Wikitech-l October 2011

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

117 participants
104 discussions

Visual Editor / parser status update meeting notes 2011-10-26
by Brion Vibber 26 Oct '11

26 Oct '11

I've copied the live etherpad notes from today's Visual Editor / New Parser update meeting onto wikitext-l for those who may be interested: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitext-l/2011-October/000463.html -- brion

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Announcing Fabrice Florin and Oliver Keyes
by Howie Fung 26 Oct '11

26 Oct '11

Everyone, I am pleased to announce that we have two contractors joining the Technology team. Fabrice Florin will be joining us for the next six months as Product Consultant, leading the development of the next version of the Article Feedback Tool. Oliver Keyes (User: Ironholds on enwp) will be joining us as a community liaison for the next three months. His role is to help ensure that the community input is better incorporated into WMF’s product development process. Fabrice has extensive background in the fields of education and journalism. He is founder and executive director of NewsTrust, a nonprofit social news site devoted to good journalism -- as well as Truthsquad, a network dedicated to fact-checking the political claims made during election campaigns. His previous ventures include: Handtap, a wireless content service for mobile phones; shockwave.com, a web entertainment site at Macromedia; Apple Computer's Multimedia Lab, a new media R&D group; and a variety of other roles in media and technology. Fabrice earned four patents for his interactive TV work at Apple and was recently elected an Ashoka Fellow for his work as social entrepreneur [1]. Read more in his online bio[2]. Oliver has been an editor since 2006 and is both an administrator and an OTRS volunteer on the English Wikipedia. With strong experience in content creation as well as administrative tasks, he has a broad base of knowledge that will undoubtedly be helpful in coordinating community feedback, organizing discussions, and making sure more voices are heard as part of the product development process. As many of you know, the Tech department continues to look for ways to gather input from our experienced editors when designing new features. Oliver’s job will be to act as a conduit between WMF’s development team and members of the community, helping editors make suggestions on feature development and helping ensure that the Foundation incorporates this input. Fabrice may be reached at fflorin at wikimedia dot org, as well as his userpages on the English Wikipedia and Mediawiki ([[User:Fabrice Florin]]). Oliver will be on the projects as [[User:Ironholds]] and [[User:Okeyes (WMF)]]; he can also be contacted directly via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:EmailUser/Okeyes_%28WMF%29. We’re very excited to be working with Fabrice and Oliver. Please join me in welcoming them! Howie Fung Senior Product Manager Wikimedia Foundation [1] http://www.ashoka.org/fellow/fabrice-florin [2] http://newstrust.net/about/bio_florin

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Welcome, Antoine Musso! (hashar)
by Rob Lanphier 26 Oct '11

26 Oct '11

Hi everyone, A belated (re-)welcome to Antoine Musso (a.k.a. "hashar" on IRC) as a contractor working on continuous integration (e.g. beefing up our unit tests, improving our Jenkins configuration, figuring out how to integrate TestSwarm, etc). Antoine has been working in our community for quite some time, going by the name "Ashar Voultoiz" on mailing lists, and by "hashar" on IRC. Now that he's working as a contractor for WMF, he's decided to let everyone know the Superman behind the Clark Kent alter ego :) You've probably already seen him be even more active (if that were possible) in SVN and elsewhere since Monday, which is when he officially started. Welcome, Antoine! Rob

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New committers
by Sumana Harihareswara 26 Oct '11

26 Oct '11

* DJ Bauch (djbauch) -- extensions & tools access -- Microsoft SQL Server support * cryptocoryne -- extensions & tools access -- Extension:AutoProxyBlock Welcome! (We are not completely through the commit access queue at the moment, but I hope to get down to zero this week.) -- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation

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Welcoming Gabriel Wicke
by Alolita Sharma 26 Oct '11

26 Oct '11

Hi All, Please join me in welcoming Gabriel Wicke as a Software Developer in WMF’s Features Engineering team. Gabriel will be working on the Visual Editor - Parser project, one of Wikimedia’s high priority projects this year. He will be working closely with our guru Brion Vibber on extending the parser to support WikiDom interactions with the Visual Editor client being developed by lead engineer Trevor Parscal, Wikia developer Inez Korczyński and front-end developer Neil Kandalgaonkar. As many of you may already know, Gabriel has been member of the Wikipedia community for many years now. He discovered Wikipedia in 2003, when it was still running on two servers. Using his previous experience with Squid caching, he got involved in technical discussions and hacking. In 2004, Gabriel designed and implemented the initial Squid caching layer, and later wrote the MonoBook skin. After completing his Computer Science degree and doing research in transactional distributed systems and Haskell, Gabriel is looking forward to more practical challenges at Wikimedia. Gabriel is an avid sportsman and professional sailor. When he’s not in front of a computer coding away, he is often sailing on his own or with friends. He was a member of the German national team in the Olympic 49er class from 2001-2008, and is now racing an A-Class catamaran. Pretty awesome! Say hello to Gabriel online. He can be found on #mediawiki as gwicke. Welcome back Gabriel! Great to have you on the Wikimedia Features team :-) Alolita -- Alolita Sharma Director, Features Engineering Wikimedia Foundation

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Git migration planning
by Rob Lanphier 25 Oct '11

