Wikitech-l June 2013

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

120 participants
117 discussions

Missing Section Headings
by Marc Riddell 13 Sep '24

13 Sep '24

Hello, I have been a WP editor since 2006. I hope you can help me. For some reason I no longer have Section Heading titles showing in the Articles. This is true of all Headings including the one that carries the Article subject's name. When there is a Table of Contents, it appears fine and, when I click on a particular Section, it goes to that Section, but all that is there is a straight line separating the Sections. There is also no button to edit a Section. If I edit the page and remove the "== ==" markers from the Section Titles, the Title then shows up, but not as a Section Heading. Also, I don't have any Date separators on my Want List. This started 2 days ago. Any thoughts? Thanks, Marc Riddell [[User:Michael David]]

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MediaWiki 1.19.0beta2
by Sam Reed 09 May '14

09 May '14

I'm happy to announce the availability of the second beta release of the new MediaWiki 1.19 release series. Please try it out and let us know what you think. Don't run it on any wikis that you really care about, unless you are both very brave and very confident in your MediaWiki administration skills. MediaWiki 1.19 is a large release that contains many new features and bug fixes. This is a summary of the major changes of interest to users. You can consult the RELEASE-NOTES-1.19 file for the full list of changes in this version. Five security issues were discovered. It was discovered that the api had a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the block/unblock modules. It was possible for a user account with the block privileges to block or unblock another user without providing a token. For more details, see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34212 It was discovered that the resource loader can leak certain kinds of private data across domain origin boundaries, by providing the data as an executable JavaScript file. In MediaWiki 1.18 and later, this includes the leaking of CSRF protection tokens. This allows compromise of the wiki's user accounts, say by changing the user's email address and then requesting a password reset. For more details, see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34907 Jan Schejbal of Hatforce.com discovered a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in Special:Upload. Modern browsers (since at least as early as December 2010) are able to post file uploads without user interaction, violating previous security assumptions within MediaWiki. Depending on the wiki's configuration, this vulnerability could lead to further compromise, especially on private wikis where the set of allowed file types is broader than on public wikis. Note that CSRF allows compromise of a wiki from an external website even if the wiki is behind a firewall. For more details, see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35317 George Argyros and Aggelos Kiayias reported that the method used to generate password reset tokens is not sufficiently secure. Instead we use various more secure random number generators, depending on what is available on the platform. Windows users are strongly advised to install either the openssl extension or the mcrypt extension for PHP so that MediaWiki can take advantage of the cryptographic random number facility provided by Windows. Any extension developers using mt_rand() to generate random numbers in contexts where security is required are encouraged to instead make use of the MWCryptRand class introduced with this release. For more details, see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35078 A long-standing bug in the wikitext parser (bug 22555) was discovered to have security implications. In the presence of the popular CharInsert extension, it leads to cross-site scripting (XSS). XSS may be possible with other extensions or perhaps even the MediaWiki core alone, although this is not confirmed at this time. A denial-of-service attack (infinite loop) is also possible regardless of configuration. For more details, see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35315 ********************************************************************* What's new? ********************************************************************* MediaWiki 1.19 brings the usual host of various bugfixes and new features. Comprehensive list of what's new is in the release notes. * Bumped MySQL version requirement to 5.0.2. * Disable the partial HTML and MathML rendering options for Math, and render as PNG by default. * MathML mode was so incomplete most people thought it simply didn't work. * New skins/common/*.css files usable by skins instead of having to copy piles of generic styles from MonoBook or Vector's css. * The default user signature now contains a talk link in addition to the user link. * Searching blocked usernames in block log is now clearer. * Better timezone recognition in user preferences. * Extensions can now participate in the extraction of titles from URL paths. * The command-line installer supports various RDBMSes better. * The interwiki links table can now be accessed also when the interwiki cache is used (used in the API and the Interwiki extension). Internationalization - -------------------- * More gender support (for instance in user lists). * Add languages: Canadian English. * Language converter improved, e.g. it now works depending on the page content language. * Time and number-formatting magic words also now depend on the page content language. * Bidirectional support further improved after 1.18. Release notes - ------------- Full release notes: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=mediawiki/core.git;a=blob_plain;f=RE LEASE-NOTES-1.19;hb=1.19.0beta2 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Release_notes/1.19 Co-inciding with these security releases, the MediaWiki source code repository has moved from SVN (at https://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3) to Git (https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/gitweb/mediawiki/core.git). So the relevant commits for these releases will not be appearing in our SVN repository. If you use SVN checkouts of MediaWiki for version control, you need to migrate these to Git. If you up are using tarballs, there should be no change in the process for you. Please note that any WMF-deployed extensions have also been migrated to Git also, along with some other non WMF-maintained ones. Please bear with us, some of the Git related links for this release may not work instantly, but should later on. To do a simple Git clone, the command is: git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/p/mediawiki/core.git More information is available at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Git For more help, please visit the #mediawiki IRC channel on freenode.net irc://irc.freenode.net/mediawiki or email The MediaWiki-l mailing list at mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org. ********************************************************************** Download: http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.19/mediawiki-1.19.0beta2.tar.gz Patch to previous version (1.19.0beta1), without interface text: http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.19/mediawiki-1.19.0beta2.patch.gz Interface text changes: http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.19/mediawiki-i18n-1.19.0beta2.patc h.gz GPG signatures: http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.19/mediawiki-1.19.0beta2.tar.gz.si g http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.19/mediawiki-1.19.0beta2.patch.gz. sig http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.19/mediawiki-i18n-1.19.0beta2.patc h.gz.sig Public keys: https://secure.wikimedia.org/keys.html

