We know NSA wants Wikipedia data, as Wikipedia is listed in one of the
NSA slides:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KS8-001.jpg
That slide is about HTTP, and the tech staff are moving the
user/reader base to HTTPS.
As we learn more about the NSA programs, we need to consider vectors
other than HTTP for the NSA to obtain the data they want. And the
userbase needs to be aware of the current risks.
One question from the "Dells are backdored"[sic] thread that is worth
separate consideration is:
Are the Wikimedia transit links encrypted, especially for database replication?
MySQL has replication over SSL, so I assume the answer is Yes.
If not, is this necessary or useful, and feasible ?
However we also need to consider that SSL and other encryption may be
useless against NSA/etc, which means replicating non-public data
should be avoided wherever possible, as it becomes a single point of
failure.
Given how public our system is, we don't have a lot of non-public
data, so we might be able to design the architecture so that
information isnt replicated, and also ensure it isnt accessed over
insecure links. I think the only parts of the dataset that are
private & valuable are
* passwords/login cookies,
* checkuser info - IPs and useragents,
* WMF analytics, which includes readers iirc, and
* hidden/deleted edits
* private wikis and mailing lists
Have I missed any?
Are passwords and/or checkuser info replicated?
Is there a data policy on WMF analytics data which prevents it flowing
over insecure links, and limits what is collected and ensures
destruction of the data within reasonable timeframes? i.e. how about
not using cookies to track analytics of readers who are on HTTP
instead of HTTPS?
The private wikis can be restricted to https, depending on the value
of the data on those wikis in the wrong hands. The private mailing
lists will be harder to secure, and at least the English Wikipedia
arbcom list contain a lot of valuable data about contributors.
Regarding hidden/deleted edits, the replication isnt the only source
of this data. All edits are also exposed via Recent Changes
(https/api/etc) as they occur, and the value of these edits is
determined by the fact they are hidden afterwards (e.g. don't appear
in dumps). Is there any way to control who is effectively capturing
all edits via Recent Changes?
--
John Vandenberg
For some months, Twitter have been blocking most URLs in their direct
messages (DMs), supposedly as an anti-spam measure.
Do we have someone who has a contact there, who could ask them to
whitelist Wikimedia project URLs in DMs?
--
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 10:26 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm sure a Board member, Lila, or Erik will correct me if I am mistaken,
> but my understanding is that there is internal agreement at Board level
> that the Product side of the org needs some systemic changes, that Lila was
> chosen with the goal of making those changes, and that some changes are
> already happening.
There's agreement at all levels that we want to continue down the path
set by Sue back in 2012 [1] for WMF to truly understand itself as a
technology and grantmaking organization. That path led to where we are
today:
1) As part of the ED transition, Sue recommended (and the Board
accepted the recommendation) to seek an ED with a strong
technology/product background, and we hired Lila Tretikov as Sue's
successor who matches those requirements.
2) In November 2012, I recommended that we prepare for building out
new functions for UX and Analytics, and prepare for dedicated
leadership for Engineering and Product. Sue accepted this
recommendation. I hired Directors for UX and Analytics in 2013,
followed by Community Engagement in 2014, and finally we hired a VP
Engineering last week to complete the process.
3) To better account for the need to learn quickly and adjust course
as appropriate, we introduced quarterly reviews in December 2012 [3]
and increasingly reduced the specificity of Annual Plan level
commitments while increasing the focus on metrics and accountability
in the reviews.
4) On the technology and product front, many improvements to process
and support infrastructure have been implemented in the last couple of
years, including but not limited to:
- Development of MediaWiki Vagrant as a standardized dev environment,
to reduce failure cases due to developer environment inconsistencies
- Improvements to continuous integration infrastructure for PHP unit
tests and QUnit JavaScript unit tests, and increased focus (but not
nearly enough yet) on automated tests, especially for newly developed
features
- Introduction and continued improvement of BetaLabs as a staging
environment for all commits, increased use of automated end-to-end
browser tests and QA testing by humans to catch bugs and regressions
prior to production rollouts
- Introduction and use of various tools for measuring the impact of
features, including EventLogging as a standard instrumentation
framework for measuring feature usage, dashboards for visualizing
usage, WikiMetrics for analyzing editor cohort behavior, Editor
Engagement Vital Signs for understanding system-wide user behavior,
analysis of pageview data using Hadoop (just rolled out), etc.
