Wikitech-l December 2013

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

125 participants
119 discussions

DSA-2814-1 varnish -- denial of service
by Jacobo Nájera 09 Dec '13

09 Dec '13

http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2814 Thanks, Jacobo

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FWD [Bug 58235] New: Remove skin selection from Wikipedia and Wikimedia site Special:Preferences for new user accounts
by K. Peachey 09 Dec '13

09 Dec '13

For wider discussion ---- From: <bugzilla-daemon <at> wikimedia.org> Subject: [Bug 58235] New: Remove skin selection from Wikipedia and Wikimedia site Special:Preferences for new user accounts<http://news.gmane.org/find-root.php?message_id=%3cbug%2d58235%2d3%40https.b…> Newsgroups: gmane.org.wikimedia.mediawiki.bugs<http://news.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.mediawiki.bugs> Date: 2013-12-09 20:27:15 GMT (35 minutes ago) https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58235 Web browser: --- Bug ID: 58235 Summary: Remove skin selection from Wikipedia and Wikimedia site Special:Preferences for new user accounts Product: Wikimedia Version: wmf-deployment Hardware: All OS: All Status: NEW Severity: normal Priority: Unprioritized Component: Site requests Assignee: wikibugs-l <at> lists.wikimedia.org Reporter: jared.zimmerman <at> wikimedia.org CC: benapetr <at> gmail.com, bugzilla+org.wikimedia <at> tuxmachine.com, dereckson <at> espace-win.org, greg <at> wikimedia.org, tomasz <at> twkozlowski.net, wikimedia.bugs <at> snowolf.eu Classification: Unclassified Mobile Platform: --- To reduce the support burden on foundation developers and designers when creating new features or improving existing ones, skin selection and related preferences should be removed for newly created accounts and the default skin (currently vector) used for all new accounts. A new access point for custom css/js should be added if necessary. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug. You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Wikibugs-l mailing list Wikibugs-l <at> lists.wikimedia.orghttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l

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Estensione per l'embedding di video
by Cristian Consonni 09 Dec '13

09 Dec '13

Ciao gvf, Francesca ha cercato disperatamente di embeddare un video in Wikina, non sapendo che però non si può fare. Pensavo avessimo in passato installato qualche estensione per farlo, ma ho ricontrollatto in Speciale:Versione[1] e non mi pare. Ho visto che c'è questa estensione che potrebbe andare bene: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:EmbedVideo La potresti installare per favore? Grazie, Cristian [1] http://wiki.wikimedia.it/wiki/Speciale:Versione

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Wikimedia engineering report, November 2013
by Guillaume Paumier 09 Dec '13

