Wikitech-l September 2013

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

137 participants
125 discussions

by C. Scott Ananian

New revelations on NSA capabilities yesterday in the New York Times: see https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/the_nsa_is_brea.html for a jumping off point. The bottom line seems to be: 1) don't use RC4 (we're already working toward that goal, I believe) 2) don't use the Dual_EC_DRBG PRNG (see http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/10189/who-uses-dual-ec-drbg) Can someone take a look at our SSL configuration and see if we have Dual_EC_DRBG enabled? (And if so, turn it off and use a better PRNG!) --scott ps. apparently Dual_EC_DRBG is built-in to Windows (!). A good reason not to run your security-critical servers on Windows, I guess... pps. if we're throwing stones, the Debian PRNG flaw is a big glass window.... ppps. http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/02/random-number-generation-il… pppps. router/switch/firewall compromises have also been a big part of the NSA story. Has anyone looked at our internal network infra closely? -- (http://cscott.net)

10 years, 7 months

Deployment schedule for the week of Sept 9th, 2013

by Greg Grossmeier

Hello and welcome to the latest update of the deployment schedule for the WMF server cluster. Full schedule available on the wiki, and is the place to look for any changes: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments#Week_of_September_9th Of special note: Next week all WMF staff will be in San Francisco for the "Tech Days" on Tues/Wed and the "All Hands" on Thurs/Friday. As such, some changes have been made to the normal deploy calendar (most notably, no deploys on Thursday due to All Hands). == Monday == * MediaWiki deploy of 1.22wmf16 to all non-wikipedia project sites (Commons, Witionary, etc) * The Language team will be rolling out some EventLogging work. * Probably a deploy of a fix to CentralNotice to accommodate multiple needs (by eg WLM). == Tuesday == * Nothing as of yet == Wednesday == * Wikipedia Zero updates * MediaWiki deploy of 1.22wmf17 to test wikis, and 1.22wmf16 everywhere else * E3 deploy of some GettingStarted changes. == Thursday == no deploys == Friday == no deploys As always, questions/comments welcome. Greg -- | Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E | | identi.ca: @greg A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |

10 years, 7 months

Etherpad Lite labs instance going down in two weeks - backup time

by Mark Holmquist

The day we have all equally hoped for and dreaded is come to pass: Etherpad Lite has now replaced Etherpad "Classic" in production, and the labs instance is on its way out. This is my as-wide-as-possible email warning to say that everything on the labs instance, as really should have been expected, is going to be gone soon. Not immediately - we intend to give you two weeks to get your important data off the instance and onto the new one at https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/ - but you should _absolutely_ be moving things as soon as possible. We will also keep a data dump around, in case anything else needs to get pulled out of the pads, but I would suggest not relying on that if you don't have to. And in the future: If a URL has "wmflabs.org" in it...don't put anything, ANYTHING, important there. The purpose of labs is to let us experiment with new technology without having to worry about reliability. Thanks so much for your help and understanding in the course of this migration. tl;dr: http://etherpad.wmflabs.org is going down in 2 weeks, get yer stuff off it. -- Mark Holmquist Software Engineer, Multimedia Wikimedia Foundation mtraceur(a)member.fsf.org https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:MHolmquist

10 years, 7 months

how to use /ResourceLoaderGetConfigVars

by Yury Katkov

Hey guys! This hook appears to be the proper way to pass my extension setting variables to javascript. [1] I don't get how it works. I mean, saw the examples in Semantic Result Formats and get what PHP side should look like. Still I have no idea how to access those variables in javascript. Please help me to figure this out. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Hooks/ResourceLoaderGetConfigVars ----- Yury Katkov, WikiVote