- Highly specialized automated testing frameworks for specific
projects, e.g. Parsoid round-trip testing and visual diffing (!) to
detect dirty diffs or output problems
- Introduction of design research as a discipline in the UX team
(through hiring of Abbey Ripstra as User Research Lead) and
incorporation of user studies in a much more systematic way across
products
- Community liaisons dedicated to key products, responding to user
feedback and helping Product Managers understand more complex
community needs
- Continued shortening of release/deployment cycles; significant
improvements to deployment tooling, rewriting our legacy "scap" tools
to increase the ability to monitor and reason about deployments;
introduction of daily "SWAT" deploys to quickly release fixes, etc.
- Introduction of various infrastructure tools that help us better
analyze/profile issues, including logstash for log analysis, increased
use of graphite for performance metrics collection and various
front-ends for visualizing those metrics
- Shift towards loosely coupled services, addressing the difficulty of
maintaining and improving our highly monolithic codebase (examples
include Parsoid, Citoid, Mathoid, and the new Content API in
development)
- Introduction of Beta Features framework to stage features for early adopters
5) The changes Lila has pushed for since we started include:
- Greater focus on quarterly prioritization and a "rolling roadmap"
rather than a fiscal year view of the world
- Increased emphasis on understanding the needs of different user
personas at all cycles of software development, including through use
of qualitative and quantitative methods
- Reducing velocity of user-facing changes (esp. on desktop) to
increase focus on foundations (platform/process improvements) that
ultimately will enable us to move faster and more effectively
- Documenting product development methodology on-wiki and establishing
a clearer social contract (to reduce the reliance on RFCs/votes
regarding feature configurations)
- Surveying the needs of current users to more systematically balance
projects that serve future/new users vs. projects that serve the users
we have today
- Improved communication channels for community engagement to make it
easier to understand what major projects are currently in development
and how to provide feedback
This already means, effectively, that the commitments in the Annual
Plan developed during Sue's time should be taken with a big block of
salt at this point in time -- we're slowing down the deployment (not
development) of big user-facing features like Flow and VE as much as
needed to ensure that we incorporate user feedback, data and
qualitative research into the product development process
appropriately and spend sufficient time on the technical foundations
for these projects.
The quarterly prioritization alone has been, IMO, a huge improvement
that's already paying off. In the "Annual Plan" view of the world,
it's unlikely that we would have prioritized a project like HHVM the
way we did, because we were generally stuck on the priorities set for
the whole year. But it was very clear that this project would provide
huge benefits to our users, and I'm glad we were able to call it out
as _the_ top priority for Q1 and give the team the space to really
focus on getting it done (almost there now, starting to serve reader
traffic [4]).
Our draft Q2 top priorities (not yet posted on-wiki, but discussed in
the metrics meeting last week) are consistent with the above, with the
main user-facing push being on mobile web/apps and editing
performance, while the other priorities are more
platform/process-related. Once again, we're continuing to work on VE /
Flow, but focusing more on fundamentals (performance, architecture,
testing, use case analysis, etc.) than accelerating deployments.
My focus over the coming days is to flesh out the details for the Q2
priorities, and then shift to putting more effort in documenting and
refining product development methodologies and processes on-wiki. On
the engineering side, there's plenty of process/infrastructure
improvement to do as well. From my point of view, continued
improvement to test coverage and CI/testing infrastructure, developer
tools, profiling/instrumentation, staged roll-out support and
strengthening of architectural leadership are the big pieces for
coming months, but I'll let Damon speak to his focus areas as he gets
the lay of the land.
Erik
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sue_Gardner/Narrowing_focus
[2] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-November/122663.html
[3] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-December/123088.html
[4] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/165004/
--
Erik Möller
VP of Product & Strategy, Wikimedia Foundation
Hi folks,
to increase accountability and create more opportunities for course
corrections and resourcing adjustments as necessary, Sue's asked me
and Howie Fung to set up a quarterly project evaluation process,
starting with our highest priority initiatives. These are, according
to Sue's narrowing focus recommendations which were approved by the
Board [1]:
- Visual Editor
- Mobile (mobile contributions + Wikipedia Zero)
- Editor Engagement (also known as the E2 and E3 teams)
- Funds Dissemination Committe and expanded grant-making capacity
I'm proposing the following initial schedule:
January:
- Editor Engagement Experiments
February:
- Visual Editor
- Mobile (Contribs + Zero)
March:
- Editor Engagement Features (Echo, Flow projects)
- Funds Dissemination Committee
We’ll try doing this on the same day or adjacent to the monthly
metrics meetings [2], since the team(s) will give a presentation on
their recent progress, which will help set some context that would
otherwise need to be covered in the quarterly review itself. This will
also create open opportunities for feedback and questions.
