-version-media-wiki-1-29-timese... .
Cindy
______________________________ Cindy Cicalese Product Manager, MediaWiki Platform Wikimedia Foundation
On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 11:33 AM, Cindy Cicalese ccicalese@wikimedia.org wrote:
Great suggestion. I'm working on adding some graphs that will show that now.
Cindy
Cindy Cicalese Product Manager, MediaWiki Platform Wikimedia Foundation
On Fri, Mar 9, 2018 at 6:54 PM, Jeroen De Dauw jeroendedauw@gmail.com wrote:
Hey,
This is really nice.
As an extension maintainer I am particularly interested in the used MediaWiki and PHP versions. Is there a way to combine those two? For instance to show the PHP version distributions for people using MediaWiki 1.29 or later.
Cheers
-- Jeroen De Dauw | https://entropywins.wtf | https://keybase.io/jeroendedau w Software Crafter | Speaker | Student | Strategist | Contributor to Wikimedia and Open Source ~=[,,_,,]:3 _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
This is pretty nifty! Thanks for putting together this dashboard for the data.
I had a question about the pingback mechanism itself. Does it allow us to (a) know when a wiki has upgraded / changed something (mediawiki, php, db, os, etc.)? (b) know when a wiki has been decommissioned, i.e. does the wiki install send pingbacks regularly that lets us track a wiki as being alive vs. being decommissioned?
I couldn't tell with a quick scan of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgPingback or Ori's original announcement, hence the question.
Thanks,
Subbu.
On 03/07/2018 09:12 PM, Cindy Cicalese wrote:
MediaWiki 1.28 introduced an optional pingback feature [0][1]. This feature is disabled by default.
The pingback feature allows MediaWiki anonymously to report back information about its installation to help developers: the MediaWiki version, database type, PHP version, operating system, system type (32-bit or 64-bit), machine hardware, web server software, and memory limit.
Aggregate pingback data collected since March 2017 is now viewable at https://pingback.wmflabs.org in graphical and tabular form. While this data only includes sites that opted in to data collection, it shows over 40,000 unique installations of MediaWiki in the last year in a variety of different configurations.
Enjoy exploring the aggregate data!
[0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgPingback [1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Pingback_Privacy_Statement
Cindy Cicalese Product Manager, MediaWiki Platform Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
Does it allow us to (a) know when a wiki has upgraded / changed something (mediawiki, php, db, os, etc.)?
The pingback is sent on the first page load after maintenance/update.php is run if a pingback has not yet been sent for the current MediaWiki version. So, the pingback will only be sent once per MediaWiki version, even if other values, such as the PHP version, have changed.
(b) know when a wiki has been decommissioned, i.e. does the wiki install send pingbacks regularly that lets us track a wiki as being alive vs.
being
decommissioned?
A pingback is not sent when a wiki is decommissioned, and there is no regular heartbeat pingback to let us know if a given wiki is still being used.
Both of these facts do definitely limit the fidelity of the data. There will always be some underreporting of the data, since the choice not to enable pingback will remain. But it would be good to ensure that the data is as accurate as possible for those sites that do opt in while still preserving anonymity.
I would be interested in gathering feedback on how to improve the fidelity of pingback data. Should we increase the frequency of pingbacks to be able to determine if a wiki is no longer active? Is there any other interesting data that can and should be gathered without impinging upon the privacy of the sites?
Another tool used to gather data is wikiapiary [0], which is an opt-in site that uses bots to regularly scan registered wikis. It is limited by the fact that it only operates on wikis that have been registered, but it can determine if a site is no longer active. It also gathers a good deal more data than pingback, including installed extensions and their versions. Wikiapiary currently tracks over 20,000 sites.
One additional note on the default for the pingback functionality. As described in [1], pingback is controlled by the value of the configuration variable $wgPingback. The default value of $wgPingback in MediaWiki core is set in includes/DefaultSettings.php to false: pingback is disabled. In order to enable pingback, that value needs to be overridden in the MediaWiki configuration to set it to true - usually in LocalSettings.php. The command line installer does not currently offer an option to enable pingback. LocalSettings.php would have to be manually edited to do so. The web installer does provide a checkbox to select whether or not pingback will be enabled. This checkbox is initially checked and would need to be unchecked to prevent pingback from being enabled.
[0] https://wikiapiary.com [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgPingback
Cindy
______________________________ Cindy Cicalese Product Manager, MediaWiki Platform Wikimedia Foundation
On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 12:24 PM, Subramanya Sastry ssastry@wikimedia.org wrote:
This is pretty nifty! Thanks for putting together this dashboard for the data.
I had a question about the pingback mechanism itself. Does it allow us to (a) know when a wiki has upgraded / changed something (mediawiki, php, db, os, etc.)? (b) know when a wiki has been decommissioned, i.e. does the wiki install send pingbacks regularly that lets us track a wiki as being alive vs. being decommissioned?
I couldn't tell with a quick scan of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki /Manual:$wgPingback or Ori's original announcement, hence the question.
Thanks,
Subbu.
I would be interested in gathering feedback on how to improve the fidelity of pingback data. Should we increase the frequency of pingbacks to be able to determine if a wiki is no longer active? Is there any other interesting data that can and should be gathered without impinging upon the privacy of the sites?
I think it would be useful to know if a wiki is active as well as the current config for an active wiki (php version, m/w version, etc), so we have a more accurate picture of what wikis are actually depending on.
Subbu.
mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org