10 years, 7 months

Wikimedia engineering August 2013 report

by Guillaume Paumier

Hi, The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in August 2013 is now available. Wiki version: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/August Blog version: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/06/engineering-august-2013-report/ 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/August/sum… Below is the full 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 August include: - A discussion about using the secure HTTP protocol<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/01/future-https-wikimedia-projects/>on Wikimedia sites, followed by a switch to that protocol for all registered users<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/28/https-default-logged-in-users-wikimed…> ; - The launch of the Notifications feature<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/30/notifications-launch-on-mobile/>on the mobile site; - A discussion about how security issues are handled<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/30/team-wikimedia-security-has-a-spot-fo…>in our community; - The Wikimania conference, which was notably an opportunity for the Language engineering team<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/02/join-the-language-engineer-team-at-wi…>to meet with users and improve language support, particularly for the Javanese language<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/23/restoring-the-forgotten-javanese-scri…> ; - A much-anticipated upgrade of the software used by our volunteer e-mail response team<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/09/wikimedias-email-response-upgrade/>, OTRS. *Note: We're also providing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this report<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/August/sum…>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. - Vice President of Engineering: Search Firm Engagement - Engineering<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oDVOXfw3> - User Experience Designer<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oO8OXfwr> - Software Engineer - Fundraising<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oawpXfwM> - Software Engineer - Editor Engagement Experimentation<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o8NJXfwl> - Software Engineer - Editor Engagement<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o6NJXfwj> - Software Engineer - Language Engineering<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oH3gXfwH> - Software Engineer - Multimedia Systems<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oj40Wfw3> - Senior Software Engineer - Multimedia<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oC9OXfwg> - QA Engineer - Manual Testing- Visual Editor<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oNeQXfwy> - FE Developer - Analytics<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=olyGXfwg> - Product Manager - Platform<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o3vtXfwI> - Dev-Ops Engineer - SRE<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ocLCWfwf> Technical Operations *Data Dumps <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Projects/Data_Dumps>* All dumps ran from the data center in Ashburn this month; only the miscellaneous and experimental services remain to be moved. GSOC student Petr Onderka completed the first incremental dump-producing code<http://www.mail-archive.com/xmldatadumps-l@lists.wikimedia.org/msg00513.html>, along with a draft specification<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Svick/Incremental_dumps/File_format/Dif…>for the new format. Test it out and let us know what you think! *Wikimedia Labs <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs>* Due to Wikimania and staff vacations, this month had a relatively low number of infrastructure changes, but we had a relatively high influx of users and tools. We ran three workshops during Wikimania and helped Toolserver users migrate their tools to Labs. We did have a few infrastructure changes, though: A change for the service group interface was merged but not yet deployed. It removes the service group interface from the project interface, reducing clutter. An API was pushed in for project and service group information, to make the information available from Wikitech, rather than LDAP. Other infrastructure changes were bugfixes, which can be found through bugzilla. *OTRS* OTRS got a long overdue update to version 3.2.9 with the generous volunteer support of Martin and Marcel of Znuny GmbH. As part of the upgrade, the service was migrated from pmtpa to eqiad, and spam filtering was overhauled. Features Engineering <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Features_engineering> Editor retention: Editing tools *VisualEditor <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor>* In August, the VisualEditor team continued work, and presented and ran workshops at Wikimania in Hong Kong<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2013>to discuss how to best improve the system. The deployed version of the code was updated three times (1.22-wmf13<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf13#VisualEditor>, 1.22-wmf14<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf14#VisualEditor>and 1.22-wmf15<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf15#VisualEditor>), with several mid-deployment releases as the code was developed to patch urgent issues. The focus in this work was in improving the stability and performance of the system, fixing a number of bugs uncovered by the community, and making some usability improvements. *Parsoid <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid>* In August, the Parsoid team continued to polish compatibility with existing wikitext. User feedback after the July VisualEditor release was instrumental in the identification of