My goal is to do this in a manner where even though the quarterly
review meetings themselves are internal, the outcomes are captured as
meeting minutes and shared publicly, which is why I'm starting this
discussion on a public list as well. I've created a wiki page here
which we can use to discuss the concept further:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_r…
The internal review will, at minimum, include:
Sue Gardner
myself
Howie Fung
Team members and relevant director(s)
Designated minute-taker
So for example, for Visual Editor, the review team would be the Visual
Editor / Parsoid teams, Sue, me, Howie, Terry, and a minute-taker.
I imagine the structure of the review roughly as follows, with a
duration of about 2 1/2 hours divided into 25-30 minute blocks:
- Brief team intro and recap of team's activities through the quarter,
compared with goals
- Drill into goals and targets: Did we achieve what we said we would?
- Review of challenges, blockers and successes
- Discussion of proposed changes (e.g. resourcing, targets) and other
action items
- Buffer time, debriefing
Once again, the primary purpose of these reviews is to create improved
structures for internal accountability, escalation points in cases
where serious changes are necessary, and transparency to the world.
In addition to these priority initiatives, my recommendation would be
to conduct quarterly reviews for any activity that requires more than
a set amount of resources (people/dollars). These additional reviews
may however be conducted in a more lightweight manner and internally
to the departments. We’re slowly getting into that habit in
engineering.
As we pilot this process, the format of the high priority reviews can
help inform and support reviews across the organization.
Feedback and questions are appreciated.
All best,
Erik
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vote:Narrowing_Focus
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Hi all,
There are online small business accounting software packages. Do any
thematic orgs have experience with them? Any recommendations? I am thinking
about proposing Quickbooks Online for the Cascadia user group, but as this
Forbes article says, there are competitors:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2014/01/06/why-your-company-m…
Thanks,
Pine
Good news everyone,
Cheese articles are gonna get improved!
As french, it was dreadful for us to see so few illustrations of cheese on
Wikipedia. This is about to change.
A group of french Wikimedians, lead by Pierre-Yves Beaudouin, designed a
project to photograph many cheeses, up to 200 for the moment.
This project is perticular as we aim to have it found through a french
crowdfunding platform, KissKissBankBank.
Of course Wikimedia France could have funded it itself, but we wanted to
use the project as a way to get the larger audience aware of their ability
to contribute and to give a fun image of contributing.
The project in few words iss follow :
* 10 cheeses per session
* During the session the cheeses are photographed and their articles
improved
* During the sessions experimented wikimedian would train new editors
* At every session every participant would enjoy eating good cheese too
If you want to read more, or even contribute, about the project you can go
on KissKissBankBank : http://www.kisskissbankbank.com/fr/projects/wikicheese
If you have any questions, please feel free to shoot them on or off list.
All the best,
--
Christophe
This press release is also available online here:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Winners_Announced_in_Wo…
Winners Announced in World’s Largest Photo Contest: Wiki Loves Monuments
*International jury selects top 10 photos from more than 321,000 worldwide.
Over the four past years, more than 1.1 million images have been submitted
to the contest.*
The international jury for Wiki Loves Monuments 2014
<http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org/> announced today the 10 winning
photographs from the world’s largest photo contest, which ran from
September 1 - 30 this year. More than 9,000 photographers uploaded over
321,000 freely-licensed photographs of historic buildings, monuments and
cultural heritage sites in 41 countries to Wikimedia Commons
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page> for use on Wikipedia and
other free knowledge projects.
This year, the grand-prize winning photograph is an image of the Holy
Mountains Monastery <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Mountains_Lavra>, a
complex of architectural monuments of national significance in Sviatohirsk,
Ukraine, taken by Konstantin Brizhnichenko
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Brizhnichenko>. The first written
mention of the monastery was in 1526. In 1624, the monastery was officially
recognized as the Sviatohirsk Uspensky Monastery. Before World War I, the
monastery was inhabited by approximately 600 monks. During the 1930s, it
was destroyed by the Soviets, along with other numerous religious sites
throughout the Soviet Union. Today, the monastery community consists of
more than 100 people, a number that increases each year.