09 Dec '13

Hi, The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in November 2013 is now available. Wiki version: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/November Blog version: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/12/09/engineering-report-november-2013/ We're also proposing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this report that does not assume specialized technical knowledge: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/November/s… Below is the HTML text of the report. As always, feedback is appreciated on the usefulness of the report and its summary, and on how to improve them. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Major news in November include: - Beta Features<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/11/07/introducing-beta-features/>, a new way for users to try out new features on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites before they are released for everyone; - The launch of our search for a VP of Engineering<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/11/20/wikimedia-foundation-is-looking-for-a…>; - A retrospective by the Mobile engineering team on best practices for collaboration<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/11/22/developing-distributedly-part-2/>while working distributedly; - The activation of OAuth on Wikimedia wikis<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/11/22/oauth-on-wikimedia-wikis/>, which allows users to authorize third-party applications to take actions on their behalf without sharing their password; - A presentation of the "Wikidata concept cloud<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/11/25/wikidata-concept-cloud/>"; - A retrospective on the ability to add musical scores<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/11/27/adding-musical-scores-to-wikimedia/>to pages on Wikimedia sites. *Note: We're also providing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this report <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/November/s…> that does not assume specialized technical knowledge.* Personnel Work with us <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Work_with_us> Are you looking to work for Wikimedia? We have a lot of hiring coming up, and we really love talking to active community members about these roles. - VP of Engineering <http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ods8Xfwu> - Software Engineer - Growth<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o8NJXfwl> - Software Engineer - Core Features<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o6NJXfwj> - Software Engineer - VisualEditor (Features)<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oqo6XfwB> - Software Engineer - Language Engineering<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oH3gXfwH> - Software Engineer <http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o09WXfwM> - Senior Software Engineer - Team Lead<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oC9OXfwg> - QA Automation Engineer<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oe09Yfw5> - Software Engineer Data Analytics (Back End)<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oLdOXfwt> - Dev-Ops Engineer - SRE<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ocLCWfwf> - Graphic Design Interns - Paid<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ohN3XfwO> Announcements - Jeff Hall joined the Platform engineering group as a member of the QA team (announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/qa/2013-November/000686.html>). - Aaron Arcos joined the Platform engineering group as a volunteer developer working with the Multimedia team (announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/multimedia/2013-November/000014.html>). - Dario Taraborelli was promoted to the position of Senior Research Scientist, Research and Data team lead. (announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/analytics/2013-November/001295.html>). - Aaron Halfaker was promoted to the position of Research Scientist ( announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/analytics/2013-November/001295.html>). - Moiz Syed joined the User Experience team as User Experience Designer ( announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/design/2013-December/001235.html>). Technical Operations *Wikimedia Labs <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs>* A new dynamic proxy system has been deployed on Labs; it allows the admin of any project to arrange for public web access and a dedicated DNS hostname for a project instance without requesting an IP address. Labs staff and volunteers will now be reclaiming quite a few IPs as existing projects migrate to a dynamic proxy setup. The WMF has hired a short-term contractor, Mike Hoover, to assist with the migration of Labs infrastructure from Tampa to our new datacenter in Ashburn. Mike has spent a lot of time exploring the existing infrastructure and running test setups; soon he will start to configure the new OpenStack nodes in production. Andrew Bogott has been working on cleaning up stale and unused resources. He's working on some automatic documentation that will help users track the status of their projects and instances with an eye towards predicting the impact of the coming migration. Labs suffered two brief outages: a brief, self-inflicted network failure, and a longer outage during which one of the virtualization hosts failed. Both outages were swiftly resolved, but there's a bit of lag as some tools and services failed to come back properly afterwards due to poor distribution of virtual servers (inter alia, both the grid master and the shadow [backup] master were on the same server). Preparation for the move to the Ashburn data center is well in progress, with the new storage server being physically configured this week as well as the new hardware servers for user databases (including the new PostgreSQL instance intended for OpenStreetMap). Features Engineering <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Features_engineering> Editor retention: Editing tools *VisualEditor <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor>* In November, the VisualEditor team continued to improve the stability and performance of the system, and add new features. The deployed version of the code was updated three times (1.23-wmf3<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.23/wmf3#VisualEditor>, 1.23-wmf4 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.23/wmf4#VisualEditor>and 1.23-wmf5 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.23/wmf5#VisualEditor>). Most of the team's focus was on fixing bugs, and on some major infrastructure changes, splitting out the OOJS<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/OOJS>and OOJS-UI <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Ooui> libraries from VisualEditor to make them available to other teams. Much of the team