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Welcome to Ken Snider, Wikimedia Operations
by Erik Moeller 28 Jan '14

28 Jan '14

Hello all, I’m delighted to announce that Ken Snider is joining the Wikimedia operations team. He will start as an international contractor working remotely from Toronto, Canada on June 10, and will be visiting SF in the week of June 17. We’re currently in the process of seeking work authorization in the United States in the Director of TechOps position. CT has graciously agreed to support the ops leadership transition full-time through June, and part-time through July. We’ll be starting the handover while Ken is working remotely. A bit more about Ken: Ken was apparently genetically predisposed to become a sysadmin since he joined one of Canada’s first large ISPs, Primus, straight out of school in 1997 and helped build their infrastructure til 2001. He then joined a startup called OpenCOLA in 2001 which was co-founded by Cory Doctorow and developed early P2P precursors to tools like BitTorrent and Steam. It’s best known today for the development of an open source (GPL’d) cola recipe which is still in use (more than 150,000 cans sold if Wikipedia is to be believed). Ken got involved in one of Cory’s pet projects, BoingBoing.net which some of you may have heard of ;-), and has been their sysadmin since 2003. After a stint from 2001-2005 at DataWire, Ken became Director of Tech Ops at Federated Media, a role he held from 2005-2012. Federated Media is an ad network that was founded to support high traffic blogs and sites that want to stay independent of large publishers, with a network that supports more than 1B requests/day. One of the unusual challenges at FM was that the company grew through acquisitions of various blogging and publishing networks. This led to the challenge of integrating very heterogeneous operations and engineering infrastructure, including multiple geographically distributed ops teams and data-center locations. As DTO, Ken led these efforts, such as OS standardization, development of a unified deployment infrastructure, etc. Ken also ensured that the operations group partnered effectively with the various engineering teams developing site features and enhancements. I want to again take this opportunity to thank CT Woo for his tireless operations leadership since December 2010. I’d also like to thank everyone who’s participated in the Director of TechOps search process. Please join me in welcoming Ken to the Wikimedia Foundation and the community. :-) All best, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

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migrating hooks doc to doxygen?
by Antoine Musso 13 Nov '13

13 Nov '13

Hello, Since we introduced hooks in MediaWiki, the documentation has been maintained in a flat file /docs/hooks.txt . Over the week-end I have converted the content of that file to let Doxygen recognize it. The patchset is: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/66128/ I have used that patch to generate a temporary documentation. That lets everyone browse the result easily. The produced result is: A landing page: https://doc.wikimedia.org/mw-hooks/hooks_mainpage.html The doc overview: https://doc.wikimedia.org/mw-hooks/page_hooks_documentation.html A list of hooks with their documentation: https://doc.wikimedia.org/mw-hooks/page_hooks_list.html I think that makes it a bit more accessible to everyone and Doxygen autolink to referenced classes. Some issues I have: - the hooks are listed alphabetically when they could be regrouped by theme (like API, SpecialPages, HTML Forms ...). - The hooks are documented in a separate file (still docs/hooks.txt), when we might want to have the doc near the wfRunHooks() call. Thoughts ? -- Antoine "hashar" Musso

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New git-review lets you configure 'origin' as the gerrit remote
by Ori Livneh 22 Oct '13

22 Oct '13

Hey, The new version of git-review released today (1.22) includes a patch I wrote that makes it possible to work against a single 'origin' remote. This amounts to a workaround for git-review's tendency to frighten you into thinking you're about to submit more patches than the ones you are working on. It makes git-review more pleasant to work with, in my opinion. To enable this behavior, you first need to upgrade to the latest version of git-review, by running "pip install -U git-review". Then you need to create a configuration file: either /etc/git-review/git-review.conf (system-wide) or ~/.config/git-review/git-review.conf (user-specific). The file should contain these two lines: [gerrit] defaultremote = origin Once you've made the change, any new Gerrit repos you clone using an authenticated URI will just work. You'll need to perform an additional step to migrate existing repositories. In each repository, run the following commands: git remote set-url origin $(git config --get remote.gerrit.url) git remote rm gerrit git review -s Hope you find this useful.