(Photo link:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Svjatogorsk,_Lavra_3.jpg)
The winner will receive flight and accommodations in Mexico to attend
Wikimania, the international conference of the Wikimedia movement, to be
held in July 2015 in Mexico City.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Wiki Loves Monuments is
the world’s largest public photo competition. In it, people are asked to
take pictures of monuments from participating countries and to upload them
to Wikimedia Commons, enabling the photos to be used to illustrate
Wikipedia in articles about these monuments and other subjects.
“With over one million free images of heritage sites across the world, Wiki
Loves Monuments is one of the world’s most important history projects
today,” says Deror Lin, the international coordinator of the competition.
“Year after year, volunteers document hundreds of thousands of heritage
sites across the world and upload the images to the internet under a free
license for the benefit of the current andnext generations. These people
display the splendor of creativity and culture in their countries.”
The competition is organized in 41 participating countries, each focusing
on their national monuments and with their own national prizes. This year,
every participating country submitted 10 nominations to the international
jury who chose the winning pictures for the competition. A number of
countries participated in the competition for the first time, including:
Albania, Kosovo, Iraq, Ireland, Lebanon, Macedonia, Pakistan and the
Palestinian Authority.
The contest was first organized in 2010 in the Netherlands and resulted in
more than 12,500 pictures of Dutch monuments. Over the past four years more
than 1.1 million images have been submitted to the contest.
*2014 Wiki Loves Monuments Winners:*
-
1st Place - the Holy Mountains Monastery, Sviatohirsk, Ukraine by
Konstantin Brizhnichenko -
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Svjatogorsk,_Lavra_3.jpg
-
2nd Place - Gare du Nord in Paris, France, by MrsEllacott (his image
ranked 7thin the French national competition) -
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gare_du_Nord_December_2013.jpg
-
3rd Place - Jøvik and Great Cormorants near Ullsfjorden, Troms, Tromsø,
Norway by Siri Uldal (7th place in Norway’s national competition) -
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jøvik_handelssted_04.jpg
-
4th Place - Alte Sennalpe Batzen (literally: Old Dairy Mountain Pasture
Batzen) at Bregenzer Forest in Schröcken, Vorarlberg, Austria by Böhringer
Friedrich (9th Place in the Austrian national competition) -
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alte_Batzenalpe_2014_Interior_06.jpg
-
5th Place - Montfort Castle at Sunrise, Israel, by Eran Feldman (1st
Place in the Israeli national competition) -
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:מבצר_מונפורט_בזריחה.JPG
-
6th Place - St Michael’s Mount, Marazion, Cornwall, UK by Fuzzypiggy
(1st Place in the UK competition) -
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_Michael's_Mount_II5302_x_2982.jpg
-
7th Place - Tower Bridge at Dawn, UK by Fuzzypiggy (3rd Place in the UK
competition) -
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tower_Bridge_at_Dawn.jpg
-
8th Place - Victorian Valves at Victoria Baths, Manchester, UK by:
RevDave (8th Place in the UK competition) -
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Victorian_Valves.jpg
-
9th Place - Interior of the Romea Theatre, Murcia, Spain by: Pedro J
Pacheco - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Teatro_Romea_Interior.jpg
-
10 Place - View of the Interior of St. Peter's Church, Teruel, Spain.
by: Diego Delso -
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iglesia_de_San_Pedro,_Teruel,_Españ…
*For more information: *
*Itzik Edri, Spokesperson for the international jury - +972-54-5878078
<%2B972-54-5878078>, itzik(a)wikimedia.org.il <itzik(a)wikimedia.org.il>*
_______________________________________________
Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
_______________________________________________
WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list
WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
Dear all,
The next WMF metrics and activities meeting will take place on
Thursday, January 15, 2015 at 7:00 PM UTC (11 AM PST). Please note, on
this occasion, we are holding this meeting on the third Thursday in
January. We will resume holding the meetings on the first Thursday of
each month beginning in February 2015.
The IRC channel is #wikimedia-office on irc.freenode.net, and the meeting will
be broadcast as a live YouTube stream.
Each month at the metrics meeting, we will:
* Welcome recent hires
* Present reports/updates that are focused on a key theme or topic. The
theme for January's meeting is: Quality
* Engage in questions/discussions
Please review
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings for further
information about how to participate.
We’ll post the video recording publicly after the meeting.
Thank you and Happy New Year!
Praveena
--
Praveena Maharaj
Executive Assistant to the VP of Product & Strategy and the VP of
Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation \\ www.wikimediafoundation.org