travelled to the Open Source Language Summit<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Language_portal/Pune_LanguageSummit_November…>in Pune, India to learn more about how to improve VisualEditor for a variety of languages, scripts, users and systems. Two new members of the QA team <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance/Browser_testing>joined in to help improve VisualEditor – Jeff Hall <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:JHall_%28WMF%29> and Rummana Yasmeen <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:RYasmeen_%28WMF%29>, and thanks to them, the automated browser tests have expanded in breadth and depth of coverage. Work continued on major new features like full rich copy-and-paste from external sources, a dialog for quickly adding citation templated references, and a tool to insert characters not available on users' keyboards. The editor was made available by default on just over 100 additional Wikipedias as part of the continuing roll-out. VisualEditor was also enabled for opt-in testing on Swedish Wiktionary and Wikimedia Sweden's wiki, the first time it has been available on a non-Wikipedia production wiki. *Parsoid <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid>* November saw the deployment of major changes to the DOM spec in coordination with the VisualEditor team<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor>. Link types are now marked up by semantics rather than syntax, interwiki links are detected automatically, categories are marked as page properties and more<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/MediaWiki_DOM_spec#Recent_changes>. During the deployment, we found that the newer libraries used by the web service front-end were buggy. We reverted the library upgrade and contributed fixes upstream. This incident prompted us to work on tests for the HTTP web service to catch issues like this in continuous integration. After these issues were sorted out, we continued with continuous improvement and fixes. Editing support for magic words and categories was improved, several dirty diff issues were fixed and the API was refined for page-independent wt2html and html2wt conversion. See our deployment page<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/Deployments>for details. Cassandra load testing<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:GWicke/Notes/Storage/Cassandra_testing>for the Rashomon storage service continued and uncovered several issues that were reported back upstream. With Cassandra 2.0.3 the 2.0 branch is now stabilizing in time to make deployment in December feasible. Cassandra is now stable at extremely high write loads of around 900 revisions per second, which is more than 10 times the load we experience in production. Core Features *Notifications <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_%28Notifications%29>* In November, we deployed Notifications on the German and Italian Wikipedias<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Release_Plan_2013#Completed>, completing our worldwide release of this tool. Fabrice Florin, Denis Barthel, Jan Eissfeldt, Erica Litrenta and Keegan Peterzell managed the community outreach for these final releases, while Benny Situ oversaw the technical deployments. Community response to Notifications has been generally favorable on all wikis. While feature development has now ended for this project, we expect new notifications and features to be developed by other teams in coming months. To learn more, visit our project hub<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo>, read the help page <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Notifications> and join the discussion on the talk page<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notifications> . *Flow <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal/Project_information>* This month, the Flow team finished out the feature set for our minimum viable product <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product>. We added watchlist integration, the ability to see board, topic, and post histories, and did a first round of community feedback and testing with our product to date. We also prepared for release to production wikis in December by working on Operations and Security needs. Growth *Growth <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth>* In November, the Growth <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth> team primarily worked on refactoring the GuidedTour<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GuidedTour>and GettingStarted <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GettingStarted>extensions, including development of an API for the latter. This public API will be used by the Growth team, the Mobile team and others to deliver editing tasks to users across a variety of Wikipedia interfaces. The team also spent significant time on the research and design preparations for its anonymous editor acquisition<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anonymous_editor_acquisition>and Wikipedia article creation <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_article_creation>projects. This included participating in a community Request for Comment about a potential Draft namespace<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Draft_namespace>for articles, requirements gathering, and working on a Draft namespace patch. Matthew Flaschen and Pau Giner attended the Wikimedia Diversity Conference<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Diversity_Conference>and presented<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Diversity_Conference/Documentatio…>(along with Jared Zimmerman and Vibha Bamba) on how diversity related to the team's engineering and product work. Support *Wikipedia Education Program <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program>* This month, we improved a feature that was built in October (allowing instructors to assign articles to student editors), completed a new feature (allowing instructors to add users as students) and started another one (displaying information about student editors' courses on Special:Contributions). We fixed some bugs, and kept up with changes in MediaWiki core. We also continued preliminary work—started last month—towards renewing the UX and broadening the extension's scope. Mobile <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering> *Wikipedia Zero <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero>* During the last month, the team monitored the rollout of Wikipedia Zero via text (USSD/SMS) in partnership with Airtel Kenya and Praekelt for the first pilot of the program. Additionally, Yuri Astrakhan promoted the program abroad. The team also prepared code and configuration for approval, finalized IP addresses for zero-rating and deployed bugfixes for the Wikipedia app for Firefox OS. We added support for simpler JSON in configuration files, enhanced