LevelUp is a mentorship program that will start in January 2013 and that
replaces the "20% time" policy
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_20%25_policy for
Wikimedia Foundation engineers. Technical contributors, volunteer or
staff, have the opportunity to participate; see
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/LevelUp for more details.
We started 20% time to ensure that Wikimedia Foundation engineers would
spend at least 20% of each week on tasks that directly serve the
Wikimedia developer and user community, including bug triage, code
review, extension review, documentation, urgent bugfixes, and so on. It
had various flaws. 1 day every week, I made people task-switch and it
got in the way of their deadlines, and it was perceived as a chore that
always needed doing.
It felt like enforcing a rota to do the dishes. So instead, let's build
a dishwasher. :-) We can cross-train each other and fill in the empty
rows on the maintainership table
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers so our whole
community gains the capacity to get stuff done faster.
If you've been frustrated because of code review delays, I want you to
sign up for LevelUp -- by March 2013 you could be a comaintainer of a
codebase and be merging and improving other people's patchsets, which
will give them more time and incentive to merge yours. :-)
When I asked what people wanted to learn, I got a variety of responses
-- including "MediaWiki in general", "puppet", "networking", and "JS,
PHP, HTML, CSS, SQL" -- all of which you can learn through LevelUp.
When I asked how you wanted to learn, all of you said you wanted
real-life, hands-on work with mentors who could answer your questions.
Here you go. :-)
I won't be starting the matchmaking process in earnest till I come back
from the Thanksgiving break on Monday, but I will reply to talk page
messages and emails then. :-)
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi All,
Due to some security concerns, ganglia.w.o is currently behind htaccess.
We're actively working to resolve the security issues, and will restore
public access once they are resolved.
Sorry for the inconvenience!
Cheers,
Peter
Hello all,
To add to the great work by Ori and Jon, I have my own recent pet
project to announce: Reviewer-bot, which adds reviewers to any new
changes uploaded to Gerrit.
The basic idea is as follows:
1) reviewer-bot listens to Gerrit's events stream
2) a contributor uploads a new change (only the first patchset is
reacted upon)
3) reviewer-bot checks http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Git/Reviewers
to see which reviewers would like to be added to new changes
4) reviewer-bot adds the reviewers to the change
Obviously, it's still in it's infancy, so it will probably crash every
now and then. However, please try it by adding your gerrit username to
the Reviewers page!
Of course, I also have the obligatory 'Fork me on github!'-notice: the
code is available at https://github.com/valhallasw/gerrit-reviewer-bot
.
I hope that, together with the RSS-based approach by Ori and the daily
digest-approach by Jon, this will help to improve the Gerrit
experience - especially for new developers!
Best,
Merlijn
Now that tests need +2 to be run, at least temporarily, I'm going to
point out that I've not been able to run tests on my development
environment in ages. I mentioned broken unit tests in Oct 4 on this
list. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/64390
There are multiple fatal bugs (not to mention the numerous test
failures), that halt test runs without any info expect the error. Some
bugs I've reported:
* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/41491
* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/42145 (skip the first few comments)
Today I tried again and there is new one:
Catchable fatal error: Argument 2 passed to
OutputPage::addWikiTextTitle() must be an instance of Title, null
given, called in /www/dev.translatewiki.net/w/includes/OutputPage.php
on line 1426 and defined in
/www/dev.translatewiki.net/w/includes/OutputPage.php on line 1472
This might be just a variant of 42145, but I can't tell for sure. I
could add exception there, but the other fatal errors make phpunit not
to display backtraces. I haven't yet had time to try to find out which
test it is.
This situation is starting to feel like a bad horror movie, so I ask
everyone to give some tender, love and care to our unit tests so that
I don't have to come up with even worse analogies.
-Niklas
--
Niklas Laxström
I'm sending this to Wikimedia-l, Wikitech-l, and Research-l in case other people in the Wikimedia movement or staff are interested in "big data" as it relates to Wikimedia. I hope that those who are interested in discussions about WMF editor engagement efforts, WMF fundraising, or WMF HR practices will also find that this email interests them. Feel free to skip straight to the links in the latter portion of this email if you're already familiar with "big data" and its analysis and if you just want to see what other people are writing about the subject.
* Introductory comments / my personal opinion
"Big data" refers to large quantities of information that are so large that they are difficult to analyze and may not be related internally in an obvious way. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data
I think that most of us would agree that moving much of an organization's information into "the Cloud", and/or directing people to analyze massive quantities of information, will not automatically result in better, or even good, decisions based on that information. Also, I think that most of us would agree that bigger and/or more accessible quantities of data does not necessarily imply that the data are more accurate or more relevant for a particular purpose. Another concern is the possibility of unwelcome intrusions into sensitive information, including the possibility of data breaches; imagine the possible consequences if a hacker broke into supposedly secure databases held by Facebook or the Securities and Exchange Commission.
We have an enormous quantity of data on Wikimedia projects, and many ways that we can examine those data. As this Dilbert strip points out, context is important, and looking at statistics devoid of their larger contexts can be problematic. http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1993-02-07/
Since data analysis is also something that Wikipedia does in the areas I mentioned previously, I'm passing along a few links for those who may be interested about the benefits and limitations of big data.