25 Oct '11

Hi everyone, For a long time, we've been talking about migrating from Subversion to Git. It's time to start getting more serious about it. First: the need to do this. There is pretty broad acceptance that we should move to a distributed version control system (DVCS). Our current Subversion-based version control system has served us well, but we're in need of a more suitable version control system for our development effort. Our community is very distributed, with many parallel efforts and needs to integrate many different feature efforts. While we've developed lots of coping mechanisms, we sure could use a system that's well suited to more fluid branching and merging. There has been resistance to this in the past, and there still may be some resistance. However, I think we've worn everyone down. :) Next: the selection of Git over other DVCSs. Over the past couple of years, other systems have been mentioned (Bzr, Hg), but there hasn't been any evidence (at least on this mailing list) for anything other than mild support for the alternatives. As you might have seen, our Ops folks have already moved to Git[1], and while they're right in the middle of the tough part of the learning curve, they seem to be adjusting just fine. The complaints seem to be of the "I really need to get used to that" variety rather than the "why are we doing this again?" variety. So, given the momentum that Git has, the ample discussion we've had on the subject, and the fact that Ops is already planning to support Git, this seems to be a settled question. So now, the questions shift from "if?" to "when?" and "how?". When? After some amount of arm twisting by Erik and Brion (*hugz*), I've agreed to float a plan that has us making the migration by the end of the year. This is completely contingent on our ability to get 1.19 deployed in a rapid fashion (which, if we can get through the code review queue at our current rate, could be done in November). Until we have a more fleshed out plan, though, "end of the year" purely a guess, and subject to change (partly based on any ensuing conversation after this mail). However, assuming we can clear the technical hurdles, there's not any procedural issues I can see getting in the way of a rapid transition. How? Lots of unsorted pieces. There are still decisions we need to make: * Code review tool: barring unforeseen complications, we're planning to use Gerrit. We need to make sure it'll be a suitable replacement for our existing tool * How do we break up the repository? One big repo? Extensions each get their own? We need to sort all of that out. A draft plan is available here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Git_conversion Rob [1] ...or so I've read on Slashdot, so it must be true: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/09/21/0531246/wikimedia-foundation-re…

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Heads up: Online coding challenge
by Erik Moeller 25 Oct '11

25 Oct '11

Hi folks, we're attempting, later this week, an experiment in reaching out to new potential developers (volunteers and paid developers alike) by means of an online coding challenge. The general idea is that, by posing interesting challenges, we'll be able to attract interesting people :-). It's described a bit more here (some information is out of date): https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Weekend_of_Code For this purpose, Jeroen de Dauw has led implementation of the "Contest" extension which can be used to manage different types of contests and have a select group of judges evaluating submissions: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Contest The overall project is being coordinated by Greg DeKoenigsberg, formerly Senior Community Architect at Red Hat. If you'd like to be involved as a judge, please let him know (greg.dekoenigsberg at gmail dot com). This is a first experiment and it may not work, in which case we may never do it again. Greg will post a full announcement about it shortly, but in the meantime, feel free to poke around the https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Weekend_of_Code pages, make edits or suggestions, etc. We'll run a CentralNotice to advertise the coding challenges, for about a week at most. During the time the banner is running and for a week or two beyond that, we may see a few more newbies on IRC and the listservs. We'll set up some alternative communications channels for them if the flood becomes too much, but I hope that won't happen and we'll see some promising developers pop up in our community. Thanks for your hospitality. :-) All best, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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lost in sites for coding challenge mobile
by Simone 25 Oct '11

25 Oct '11

i am lost in sites, when i upload a picture where it must go? in *.wikipedia.org or in commons.wikimedia.org? i didn't understand... another thing is that to take the token the user must be logged, and i have seen that every country has got different logins, for examples: my login of it.wikipedia.org is different than en.wikipedia.org... so the user must choose first the domain where want to log and after take the token to upload the contents... Thank's for attenction, Simo

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Brief triage report from NOLA Hackathon
by mhershberger＠wikimedia.org 25 Oct '11

25 Oct '11

I did two triages at the NOLA hackathon. Unfortunately, since these were in the flesh and I didn't have a designated note taker, I don't have a good set of notes. Compounding the problem is the time since these triages. Caveats aside, I would still like to publish some brief information from the triages. Since Sam Reedy and I were in the same room and he had asked for my help in sorting out the shell bugs that he handles, we set up an Etherpad (http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/ShellSort) and started plowing through them to classify them into three different categories. The other triage was an attempt to cover the regressions introduced in 1.18. We made some progress (http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/118-Regression-Triage), but in the end there were too many to cover in a single meeting. Hopefully, with the improved PHPUnit tests (http://integration.mediawiki.org/ci/), and additional js tests (http://toolserver.org/~krinkle/testswarm/) we'll have fewer regressions in our 1.19 release. I was also able to meet with a couple of developers who were interested in working on the Selenium testing platform so I tagged a number of bugs that I thought could benefit from Selenium testing (see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=need-regression-test). Thanks, Mark.

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Bug 189
by Ting Chen 24 Oct '11

24 Oct '11

Hello dear developer community, today I would like to awake your attention and interest on a very old bug with the number 189: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=189, and related to it Bug 29630: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29630 It is about the possibility of different MediaWiki plug-ins that would enable our projects, mostly WikiSource, but also Wikipedia, to input and show music notes on an easy way. You can really have impact on our projects by addressing this bug and make a lot of Wikisource community members happy. Any takers on this? Greetings Ting

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Wikitech-l October 2011