performance and redirect features and constrained ZeroRatedMobileAccess extension loading to guard against repeats of last month's configuration bug. *Mobile web projects <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_web_projects>* The Onboarding A/B Test resulted in an Edit Guider, now available. The overlay UI overhaul currently in beta is planned to become available on the main site. User profiles intent is also in testing in beta. Language Engineering<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_engineering> Team highlights for this past month include a very successful Open Source Language Summit<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Language_portal/Pune_LanguageSummit_November…>in Pune, India co-organized with Red Hat. More than 60 developers joined in to collaborate and work together on improving language support for Wikipedia on the web and mobile. Work sprints on integration of input methods in VisualEditor, Indic Fontbook specification, mobile input methods and content translation were held. The team also fixed and deployed several issues related to performance and saving preferences for the Universal Language Selector (ULS). Other tasks completed include creating a class for interlanguage links using where the Autonym font can be used only for autonym items. The team also worked on collating documentation about all initial inclusion requests for each web font served through ULS also documented in the font.ini files of each font in the repository. Platform Engineering <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineering> MediaWiki Core *DevOps Sprint 2013 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/DevOps_Sprint_2013>* The DevOps sprint participants focused their efforts towards monitoring related work, specifically getting Logstash in production and puppetizing/migrating Graphite (both still in-progress). Cache related fixes were made to avoid users seeing outdated version of pages when using non canonical URL forms. A fix was made to the commons upload process to update all articles that use that page as users would expect. *Search <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Search>* Before November 18, we were spinning up an aggressive plan to add many new wikis to CirrusSearch. On November 18, we had multiple incidents that caused us to roll all wikis using CirrusSearch back to Lucene; we've spent the rest of November implementing fixes for all issues discovered on the 18th. That is now done and we plan to switch all wikis that used to have CirrusSearch back to running it as a secondary search engine on December 2. We'll attempt to restart our aggressive plan as soon as we're comfortable with it again. *Site performance and architecture <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Site_performance_and_architecture>* We ran a controlled experiment to test the impact of module storage on performance. We expect to publish our findings within a week. We puppetized Graphite and MediaWiki's profiling log aggregator and migrated them to our Ashburn data center. Finally, we started working on a replacement profiling log aggregator that will process and visualize profiling data from both client-side and server-side code. *Auth systems <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Auth_systems>* Our preliminary version of OAuth is now live on all Wikimedia wikis. Since the rollout, five OAuth consumers have been accepted. We're hopeful many more consumers will be proposed. *Wikimania Scholarships app <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimania_Scholarships_app>* Work is progressing towards a planned launch of the application on 2013-12-19. The source code has been imported into an internal git repository and is now being managed via gerrit. A bugzilla component has been created under the Wikimedia product to track defects and feature requests. Several changesets are in review to complete the basic functionality of the application and prepare for an internal security review. *Security auditing and response <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security_auditing_and_response>* We released a security update to MediaWiki to fix a number of issues in core and extensions. Security reviews of Limn, GWTools and Flow extensions are in progress. *Admin tools development <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development>* This activity is still officially on hold. However, progress on the global rename user tool continued, as well as implementing global CSS/JS<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13953> . Quality assurance *Quality Assurance <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance>* November saw significant improvements to the QA documentation<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance>on mediawiki.org contributed by both staff and volunteers. Participants in the Google Code-in <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in> program made even more contributions, to both documentation and browser test code. The QA team welcomed new staff members Rummana Yasmeen and Jeff Hall, who made immediate contributions to the VisualEditor project and to the browser test automation. *Beta cluster <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Beta_cluster>* In November, the Beta cluster saw greatly improved support for testing Parsoid, the parsing engine behind VisualEditor. The Beta cluster also continues to provide a real-world simulation for the Flow project in advance of Flow's limited release scheduled for December. Beta continues to be the the main test environment for MobileFrontend, CirrusSearch, and many other Wikimedia software projects. *Browser testing <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance/Browser_testing>* In November, we added significant browser test coverage for the Flow project, and the addition of Jeff Hall to WMF staff brought a focus to testing VisualEditor. Browser tests now reside in ten different repositories across WMF projects. November saw a increased browser test coverage for the Language, VisualEditor, and Flow projects, among others. The diversity of browser tests in project repositories has been a force behind great improvements in infrastructure, with code shared among the projects now residing in the repository at mediawiki/selenium. Engineering Community Team<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team> In November, the Engineering community team held their second monthly showcase<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team/Meetings>, as well as their quarterly review<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team/November_2013_Qua…>for the July–September period. *Bug management <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management>* Andre Klapper and Quim Gil prepared and organized Wikimedia's participation in Google Code-In <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in>. This includes supporting mentors and students by writing documentation and importing tasks. Code-related, Andre cleaned up Wikimedia Bugzilla's custom CSS by removing 16 CSS files<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54823>with 6 left<https://git.wikimedia.org/tree/wikimedia%2Fbugzilla%2Fmodifications.git/HEA…>to stay, prepared and tested patches for upgrading Wikimedia Bugzilla <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49597#c5>from version 4.2 to 4.4, updated the Greasemonkey triagescripts<https://git.wikimedia.org/log/wikimedia%2Fbugzilla%2Ftriagescripts>(e.g. stock answers to ping assignees), and sync'ed the "WeeklyReport" Bugzilla extension code <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/96479/> with upstream. WMF's Operations team installed new SSL certificates<https://rt.wikimedia.