* Links:
>From the Harvard Business Review
http://hbr.org/2012/04/good-data-wont-guarantee-good-decisions/ar/1
>From the New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/technology/big-data-is-great-but-dont-fo…
and
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/sunday-review/big-datas-impact-in-the-wo…
>From the Wall Street Journal. This may be especially interesting to those who are participating in the discussions on Wikimedia-l regarding how Wikimedia selects, pays, and manages its staff.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443890304578006252019616768.h…
And from English Wikipedia (:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_intelligence
Cheers,
Pine
Hi everyone,
My understanding is that some new extensions intended for widespread
deployment aren't getting deployed to test2.wikipedia.org before going
to other production wikis. As I was discussing this with Chris
McMahon, he pointed out that there's no stated policy that this should
be done.
test2.wikipedia.org is basically a standard configuration wiki on the
production cluster that we use as the final place for testing before
going out to other production wikis. Pretty much anything destined
for one of our top wikis or to a substantial number of smaller wikis
should go to test2. That's especially true now that our QA team is
relying on test2 as an automated test target.
Is there any reason why this shouldn't be a stated policy? If not,
where should we state the policy so that people are aware of it?
Rob
Hi everyone. I wrote an open-source, offline wiki application and
wanted to announce it here. My apologies if this email is off-topic
for this mailing list, but I am hoping XOWA will interest some of you.
XOWA is a standalone application that can read and edit Wikimedia data
dumps offline. XOWA stands for "XOWA Offlines Wiki Articles!", but it
also goes by the more generic "XOWA Offline Wiki Application."
XOWA has several features:
* Displays all articles from a Wikimedia data dump.
* Works with English Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikiquote, as
well as the non-English language counterparts (for example, French
Wikipedia).
* Renders articles with full HTML formatting.
* Downloads images and other files on demand.
* Edits articles.
* Runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.
* Installs to a flash memory card for portability to other machines.
* Is customizable and extendable at many levels: from keyboard
shortcuts to HTML layouts to internal options.
* Is open-source under the AGPLv3 license.
Screenshots of XOWA are available here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xowa. Imgur links are listed below:
* The "Wikipedia" article in English Wikipedia (shows an article):
http://imgur.com/a/OydBK#0
* The "Solar_System#Visual_Summary" section (shows more images):
http://imgur.com/a/OydBK#1
* The "Pythagorean_Theorem#Algebraic_proofs" section (shows Math
images from LaTeX): http://imgur.com/a/OydBK#2
* The "File:Mona Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci, from C2RMF retouched.jpg"
image in Wikimedia Commons (shows Wikimedia Commons):
http://imgur.com/a/OydBK#3
* The "France" article in French Wikipedia (shows a non-English
language wiki): http://imgur.com/a/OydBK#4
* The "Sandbox" page in Edit mode (shows edit mode): http://imgur.com/a/OydBK#5
As with anything, there are a few caveats:
* Initial release: XOWA is currently in an alpha stage and there are
many defects and omitted features. I'm hoping that 90% of the articles
on English Wikipedia will render without issues, though the percentage
will be lower on other wikis.
* Performance: XOWA may perform slowly, depending on the machine's
capabilities. As a rough standard of comparison, most pages load in
less than 5 seconds on my primary machine (a Windows XP 3.4 GHz
machine with 2 GB RAM and a 2 TB 7200 RPM hard drive). However, on my
secondary machine (an Ubuntu Linux 1.6 GHz, 1 GB RAM machine with a 32
GB SD card) the threshold is 10 seconds.
* Divergent code base: XOWA is written in Java and its approach is not
a direct reproduction of the MediaWiki parser. As such, certain
articles will render differently. In addition, many extensions have
not yet been implemented in XOWA.
* Some assembly required: XOWA requires that a user assemble the
installation. This includes downloading and unzipping the MediaWiki
data-dump, installing xulRunner/imageMagick/inkscape/MiKTeX, editing
the config file, running batch files, etc. Although these should be
straightforward one-time steps, it does mean that a user must be
willing to do some technical tinkering to get XOWA to run.
These caveats notwithstanding, I'm hoping you are willing to give XOWA a try.
Here are the relevant links:
* Instructions: http://sourceforge.net/p/xowa/wiki/Home/
* Files: http://sourceforge.net/projects/xowa/files/
If anyone has questions, please ask, and I will be happy to follow-up
with more details. For reddit users, I am going to post a thread at
www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia.
Thanks for your time.
https://blog.mozilla.org/it/2012/11/28/learn-mysql-for-free-during-a-virtua…
"Starting January 1st, read a chapter per week and do the exercises. We
will go through chapter 12....The first few chapters cover database
basics and installing and connecting to MySQL, so if you cannot start
exactly on January 1st, that’s fine. And you can do exercises ahead of
time."
If you'd like to improve your skills at MySQL installation, database
design, querying, managing users and permissions, backups, options and
configuration, this is a cool opportunity. And if you can't afford the
book on your own, talk to me and I may be able to buy you the PDF.
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
Hey,
Just a brief response to people who requested that I view/work on some
bugs: currently I am traveling and have limited Internet, but when I get
back on the 7th of January I'll look into stuff and give responses.
*--*
*Tyler Romeo*
Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2015
Major in Computer Science
www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo(a)gmail.com