FYI :-) This definitely should be interesting to bot writers.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 8:36 AM
Subject: [Toolserver-l] Please register for the Berlin hackathon -
June 1-3, 2012
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>,
toolserver-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org,
mediawiki-enterprise(a)lists.wikimedia.org
I invite you to the yearly Berlin hackathon. It's 1-3 June and
registration is now open. If you need financial assistance or help with
hotel/hostel, just mention it in the registration form.
https://wmberlin.eventbrite.com/
This is the premier event for the MediaWiki and Wikimedia technical
community. We'll be hacking, designing, and socialising, primarily
talking about Gadgets, the switch to Lua, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Labs.
Our goals for the event are to bring 100-150 people together, with
lots of people who have not attended such events before. User
scripts, gadgets, API use, Toolserver, Wikimedia Labs, mobile,
structured data, templates -- if you are into any of these things, we
want you to come!
Details: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Berlin_Hackathon_2012
Thanks to Wikimedia Germany for hosting and coordinating this event.
(Venue still to be determined.)
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
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--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Note for authors of upload bots.
The just released MediaWiki 1.17.3 and 1.18.2, as well as Wikimedia
projects as of now, have changed to require the edit token for upload.
This had been done in 1.16, then backed out due to the disruption
produced to bots, and the fact that it wasn't possible to generate a
file upload with javascript. It is now possible to do with modern
browsers, so the check has gone in again.
If your bot is not providing an edit token on upload, it will start failing.
Relevant piece of the announcemente copied below:
-------- Original message --------
Subject: MediaWiki security and maintenance release
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 19:37:32 -0000
From: Sam Reed <reedy(a)wikimedia.org>
To: <mediawiki-announce(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
CC: wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Jan Schejbal of Hatforce.com discovered a cross-site request forgery
(CSRF) vulnerability in Special:Upload. Modern browsers (since at least
as early as December 2010) are able to post file uploads without user
interaction, violating previous security assumptions within MediaWiki.
Depending on the wiki's configuration, this vulnerability could lead to
further compromise, especially on private wikis where the set of allowed
file types is broader than on public wikis. Note that CSRF allows
compromise of a wiki from an external website even if the wiki is behind
a firewall.
For more details, see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35317
I've created a template that's intended for use on feedback pages
where users report lots of bugs and issues:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template:Tracked
This could be useful in helping non-technical users quickly understand
the status of issues that are being reported on-wiki.
However, it would be even more useful if the bug status could be
automatically regularly updated according to what's in Bugzilla.
Is there a bot already that can update bugzilla status information in
wiki pages? If not, is anyone in the list up for taking a crack at it?
Thanks :)
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Hi all.
I use Perl and upload functions of MediaWiki::API and MediaWiki::Bot modules
(last version).
Bots don't work - returned "HTTP::Message content must be bytes at
/usr/local/share/perl/5.10.0/HTTP/Request/Common.pm line 91".
OS is Debian Linux.
How to resolve this issue?
--
Roman Noverlan
Hi everyone,
My bot is fully functional. It does a number of things in a loop and
sleeps between each item in the loop, then at the end of the loop.
Yet, my bot is single-threaded. If it is desirable that some of these
items occur more frequently than others, then it seems appropriate to
break the task up into multiple threads. Yet, there are a few problems:
- Editing Wikipedia requires a login, edit token, and cookies, which
must be shared among the threads if multiple threads are able to edit.
- If the threads do not coordinate their accesses to Wikipedia, the bot
may communicate with Wikipedia in bursts, which does not play nicely.
- One can get logged out at any time, requiring that the thread login
again.
- The fragile nature of the Internet means that all kinds of spurious
errors are bound to occur.
Does anyone have any ideas about how to implement multithreading in a
Wikipedia bot in a robust way?
Richard
Hi all and TIA.
I usually run my bot with maxlag = 5 seconds.
When it attempts a
communication with Wikipedia, if it receives Error:maxlag or HTTP 503 ,
it retries up to 5 times with 10 seconds between each try. If it still
can't get through, it aborts. At the time I'm writing this, about 3pm
Friday afternoon in Australia, my bot is routinely aborting due to 5
maxlag or 503s in a row.
I am usually logged into #wikipedia and #wikipedia-en on Freenode, and
have noticed that many times I and other Australians will complain that
Wikipedia is very slow and timing out for human edits, when Americans
claim that they have no such problem at that time.
Currently I'm running the bot with maxlag = 10 seconds, and it's having
no problems now.
Is the maxlag parameter something that will change if I'm connecting
from Australia? May I be allowed some leniency for being on the other
side of the world, or does it not work like that? If maxlag > 5
seconds, does that mean I should stop wasting the server's time and run
my bot some other time?
Richard
Hi, gang.
#wikipedia-bag on Freenode is a little slow, so I think the list might
give me some more action.
I'm a 33 year old doctor obviously with too much spare time on his
hands. I've made about 15,000 edits to English Wikipedia manually.
Recently I had the idea of writing a bot to do a few things
automatically. I'm writing it in C (C99) on an Ubuntu machine. I've
been coding for 5 days and my bot ought to be making test edits within
a couple of days.
Is anyone else out there using C, or am I the only one crazy enough?
Richard