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=5011>for bugzilla.wikimedia.org. The "shellpolicy" keyword in Bugzilla was renamed<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49494>to "community-consensus-needed" and the "wikidata" keyword was removed <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56417>. Furthermore, Andre created a draft for a Bugzilla etiquette<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Bugzilla_etiquette> . *Mentorship programs <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs>* We started successfully Wikimedia's first participation in Google Code-In<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-In>. Six candidates were selected as new interns at the FOSS Outreach Program for Women - Round 7<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_Program_for_Women/Round_7>: - Anu G Enchackal <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Inchikutty> - UploadWizard:OSM Map Embedding<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Inchikutty/UploadWizard_OSM_Map_Embeddi…>(mentored by Gergő Tisza <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Tgr>) - Diwanshi Pandey <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Diwanshipandey> - Complete the MediaWiki development course at Codecademy<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Diwanshipandey/OPW>(Yuri Astrakhan <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Yurik>) - Brena Monteiro <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Monteirobrena> - mediawiki.org homepage redesign <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Monteirobrena/OPW>(Heather Walls <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Heatherawalls> and Quim Gil<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil>) - Be Birchall <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:5xbe> - Clean up Parsoid round-trip testing UI, including using a templating system<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:5xbe/Proposal>(Marc Ordinas <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Marcoil> and Subramanya Sastry <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Ssastry>) - Maria Pacana <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Mariapacana> - Clean up tracing/debugging/logging inside Parsoid<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Mariapacana/Application>(Subramanya Sastry <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Ssastry> and Arlo Breault<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Arlolra>) - Niharika Kohli <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Niharika> - Compact interlanguage links as a beta feature<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Niharika/Compacted_Interlanguage_Links_…>(Sucheta Ghoshal and Pau Giner) We also confirmed the participation of Wikimedia in the Facebook Open Academy <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Facebook_Open_Academy> program. *Technical communications <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_communications>* In November, Guillaume Paumier <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Guillom>'s primary focus was on preparing for the Google Code-in<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in>program, and mentoring students once the program started. In 2 weeks, 18 students<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_communications/Code-in/2013>worked on writing discovery reports <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Discovery_reports> (candid essays from the perspective of newcomers to the Wikimedia technical community); among them, seven completed their task successfully. Guillaume also assembled and published the weekly technical newsletter<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News>and provided ongoing communications support<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_communications/Tech_blog_activity>for the engineering staff. *Volunteer coordination and outreach <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Volunteer_coordination_and_outreach>* Erik Moeller's talk "The Wikipedia stack" was accepted for the main track session at FOSDEM <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Events/FOSDEM>. The call for proposals for the Wikis devroom at FOSDEM<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Events/FOSDEM>was extended until December 15. Wikimedia applied for a stand. A Request for Proposals for a technical writer contractor<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-November/073077.html>was also sent. Last, we helped establishing a routine around Architecture meetings <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_meetings>. Multimedia *Multimedia <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia>* In November, Mark Holmquist and Gergő Tisza developed a second beta version of the Media Viewer<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer>, based on new designs by Pau Giner. For a more immersive experience, this next version<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer#Next_Version>displays larger images, as shown in the demo <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lightbox_demo>. We also released Beta Features<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/About_Beta_Features>on all Wikimedia wikis, where it is already used by thousands of users. This experimental program invites users to try out new features before they are released widely, then give feedback to developers. To use Beta Features, click on the small 'Beta' link next to your 'Preferences' on your site, or test the latest version on MediaWiki.org<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatu…>. Fabrice Florin managed product development, led the creation of the Multimedia Vision 2016 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Multimedia_Vision_2016.pdf>(with Pau Giner), hosted roundtable discussions <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Roundtables/Roundtable_4> and updated the team's multimedia plans<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/2013-14_Goals#Milestones>, based on community