issues and the development of support for important use cases of creative templating. The increased team size also allowed us to perform some long-standing code cleanup, make Parsoid compatible with Node 0.10, and improve testing. The round-trip testing infrastructure <http://parsoid.wmflabs.org:8001/> received a much-needed overhaul. The storage back-end switched from SQLite to MySQL, which improved throughput a lot and is allowing us to test new code far more quickly than before. Performance statistics are now recorded, which will let us identify performance bottlenecks as well as catch performance regressions. During Wikimania, the Kiwix team used Parsoid output to create an offline copy of Wikivoyage. With standard HTML libraries and the rich RDFa information in the Parsoid DOM, downloading and modifying the HTML representation was done in about 1000 lines of JavaScript<http://sourceforge.net/p/kiwix/other/ci/master/tree/mwhtmldumper/mwhtmldump…> . Editor engagement features *Notifications <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_%28Notifications%29>* In August, we released Notifications on the French, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese and Swedish Wikipedias, after extensive testing on the English Wikipedia, as well as mediawiki.org and Meta-Wiki. This engagement tool was well received by our new communities, especially social features such as Mentions and Thanks, which enable users to communicate more effectively than before. Benny Situ led the engineering work for this deployment and fixed a number of bugs, with the help of Erik Benhardson and Matthias Mullie. Fabrice Florin managed community relations for these new releases, updating this release plan<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Release_Plan_2013>and reaching out to more projects, to prepare for worldwide deployments on all wiki projects in coming months. To that end, we teamed up with Philippe Beaudette, Maggie Dennis, Patrick Earley, Jan Eissfeld, Anna Koval, Keegan Peterzell, and Sherry Snyder to coordinate these releases with the communities they serve. Dario Taraborelli created new metrics dashboards for French <http://ee-dashboard.wmflabs.org/dashboards/frwiki-features>, Hungarian <http://ee-dashboard.wmflabs.org/dashboards/huwiki-features>, Polish <http://ee-dashboard.wmflabs.org/dashboards/plwiki-features>, Portuguese <http://ee-dashboard.wmflabs.org/dashboards/ptwiki-features> and Swedish <http://ee-dashboard.wmflabs.org/dashboards/sewiki-features>Wikipedias. Lastly, we presented our work on Notifications in two talks at Wikimania 2013, with both a general overview<https://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Notifications>and a technical presentation<https://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/How_to_enhance_your_Me…>(see slides<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Notifications_Slides_-_08-10-2013.pdf>). We are very grateful to all our community champions for each language and look forward to more collaborations in the future. Our next major deployment to non-English Wikipedias will take place on Sep. 17, to be followed by weekly releases throughout the fall, as outlined in our release plan <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Release_Plan_2013>. To learn more, visit the project portal<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notifications>, 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>* In August, we continued development of the Flow prototype by implementing revisioning, moderation<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal/Functional_Specifications/Modera…>, and display code, on top of the storage and block abstractions. We have deployed this prototype to an internal labs instance to encourage the full team's involvement in development. Additionally, we participated in an agile workshop<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Flow_Team_Development_…>run by Arthur and Tomasz from the mobile team. This workshop facilitated planning the Flow MVP and setting goals for the team's first development sprint, along with providing information about agile guidelines and practices that have worked well for the mobile team. *Article feedback <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback>* In August, we made a few feature tweaks and bug fixes for the Article Feedback Tool <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5>(AFT5) on the English <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ArticleFeedbackv5> and French<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fr:Sp%C3%A9cial:ArticleFeedbackv5>Wikipedias. Matthias Mullie released a few patches to improve the opt-in/opt-out tool<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Feature_Requireme…>, and tested the new feedback notifications<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Watched_Page_-_Fee…>to let users know when feedback is marked as useful for a page they watch (or for a comment they posted). We also presented our work on AFT5 at Wikimania 2013, with designer Pau Giner and our French and German champions Benoît Evellin and Denis Barthel, in this session<https://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Article_Feedback>(see slides<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Article_Feedback_Slides_-_08-11-2013.pdf>). The team plans to make the AFT5 tool available to other wiki projects interested in testing this tool later this year, as outlined in the release plan<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Release_Plan_2013> . Editor engagement experiments *Editor engagement experiments<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editor_engagement_experiments> * In August, the Editor Engagement Experiments team (E3) primarily focused on development for its next and final A/B test of the Getting Started<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GettingStarted>task