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Can we help Tor users make legitimate edits?
by Sumana Harihareswara 28 Sep '13

28 Sep '13

TL;DR: A few ideas follow on how we could possibly help legit editors contribute from behind Tor proxies. I am just conversant enough with the security problems to make unworkable suggestions ;-), so please correct me, critique & suggest solutions, and perhaps volunteer to help. The current situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advice_to_users_using_Tor_to_bypass… We generally don't let anyone edit or upload from behind Tor; the TorBlock extension stops them. One exception: a person can create an account, accumulate lots of good edits, and then ask for an IP block exemption, and then use that account to edit from behind Tor. This is unappealing because then there's still a bunch of in-the-clear editing that has to happen first, and because then site functionaries know that the account is going to be making controversial edits (and could possibly connect it to IPs in the future, right?). And right now there's no way to truly *anonymously* contribute from behind Tor proxies; you have to log in. However, since JavaScript delivery is hard for Tor users, I'm not sure how much editing from Tor -- vandalism or legit -- is actually happening. (I hope for analytics on this and thus added it to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Dreams .) We know at least that there are legitimate editors who would prefer to use Tor and can't. People have been talking about how to improve the situation for some time -- see http://cryptome.info/wiki-no-tor.htm and https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2012-October/004116.html . It'd be nice if it could actually move forward. I've floated this problem past Tor and privacy people, and here are a few ideas: 1) Just use the existing mechanisms more leniently. Encourage the communities (Wikimedia & Tor) to use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Request_an_account (to get an account from behind Tor) and to let more people get IP block exemptions even before they've made any edits (< 30 people have gotten exemptions on en.wp in 2012). Add encouraging "get an exempt account" language to the "you're blocked because you're using Tor" messaging. Then if there's an uptick in vandalism from Tor then they can just tighten up again. 2) Encourage people with closed proxies to re-vitalize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WOCP . Problem: using closed proxies is okay for people with some threat models but not others. 3) Look at Nymble - http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#oakland11-formalizing and http://cgi.soic.indiana.edu/~kapadia/nymble/overview.php . It would allow Wikimedia to distance itself from knowing people's identities, but still allow admins to revoke permissions if people acted up. The user shows a real identity, gets a token, and exchanges that token over tor for an account. If the user abuses the site, Wikimedia site admins can blacklist the user without ever being able to learn who they were or what other edits they did. More: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~iang/ Ian Golberg's, Nick Hopper's, and Apu Kapadia's groups are all working on Nymble or its derivatives. It's not ready for production yet, I bet, but if someone wanted a Big Project.... 3a) A token authorization system (perhaps a MediaWiki extension) where the server blindly signs a token, and then the user can use that token to bypass the Tor blocks. (Tyler mentioned he saw this somewhere in a Bugzilla suggestion; I haven't found it.) 4) Allow more users the IP block exemption, possibly even automatically after a certain number of unreverted edits, but with some kind of FlaggedRevs integration; Tor users can edit but their changes have to be reviewed before going live. We could combine this with (3); Nymble administrators or token-issuers could pledge to review edits coming from Tor. But that latter idea sounds like a lot of social infrastructure to set up and maintain. Thoughts? Are any of you interested in working on this problem? #tor on the OFTC IRC server is full of people who'd be interested in talking about this. -- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation

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The summary of new zero architecture proposal
by Yuri Astrakhan 25 Sep '13

25 Sep '13

Based on many ideas that were put forth, I would like to seek comments on this ZERO design. This HTML will be rendered for both M and ZERO subdomains if varnish detects that request is coming from a zero partner. M and ZERO will be identical except for the images - ZERO substitutes images with links to File:xxx namespace through a redirector. * All non-local links always point to a redirector. On javascript capable devices, it will load carrier configuration and replace the link with local confirmation dialog box or direct link. Without javascript, redirector will either silently 301-redirect or show confirmation HTML. Links to images on ZERO.wiki and all external links are done in similar way. * The banner is an ESI link to */w/api.php?action=zero&banner=250-99* - returns HTML <div> blob of the banner. (Not sure if banner ID should be part of the URL) Expected cache fragmentation for each wiki page: * per subdomain (M|ZERO) * if M - per "isZeroCarrier" (TRUE|FALSE). if ZERO - always TRUE. 3 variants is much better then one per carrier ID * 2 per subdomain. P.S. Redirector is a Special:Zero page, but if speed is an issue, it could be an API calls (which seem to load much faster). The API call would redirect to the target, or could either redirect to the special page for confirmation rendering, or output HTML itself (no skin support, but avoids an extra redirect). Might not be worth it as javascript will be available on most of our target platforms now or soon.