and team feedback. Bryan Davis, Aaron Schulz and Chris Steipp reviewed new code for the upcoming GLAM Toolset<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:GLAMToolset_project#Goal_1:_GLAM…>for batch uploads by museum curators. We also welcomed Aaron Arcos as volunteer software engineer, who is joining our multimedia team<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia>full-time through Spring 2014. To discuss these features and keep up with our work, we invite you to join the multimedia mailing list<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/multimedia>. We are also recruiting for a senior software engineer<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ouLnWfwi&c=qSa9VfwQ>position on our team. Analytics <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics> *Kraken <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Kraken>* We continued to make progress on event delivery via Kafka. We identified and tested solutions for issues encountered with event delivery from the Amsterdam data center. We also tested solutions to fix Ganglia logging issues. *Wikimetrics <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Wikimetrics>* We concluded Phase 1 of Wikimetrics, by implementing asynchronous cohort validation, editor survivor and threshold metrics. *Data Quality <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Data_Quality>* We identified issues with over-counting page views, and deployed a fix in November. Data from July onward were restated. *Research and Data <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Research_and_Data>* This month, we started work on metrics standardization<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Epics/Editor_Engagement_Vital_Signs>, one of the team's quarterly goals. We published a number of supportive analyses of new user acquisition<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newly_registered_user>, activation <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:New_editor> and retention <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Surviving_user> as well as "active editors"<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Refining_the_definition_of_monthly…>to assess issues and potential benefits of new definitions. The outcome of this analysis will inform design decisions for new dashboards focused on editor engagement. In collaboration with the Platform team, we ran an A/B test to determine performance gains of localStorage. The results<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Module_storage_performance>indicate that the use of localStorage significantly improves the site's performance for the end user: Module storage is faster. Readers whose pages load slower tend to browse less. Mobile browsers don't seem to benefit substantially from caching. We published the results of a test designed to explore if displaying a short tutorial could improve the first-edit completion rate of newly-registered users on mobile devices. The results<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Mobile_editor_engagement/Tutorial_…>support the hypothesis, indicating that edit guiders are a good onboarding strategy for new mobile users. We ran an analysis of anonymous editor acquisition<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anonymous_editor_acquisition>as background research for new onboarding strategies designed by the Growth team and found that editors who edit as an IP right before registering an account are our most productive newcomers<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Productive_newcomer>. On November 9, 2013 we hosted the inaugural Labs2 Wiki Research Hackathon<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Labs2/Hackathons/November_9th,_2013>: it was the first in a series of global events meant to "facilitate problem solving, discovery and innovation with the use of open data and open-source tools" (read the full announcement<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/17/join-inaugural-wiki-research-hackatho…>). Highlights from the event are available in the latest issue of the Research Newsletter<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-12-04/Recen…>. We are planning to host a new hackathon in Spring 2014 and we are actively seeking <wrh(a)wikimedia.org> volunteers to host local and virtual meetups. Kiwix <http://www.kiwix.org> *The Kiwix project is funded and executed by Wikimedia CH <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CH>.* We have released two new versions of Kiwix for Android<https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwixmobile>this month (1.5 & 1.6), providing many new features; most of them were developed by young new developers as part of the Google Code-in program<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in>. We have also released a new and unique tool to easily create ZIM file yourself <https://sourceforge.net/p/kiwix/mailman/message/31653271/> from data on your hard drive; the tool is stable and can now be used. Work continues around tools based on Parsoid output, especially as we need to rewrite the ZIM-related code for the Mediawiki offline toolchain<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/PDF_rendering>, currently under heavy re-engineering. Wikidata<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata> *The Wikidata project is funded and executed by Wikimedia Deutschland <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Deutschland/en>.* Wikidata developers held an office hour to give a status update and answer questions (read the log<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2013-11-13b>). In addition, they worked on ranks, ordering of statements and the quantities datatype. The quantities datatype is needed, for example, to enter the number of inhabitants of a country in Wikidata. It is available for testing now on http://test.wikidata.org. Ranks will allow for certain statements to be marked as preferred or deprecated. This is for example useful to indicate a previous mayor of a city, or the number of inhabitants of a country in 1900. Magnus Manske wrote a gadget<http://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/?p=108>that allows you to additionally show Wikidata search results when doing a search on Wikipedia. He also extended the Reasonator tool to now also work for cities <https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?q=Q1040>. Until now, it only supported people and species. Future The engineering management team continues to update the *Deployments <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments>* page weekly, providing up-to-date information on the upcoming deployments to Wikimedia sites, as well as the *annual goals <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2013-14_Goals>*, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts. -- Guillaume Paumier Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation https://donate.wikimedia.org