suggestion system, a part of a project aimed at onboarding new Wikipedians <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Onboarding_new_Wikipedians>. The team also worked on enhancements and bug fixes for the GuidedTour extension <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GuidedTour>, such as adding the ability to customize default tour actions and better integration with VisualEditor <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor>. During part of August, the majority of the E3 team was at Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong, and delivered three talks, including on: guided tours<https://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Make_your_user_experie…>, the team's new editor onboarding process<https://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Forget_the_tutorials,_…>, and product management<https://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/What_is_a_product_mana…>at the Wikimedia Foundation. Mobile <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering> *Commons App <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Commons>* This month, the Mobile Apps team pushed out additional releases of the Commons photo uploader app for iOS and Android. The iOS version includes a major UI revamp by Monte, while the Android version has received multiple incremental updates by Yuvi and Brion. Yuvi has been working on modernizing support for campaigns in UploadWizard, which will make it easier to coordinate uploads for events like Wiki Loves Monuments. Viewer, contributor, and admin user interfaces for campaigns will come to the web, with campaign-tied uploading in the web and mobile app. The team also started making plans for the next generation of the Wikipedia reader app, which will be more closely integrated with the mobile web site to ensure that new features are always available through a web view, even where we don't create specific native support. More details will be put together in the next couple months. *Wikipedia Zero <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero>* This month, the team completed version 1 of Wikipedia Zero automation tests, continued programming the re-architecture of Wikipedia Zero, implemented search engine non-indexing, and analyzed HTTPS requirements in support of a push for greater usage of HTTPS across Wikimedia projects. The Wikipedia Zero engineering team thanks Amit Kapoor from the Wikipedia Zero partnerships team, who wrapped up work with Wikimedia Foundation this month, for his hard word getting the program off the ground. And the team is also pleased to welcome Carolynne Schloeder, who joins the Wikipedia Zero program as Director of Mobile, Programs. *Mobile web projects <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_web_projects>* This month we continued to improve the mobile editing feature, monitoring and triaging bugs and expanding the feature show at the section level of articles. We also released the first iteration of mobile notifications to projects where Echo is enabled (English, French, Polish, Portuguese, Hungarian, and Swedish Wikipedia, as well as and Meta). In beta, we built a new notifications treatment to be released in later months and continued working on mobile talk pages. Language engineering<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_engineering> *Language tools <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Language_tools>* The language team continued maintenance of the UniversalLanguageSelector<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UniversalLanguageSelector>, in particular improving performance and integration testing<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Language_Testing_Plan>, and completed its integration with EventLogging, which will provide metrics<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Language_tools/Impact_Measurement_and_Metrics>useful e.g. to choose the best default font for a language<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/FAQ#What_if_the_…>. Counts from translatewiki.net<https://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/graph.php?r=week&z=xlarge&title=&vl=&x…>are live and a deployment plan for Wikimedia projects is under analysis. The team also released<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-August/071529.html>its monthly version of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB) which is used by third party developers and community members to add language support for their MediaWiki applications. The team continued mentoring four Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students. Praveen Singh, mentored by Santhosh Thottingal, released a Chrome extension<https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikimedia-input-tools/fjnfifedbee…>for Wikimedia Input Tools and contributed to the Indic Font Specification, a collaborative open source project. Team members also continued to work with Red Hat on various language initiatives. The team participated at Wikimania in Hong Kong, which was an opportunity to meet face to face, as well as to interact with Wikipedians and community members to solve a variety of issues, including dealing with Chinese language variants<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/03/language-support-at-wikimania-2013-in…>and adding language assets for Javanese<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/23/restoring-the-forgotten-javanese-scri…>. The team also presented various talks<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/02/join-the-language-engineer-team-at-wi…>on language engineering. Platform Engineering<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineering> MediaWiki Core *Multimedia <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia>* In August, we continued to expand our multimedia team<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia>: Bryan Davis joined us