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Meet Bingle and Bugello
by Arthur Richards 19 Sep '13

19 Sep '13

I wrote a tool that will import bugs from Bugzilla into either Mingle and/or Trello (two project management tools used by some teams at the Wikimedia Foundation). The mobile web team was finding it difficult to keep track of two separate tools - one for new feature development, the other for tracking bugs, so Bingle helps bridge the gap and allows us to focus on one tool. This has had the side effect of keeping visibility of reported bugs high and has made it easier for us to quickly prioritize incoming bugs against existing work, and quickly respond to open issues. You can find the code and some rudimentary usage instructions here: https://github.com/awjrichards/bingle I hacked this together rather quickly - expedience was my goal rather than perfection, so it's not well documented, a little quirky, and there's a lot of room for improvement. I've been sitting on it for a while, hoping to make improvements before announcing it, but I have not found the time to make the changes I would like (eg for it to use the Bugzilla API rather than Bugzilla atom feeds). So, I invite anyone interested and willing to fork it, and pitch in and help make it awesome :) -- Arthur Richards Software Engineer, Mobile [[User:Awjrichards]] IRC: awjr +1-415-839-6885 x6687

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Making inter-language links shorter
by Pau Giner 04 Sep '13

04 Sep '13

As multilingual content grows, interlanguage links become longer on Wikipedia articles. Articles such as "Barak Obama" or "Sun" have more than 200 links, and that becomes a problem for users that often switch among several languages. As part of the future plans for the Universal Language Selector, we were considering to: - Show only a short list of the relevant languages for the user based on geo-IP, previous choices and browser settings of the current user. The language the users are looking for will be there most of the times. - Include a "more" option to access the rest of the languages for which the content exists with an indicator of the number of languages. - Provide a list of the rest of the languages that users can easily scan (grouped by script and region ao that alphabetical ordering is possible), and search (allowing users to search a language name in another language, using ISO codes or even making typos). I have created a prototype <http://pauginer.github.io/prototype-uls/#lisa> to illustrate the idea. Since this is not connected to the MediaWiki backend, it lacks the advanced capabilities commented above but you can get the idea. If you are interested in the missing parts, you can check the flexible search and the list of likely languages ("common languages" section) on the language selector used at http://translatewiki.net/ which is connected to MediaWiki backend. As part of the testing process for the ULS language settings, I included a task to test also the compact interlanguage designs. Users seem to understand their use (view recording<https://www.usertesting.com/highlight_reels/qPYxPW1aRi1UazTMFreR>), but I wanted to get some feedback for changes affecting such an important element. Please let me know if you see any possible concern with this approach. Thanks -- Pau Giner Interaction Designer Wikimedia Foundation

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Bugzilla: Separate bug report status when patch is in Gerrit?
by Andre Klapper 26 Aug '13

26 Aug '13

Hi everybody, in December I mentioned the idea of having a "PATCH_AVAILABLE" or "PATCH_TO_REVIEW" status in Bugzilla [1] and that we should re-evaluate the idea once we have automatic notifications from Gerrit into Bugzilla in place [2]. This is now the case [3]. >From the Amsterdam Hackathon I know that some developers would like to filter on bug reports that have or don't have a patch in Gerrit, and easier finding of bug reports with a corresponding patch && lack of recent changes might provide another entry point for new developers (pick up the existing patch and finish it). Hence I propose * to remove the manually set and error-prone Bugzilla keyword "patch-in-gerrit": Every bug on its way to get RESOLVED FIXED has to pass this stage anyway so a status feels more appropriate, and * to make the "Gerrit Notification Bot" automatically change the bug report status to "PATCH_AVAILABLE"/"PATCH_TO_REVIEW" in Bugzilla when a patch for that bug report has been committed (not: merged) to Gerrit. Comments? andre [1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-December/065046.html [2] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-December/065226.html [3] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17322 PS: Making the Gerrit notification bot automatically close bug reports in Bugzilla after merging a patch in Gerrit, or differentiating in Bugzilla between "RESOLVED FIXED" (fix merged) and "RELEASED" (fix deployed on the Wikimedia wikisites) are also interesting topics to discuss at some point, but not in this thread. One step at a time. -- Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/

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Wikitech-l June 2013