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MediaWiki TLV
by oren bochman 09 Dec '13

09 Dec '13

Dear MediaWiki Hackers , WikiMedia Israel is pleased to announce a second Hackathon in Tel Aviv. If anyone is staying in Israel or Visiting for Xmas consider joining us at a developer conference and will be held in the hackaton format - (less lectures and more coding, adding features and fixing pesky bugs. ) On the hour, every hour we will host lightning talk in a subject related to wiki technology or research. (lightning talks are about 5 minutes long) Some of the slots are currently open - so let us know if you have some interesting updates ? Schedule: 10:00 - Start and Registration. 10:30 - Opening Words and Setting up teams. >From this point on we will code in teams with short breaks for meals and brief lightning talks (5 minutes) 12:00 - Lightning talk on MediaWiki Eco system. 13:00 - Lightning talk on Google summer of code. 14:00 - Lunch 15:00 - Lightning talk on translation, internationalization and localization. 16:00 - Lightning talk on (Suggest a subject) . 17:00 - Lightning talk on (Suggest a subject). At this point we suggest you prepare a demo on what you have developed or learned. 18:00 - Lightning talk on (Suggest a subject). 19:00 - Dinner. 19:30 - Demos. 22:00 - Closing. http://www.meetup.com/MediaWiki-TLV/ English registration http://www.wikimedia.org.il/events/hackathon-2013/ Hebrew registration Any questions can be directed to me at OrenBochman(a)gmail.com --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com

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Making MediaWiki extensions installable via Composer
by Jeroen De Dauw 09 Dec '13

09 Dec '13

Hey all, Several MediaWiki extensions, such as Maps and Semantic MediaWiki, are now installable via Composer. Lately I've been getting quite a few questions from developers on how to have their extensions support this awesome dependency manager, and decided to write down the most important points that are not obviously evident in the Composer documentation down. http://www.bn2vs.com/blog/2013/11/24/introduction-to-composer-for-mediawiki… Cheers -- Jeroen De Dauw http://www.bn2vs.com Don't panic. Don't be evil. ~=[,,_,,]:3 --

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QRCode - QRpedia
by Rodrigo Padula 09 Dec '13

09 Dec '13

Hello guys, I'm starting some conversations here in Brazil about the GLAM and other touristic ideas under the Brazilian Education Program. So, we are very interested to use the QRCodes linking to wikipedia articles, so we are evaluating QRpedia. Since the QRpedia is running as an external project in an external domain, it is reliable and stable to use in that kind of project? There are any plans to have that "service" running officially on Wikimedia's servers? There are any way to have it running on the http://tools.wmflabs.org/server ? Best regards -- *Rodrigo PadulaEducation Program Coordinator - Brazil**Consultant for the Brazilian Catalyst Program at Wikimedia Foundation* *+55 21 9326 0558Blog: http://www.rodrigopadula.com <http://www.rodrigopadula.com>Twitter: @rodrigopadula*

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Bugzilla Weekly Report
by reporter 08 Dec '13