as senior platform engineer, working with product manager Fabrice Florin, front-end engineer Mark Holmquist and engineering director Rob Lanphier. We discussed multimedia plans and new feature ideas with community members in two separate events: a multimedia roundtable at Wikimania 2013 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Roundtables/Roundtable_3>and an IRC chat<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2013-08-22>, and updated our multimedia plan for the coming year<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/2013-14_Goals>based on their feedback (see slides <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Multimedia_Project_Slides.pdf>). Summer contractor Brian Wolff completed the development of new gallery tags to support more appealing layouts for thumbnails, while Jan Gerber made improvements to the Score and TimeMediaHandler extensions. Mark Holmquist started development on the Media Viewer<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer>, based on designs by May Tee-Galloway and Jared Zimmerman; this new tool will display images in larger size when clicking on article thumbnails, as well as display file information and a full-screen viewing option, right on the same page. We aim to test a first version of this tool as part of a beta experiment <https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/multimedia/cards/2>on a few pilot sites in coming weeks. To discuss these features and keep up with our work, we invite you to join this new multimedia mailing list<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/multimedia>. Last but not least, we are also recruiting for two more positions for our team: a multimedia systems engineer<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oj40Wfw3&c=qSa9VfwQ>and a senior software engineer<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ouLnWfwi&c=qSa9VfwQ>. Please spread the word about this unique opportunity to create a richer multimedia experience for Wikipedia and MediaWiki sites! *Search <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Search>* In August we deployed CirrusSearch to test2.wikipedia.org and mediawiki.organd we're testing there. We're actively looking for other volunteers to test out CirrusSearch. Right now, CirrusSearch is not the primary search for mediawiki.org; you have to use a URL parameter to test it. We're hoping to make it the primary in September. *Auth systems <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Auth_systems>* The team deployed OAuth to mediawiki.org on Aug 20th, and are working on enhancement requests before the extension is enabled on the rest of the WMF wikis. Several small bugs were fixed in SUL. *Security auditing and response<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security_auditing_and_response> * The team responded to reported issues, and prepared for the next MediaWiki release, scheduled on September 3. We worked with Operations to enable HTTPS for user logins in most geographies. Quality assurance *Quality Assurance <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance>* This month QA began collaborating closely with Release Engineering to coordinate improvement of reporting, monitoring, and testing software releases. Our goal is to make our frequent software releases even more reliable than they already are, and to use the tools and systems in place today such as the beta labs cluster to make those reliable releases even more frequent. *Browser testing<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance/Browser_testing> * This month saw a significant change to the structure and organization of browser tests, with tests and builds for CirrusSearch, UniversalLanguageSelector, and VisualEditor following the example of MobileFrontend and now residing in the git repositories for those extensions, rather than in the /qa/browsertests repository. This creates opportunities for more frequent and more accurate Jenkins builds of the tests, while also reducing the overhead required for analyzing test failures. Engineering community team *Bug management <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management>* Andre gave presentations on Improving MediaWiki quality: How everybody can help with bug report triaging<https://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Improving_MediaWiki_qu…>and Transparency and collaboration in Wikimedia engineering<https://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Transparency_and_colla…>at Wikimania 2013 <http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/>. He updated Bugzilla's technical documentation <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bugzilla.wikimedia.org>and documented how to test Bugzilla code changes on the Wikimedia Labs instance<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Bugzilla_Labs_instance>. Bugzilla now consequently links<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?bug_id=42524,45271,52764>to canonical places explaining how to write a good bug report and explaining Bugzilla's UI fields. Bugzilla also shows a new "Show other bugs" link <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46413> next to the "Component" area to make finding similar reports easier. Andre cleaned up his Greasemonkey triage helper scripts<https://git.wikimedia.org/tree/wikimedia%2Fbugzilla%2Ftriagescripts>by providing a setting for each functionality at the beginning of the file; a blog post<http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/2013/08/23/bugzillatips-triage-helpertools-…>provides more details. Bugzilla's testing instance <http://boogs.wmflabs.org/> on Wikimedia Labs saw several patches deployed for testing, which after some more testing should end up in the live Bugzilla; changes include: showing the history of a bug report inline between the comments<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47256>and configuring the guided bug entry form <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36762>for users that are new to bug reporting. *Mentorship programs <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs>* The 20 Google Summer of Code<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2013>projects passed the official mid-term evaluation at the beginning of August, and the Outreach Program for Women<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_Program_for_Women/Round_6>project is on track as well. Katie Filbert <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Aude> (Aude), David Cuenca<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Micru>(Micru) and Quim Gil <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil> (Qgil) will participate at GSoC Mentors Summit in Mountain View (CA, USA) on October 19-20. Monthly reports from the projects: - Refactoring of ProofreadPage extension<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Proofread_Page/GSoC#August> - Section handling in Semantic forms<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Himeshi/GSoC_2013/Project#August> - jQuery.IME extensions for Firefox and Chrome<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Prageck/GSoC_2013_Application#Monthly_R…> - Android app for MediaWiki translation<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Orsagi/GSoC_2013_proposal#Monthly_Repor…> - Mobilizing Wikidata<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Pragunbhutani/GSoC_2013_Updates#Monthly…> - Improve support for book structures<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Book_management/Progress#August> - Incremental data dumps<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Svick/Incremental_dumps#August_report> - Language Coverage Matrix Dashboard<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Harsh4101991/GSoC_2013#August> - Internationalization and Right-To-Left Support in VisualEditor<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Mooeypoo/GSOC_2013_Proposal:_RTL_Suppor…> - Browser test automation for Visual Editor<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Rachel99/proposal1#August> - VisualEditor plugin for source code<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Beanixster#August> - UploadWizard: Book upload customization<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Rasel160/GSoC2013/Status#2013-08-monthly> - Prototyping inline comments<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Rjain/Gsoc2013/Project_Updates#August> - Improvement of glossary tools<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GSOC_2013_Improvement_of_glossary_tools#Augu…> - Incremental updates for Kiwix<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Kiran_mathew_1993/ZIM_incremental_updat…> - Pronunciation Recording Tool<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Rahul21/Gsoc2013/Project_Updates#August> - Bayesian Spam Filter<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Anubhav_iitr/Bayesan_spam_filter/Projec…> - Wikidata language fallback and conversion<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Liangent/wb-lang/updates#August> *Technical communications<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_communications> * Guillaume Paumier <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Guillom> continued to focus on the VisualEditor deployment effort, working on communications, documentation and liaising with the French Wikipedia. Work on technical communications mostly focused on perennial activities like Tech news<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News>and ongoing communications support to the engineering staff. *Volunteer coordination and outreach<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Volunteer_coordination_and_outreach> * We had a team presentation at Wikimania: Transparency and collaboration in Wikimedia engineering<http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Submissions/Transparency_and_c…>, explaining how volunteers can make a difference. Following the work on Community metrics <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_metrics>, the five key performance indicators<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_metrics#Key_performance_indicators>(KPIs) were discussed and agreed upon. We are focusing on the first one: who contributes code<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_metrics#Who_contributes_code>. A list of Key Wikimedia software projects<https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Key_Wikimedia_software_projects>has been created to define the scope of these KPIs. Recruiting automated browser testers keeps being our top priority. We are organizing the next workshop in San Francisco and online on September 18: Epic fail: figuring out Selenium test results<http://www.meetup.com/wikimedia-tech/events/137381022/> . Analytics <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics> *Analytics infrastructure<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Infrastructure> * We continue to pursue the initiatives listed in our planning document. We've had one analyst accept a job offer (welcome Aaron<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EpochFail>!) and are in discussions with a software engineer. We continue to have a solid pipeline and are spending a lot of time interviewing. Wikimetrics is on target for an early September release and we've made good progress against our hadoop infrastructure goals. In co-operation with Ops, we've completed our reinstall of the Hadoop cluster and run several days of reliability testing over the labor day weekend. We are currently investigating replacing the Oracle JDK with the Open JDK to be in line with our goals of using open source whenever possible. Our project to replace udp2log with Kafka is making steadily progress. Varnishkafka, which will replace varnishncsa, has been debianized<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/78782/>and