08 Dec '13

MediaWiki Bugzilla Report for December 02, 2013 - December 09, 2013 Status changes this week Reports changed/set to UNCONFIRMED: 8 Reports changed/set to NEW : 31 Reports changed/set to ASSIGNED : 49 Reports changed/set to REOPENED : 21 Reports changed/set to PATCH_TO_RE: 92 Reports changed/set to RESOLVED : 318 Reports changed/set to VERIFIED : 40 Total reports still open : 13202 Total bugs still open : 7654 Total non-lowest prio. bugs still open: 7440 Total enhancements still open : 5548 Reports created this week: 370 Resolutions for the week: Reports marked FIXED : 247 Reports marked DUPLICATE : 35 Reports marked INVALID : 12 Reports marked WORKSFORME: 17 Reports marked WONTFIX : 23 Specific Product/Component Resolutions & User Metrics Created reports per component MediaWiki extensions Flow 41 Wikimedia General/Unknown 27 VisualEditor Editing Tools 23 MediaWiki extensions WikidataRepo 17 Wikimedia Labs tools 13 Created reports per product MediaWiki extensions 160 Wikimedia 70 VisualEditor 42 MediaWiki 40 Wikimedia Labs 20 Top 5 bug report closers jforrester [AT] wikimedia.org 31 ebernhardson [AT] wikimedia.or28 gwicke [AT] wikimedia.org 21 aklapper [AT] wikimedia.org 20 lydia.pintscher [AT] wikimedia17 Most urgent open issues Product | Component | BugID | Priority | LastChange | Assignee | Summary -------------------------------------------------------------- Analytics | Tech communit | 53489 | Highest | 2013-10-31 | acs[AT]bitergia.com | Relating tech contributors with organ Analytics | Tech communit | 57038 | Highest | 2013-11-20 | acs[AT]bitergia.com | Metrics about contributors with +2 pe MediaWiki | Categories | 55630 | Highest | 2013-11-22 | wikibugs-l[AT]lists. | When using UCA collations, Persian di MediaWiki | JavaScript | 52659 | Highest | 2013-11-25 | wikibugs-l[AT]lists. | [Regression]: mediawiki.notification: MediaWiki ext | CentralAuth | 54195 | Highest | 2013-12-03 | csteipp[AT]wikimedia | CentralAuth not caching Special:Centr MediaWiki ext | Echo | 53569 | Highest | 2013-12-03 | wikibugs-l[AT]lists. | [Regression] Echo: Sending 2 e-mails MediaWiki ext | Flow | 56680 | Highest | 2013-11-18 | wikibugs-l[AT]lists. | Flow must respect the per-wiki VE opt MediaWiki ext | MassMessage | 57464 | Highest | 2013-12-02 | wikibugs-l[AT]lists. | MassMessage thinks namespaces that do MediaWiki ext | ProofreadPage | 57948 | Highest | 2013-12-05 | wikibugs-l[AT]lists. | The mouse scroll zoom capacity have b MediaWiki ext | WikidataRepo | 57918 | Highest | 2013-12-03 | wikidata-bugs[AT]lis | show diffs for sorting changes MediaWiki ext | WikidataRepo | 52385 | Highest | 2013-12-04 | wikidata-bugs[AT]lis | Query by one property and one value ( VisualEditor | Editing Tools | 50768 | Highest | 2013-11-25 | rmoen[AT]wikimedia.o | VisualEditor: Better reference UI for VisualEditor | MediaWiki int | 48429 | Highest | 2013-11-01 | krinklemail[AT]gmail | VisualEditor: Support editing of sect VisualEditor | Technical Deb | 50514 | Highest | 2013-11-01 | roan.kattouw[AT]gmai | VisualEditor: We need an integration Wikimedia | Site requests | 58074 | Highest | 2013-12-07 | wikibugs-l[AT]lists. | Reinstate namespace aliases on ml sit Wikimedia Lab | Infrastructur | 48501 | Highest | 2013-11-14 | greg[AT]wikimedia.or | beta: Get SSL certificates for *.{pro Wikimedia Lab | tools | 57642 | Highest | 2013-12-08 | marc[AT]uberbox.org | Replicated database of dewiki is corr

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Adding a html builder to Lua
by hoo 08 Dec '13

08 Dec '13

Hey all, I'm currently working on the new Capiunto MediaWiki extension[1], which adds infobox functionality to Scribunto (and the MediaWiki parser in general). The Capiunto extension uses the HtmlBuilder Lua module[2] originally from enwiki to create the Infobox html. The HtmlBuilder provides general support for creating html in an easy and flexible way (maybe comparable to jQuery in JavaScript). Because of this and because it doesn't really fit into Capiunto we consider adding it directly to Scribunto. That way one could access its functionality directly as (maybe) mw.html. Prior to adding it to Scribunto I will review, document and write unit tests for the module. I hope you agree that this module is nice to have and that it fits into Scribunto best. Cheers, Marius 1 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Capiunto 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:HtmlBuilder

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Known issues in 1.22.0
by Mark A. Hershberger 08 Dec '13

08 Dec '13

There were a few issues whose fixes didn't make it into 1.22.0, but we should be able to address them within a couple of weeks. I've been making a list of the issues that should be fixed in 1.22.1: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/Known_issues Please feel free to suggest additions to the list. You can even make the additions if you are sure the problem will be rapidly addressed, but I or another person on the release managment team may revert your edits. The list currently has the following items: * The installer doesn't work for extensions on Windows. * There is a problem with Postgres support. bugzilla:46594 <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46594>, bugzilla:47055 <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47055>, bugilla:49523 <https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Bugilla:49523&action=edit&redli…> (User:Saper <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Saper> thinks these can be fixed by providing "FOR UPDATE table" support.) * Handle explicit plural forms in custom convertPlural in language classes <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/99088/>. * Installer reports undefined $nofollow <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/99654/> Thanks, Mark. -- http://hexmode.com/ When you are generous, you are not bestowing a gift, but repaying a debt. -- "On Living Simply", St John Chrysostom

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