the first performance tests of compressing the message sets are very encouraging. We created a test environment in Labs to test Kafka failover modes and we have been prototyping with Camus<https://github.com/linkedin/camus>to consume the data from a broker and write it to HDFS. We are right now thinking about how to set up Kafka in a multi data-center environment. The Zookeepers have been reinstalled through Puppet as well. *Analytics Visualization, Reporting & Applications<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Visualization,_Reporting_%26_Appli…> * In close collaboration with Dario, Jaime and Jessie, we have worked on new features for Wikimetrics. In particular, we are adding new metrics such as survival, pages created <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/80659/>, aggregation of metrics <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/76742/>, metadata in the CSV output <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/81261/>, a support page<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/79457/>and we have now more than 90% test coverage <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/81153/> of the codebase. In preparation for the reinstallation of the Hadoop cluster, we moved all Wikipedia Zero jobs off the cluster. We took this opportunity to add additional monitoring to the creation of Wikipedia Zero dashboards. We have worked with Wikipedia Zero to identify a problem with Geolocation of requests that has created large jumps in total traffic. We spent quite some time creating a more robust process for updating and monitoring gp.wmflabs.org. This dashboard is used by various internal stakeholders and receives its information from different datastreams using different scripts. We have been working on running these scripts under the general purpose stats user, adding additional monitoring to prevent stale data and puppetized some of the jobs. *Data Releases <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Data_Releases>* In August, we attended WikiSym and Wikimania. Dario Taraborelli<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DarTar>gave a keynote address on actionable Wikipedia research<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_research_keynote_WikiSym_2013…>at WikiSym, where several other Wikipedia research papers<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2013/August>were presented. At Wikimania, we hosted two sessions focused on Wikimedia data<https://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Datafying_Wikimedia>and analytics tools <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:UserMetrics_Wikimania_2013.pdf>. We also worked with Platform engineering this month on analyzing and visualizing HTTPS failure rates by country<https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ams-fyukCIlMdFRwMWJ3czFRQ0NEeV…>, in preparation for the switch to HTTPS as a default. We released new dashboards for the launch of notifications on 5 other Wikipedias and continued to provide ad-hoc support to teams in Editor Engagement. Last, we continued screening and interviewing candidates for an open research analyst position. Kiwix <http://www.kiwix.org> *The Kiwix project is funded and executed by Wikimedia CH<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CH> .* Release of the new Mediawiki offliner<http://sourceforge.net/p/kiwix/other/ci/master/tree/mwhtmldumper/>was a little bit delayed; we are still fixing stability bugs. This solution has already proven its efficiency, as we have released 20 new ZIM files this month: a new throughput record. The ZIM incremental update GSoC project<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Kiran_mathew_1993/ZIM_incremental_updat…>progresses too, as the student works on the integration of zimdiff/zimpatch in the Kiwix ecosystem. Kiwix developers have had a 6 days hackathon in Hong-Kong to prepare the next Kiwix release <http://www.kiwix.org>, after some final work on compilation. 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> .* In August, the Wikidata team was present at 3 events: COSCUP, Wikimania<http://blog.wikimedia.de/2013/08/22/wikidata-and-other-technical-bits-at-wi…>and a meetup about Wikidata and Incubator. A lot of work has been put into improving the API and its documentation. The team also worked on the ability to reorder the qualifiers and sources in a statement, improved the speed of Wikidata slightly, and made progress on the ability to query for statements with a specific property and value, as well as merging items. An improved proposal <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiktionary> for the support of Wiktionary has been published. They also started the paper cuts <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Paper_cuts> initiative to find and fix small bugs that have a large impact on how enjoyable it is to use Wikidata. Denny and Adam gave a short overview of the state of Wikidata and answered questions during an office hour<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2013-08-26>on IRC. The biggest news for August though was the activation of data access (Wikidata phase 2) on Wikivoyage<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:PC#Data_acccess_for_Wikivoyage_and_b…> . 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 *engineering roadmap<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Roadmap> *, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts. ------------------------------ *This report was written collaboratively by Wikimedia engineers and managers. See revision history<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_engineering_report/20…>and associated status pages. A wiki version<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/August>is also available. * -- Guillaume Paumier Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation https://donate.wikimedia.org

10 years, 7 months

Re: [Wikitech-l] [Wikitech-ambassadors] VisualEditor weekly update - 2013-09-05 (MW 1.22wmf16)

by Paul Selitskas

On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 3:40 AM, James Forrester <jforrester(a)wikimedia.org>wrote: > All, > > We also added a set of keyboard shortcuts for setting the block > formatting: Ctrl+0 sets a block as a paragraph; Ctrl+1 up to Ctrl+6 sets > it as a Heading 1 ("Page title") to Heading 6 ("Sub-heading 4"); Ctrl+7 sets > it as pre-formatted (bug 33512<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33512>). > The help/'beta' menu now exposes the build number next to the "Leave > feedback" link, so users can give better reports about issues they > encounter (bug 53050<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53050> > ). > Here it is! I have some characters assigned to the third layer (via Ctrl+Alt/AltGr), and they conflict with the new keyboard shortcuts. It's very very annoying and makes VE almost unusable. Is there a way to distinguish Ctrl and Ctrl+Alt? > If you have any questions, please do ask. > > Yours, > -- > James D. Forrester > Product Manager, VisualEditor > Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. > > jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list > Wikitech-ambassadors(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors > > -- З павагай, Павел Селіцкас/Pavel Selitskas Wizardist @ Wikimedia projects

10 years, 7 months

by Thomas Gries

to whom it may concern: It has been reported, that myOpenID will close down for good in February 2014. Users of this OpenID registrar will have to go elsewhere. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6329158 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/05/myopenid_closes_for_good_2014/

10 years, 7 months

Is there a way to let mediawiki support jquery mobile?

by XIAO Qingjun

Hi, all I am trying to add some jquery mobile components to my wiki site, to give it a more beautiful look on Android app. The app is the official mediawiki mobile client, which can be downloaded from the following link. https://github.com/wikimedia/WikipediaMobile Now, there is no problem for me to include the jquery mobile javascript and css to this little phonegap-based project. If the contents grabbed from the mediawiki website (by mobilefrontend) contains jquery mobile components, they can be shown properly on my android phone. However, the wiki site look quite different if it is accessed from a PC. All the jquery mobile contents do not load properly. So I added the jquery.mobile-1.3.2.min.js to mediawiki common.js, and the jquery.mobile-1.3.2.min.css to mediawiki common.css. But the whole site looks a mess. All the buttons and links are shown as jquery mobile buttons, and cannot be clicked. I wonder whether there is a graceful method to apply the jquery.mobile js and css just to the wiki contents (in particular, to div#content), without affecting the surrounding parts, like the edit page button, save page button, etc. Thanks for casting some light onto this issue. Best Shawn

10 years, 7 months

"Developers" link in the footer of all Wikimedia wikis

by Quim Gil

Just a heads up about a little big step. As per Add "Developers" link to footer of Wikimedia wikis using WikimediaMessages extension https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33464 A Developers link pointing to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/How_to_contribute is visible in the footer of ALL WIKIMEDIA PROJECTS. Thank you very much MZMcBride, Matmarex, MaxSem, Nemo, Ori and anyone else involved! Thank you also to all the translators of that string and that page. Next... revisiting https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_hub ? -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil

10 years, 7 months

Reminder: Gerrit downtime in 30 minutes

by Chad Horohoe

Hi all, Just a friendly reminder that we're taking down Gerrit in about 30 minutes for a planned migration to a new (bigger) server. We've allotted an hour for the changeover but I'm not expecting it to take that long. I'll be sure to let everyone know when it's back up and running. -Chad

10 years, 7 months

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Wikitech-l September 2013