I am pleased to announce that Joaquín Oltra Hernández joining the WMF
as a Software Engineer for the Mobile Web Team!
In Joaquins own words ...
---
I'm spanish, living in the sunny east coast. I've been working with
web frontends, UIs and javascript for about 8 years. For the last year
I've been freelancing and previously I worked for 3 years for the
trademarks and designs office for the European Union.
I love learning about new programming languages and paradigms, and
also the openness of the web front-end and how it allows us to create
useful open software and interfaces that everybody can use and
interact with directly.
On my free time reading mind expanding books [1], riding a mountain
bike, hiking up the mountain, and tinkering with small side projects
with new languages and libraries. I also love to travel, seeing and
learning about different countries and cultures [2].
You can find me on Freenode with the nick joakino
I'll be working remotely from Alicante in Spain.
---
Please welcome Joaquín!
--tomasz
[1] - "Flow - The psychology of optimal experience" & "Status: Anxiety"
[2] - https://www.flickr.com/photos/joaquinoltra
[3] - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_web/Team
Calling all MediaWiki contributors!
As many of you may know, there's a tool out there in the MediaWiki ether
called MediaWiki-Vagrant. Whether you know what it's all about, love it,
hate it, or haven't a clue—no, it isn't a fork of our wiki platform for
displaced San Franciscans—we want to hear from you.
One role of the Release Engineering team here at WMF is to develop and
maintain tooling that reduces barriers to code contribution, accurate
review/testing, and safe deployment. MediaWiki-Vagrant has emerged as one
important piece of that toolchain, but with its ever growing user base it
has also grown in complexity. We're dedicated to keeping it as congruent
with staff and community needs as possible, but we need your help!
Please complete the following survey when you have a few minutes to spare.
Your answers will inform the direction we take with MediaWiki-Vagrant and
related tools over the next quarter and beyond.
https://wikimedia.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_eM9U3IVEt6UXqnz
Thanks for your time and, most of all, your contributions to MediaWiki.
--
Dan Duvall
Automation Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation <http://wikimediafoundation.org>
Thanks for the note. Would it be within our mission scope to host a
Freenode server? We use Freenode a *lot* for public and private
communications. There have been previous discussions about WMF support for
upstream services, and WMF has been talking about offering non-monetary
support to affiliates, so I think hosting a Freenode server could make
sense.
Pine
On Nov 10, 2014 1:11 AM, "Faidon Liambotis" <faidon(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> This is just a quick update that as of late October, WMF is officially
> hosting a Tor relay:
>
> https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/DB19E709C9EDB903F75F2E6CA95C84D637B62…
>
> This is not an exit node, and it's just a small contribution to the
> network. Really - anyone can do it: https://www.eff.org/torchallenge/
>
> We want to note that editing via Tor is a whole other matter, and I
> would refer to previous conversations on this list if you have questions
> about the current state of things. We also currently have no plans to
> run an exit node or a hidden service, but we're open to suggestions for
> additional ways in which WMF can support anonymity and privacy.
>
> Sincerely,
> Faidon
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
The Wikimedia Foundation has an account with browserstack.com for
cross-browser testing. I do not think it sees much use, but in case anyone
is using the browserstack service, they had a security breach yesterday:
https://twitter.com/browserstack
Browserstack says it will publish details of the breach directly to users.
-Chris
Something else that I have had in the pipeline for a long while is autosave drafts. Basically, whenever you type, the article is saved to your local computer. If the browser crashes, and you visit the same article, it will prompt you for recovery. Making a Special:Autosave drafts index page would be trivial.
Implementation:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/5130/ <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/5130/>
Of this, I also have an alternate implementation:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/157818/ <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/157818/>
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/159626/ <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/159626/>
The original one is based on code by Joancreus and uses localStorage. It works, quite well actually, but while improving it, I became of the opinion that localStorage is basically so limited in storage and gives you so little feedback as an API and an enduser, that it's not really suited for much more than usersettings (big cookies). Not for saving potentially multiple 1MB articles, with structured details.
As a storage layer, indexedDB is much nicer in that regard. API wise, it's a bit convoluted, but a jQuery plugin makes it usable and readable. There are WebSQL polyfills for platforms that don't have indexedDB, which would allow us to support browsers of the past 6 years.
I would like some opinions on which way to go here. Additionally, i would love to hear what else people think would be required to make this usable for the Wikipedia audience and the naming. Would this be Drafts ? Autosave drafts ? autosave ? Would you say 'recover' when asking the user to use the version from drafts, or just 'use draft' etc?
Note that the '2nd' version also has a few more improvements like a separate RL module and a preference option, but those can easily be added to the first implementation as well.
DJ
Interested in helping out in improving
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/ ? Worried about getting phabricator
set up for development? Not interested in installing MySQL?
Now there is a solution! Phabricator-tools, only $0.00 (plus a few GB
tax & storage) from github!
[/tongue-in-cheek]
Yesterday, I adapted[2] the existing phabricator-tools[1] repository
(which is mean to quickly get phabricator running) to work (better)
for development. To use it, do the following:
git clone https://github.com/valhallasw/phabricator-tools
cd phabricator-tools/vagrant
vagrant up
firefox http://127.0.0.1:8080 &
ssh -P 2222 vagrant@localhost # password vagrant
cd /phabricator/instances/dev/phabricator
# edit whatever you want
Then, if you're ready to submit a patch:
git config --global user.name ...
git config --global user.email ...
git commit all the things
arc diff # and follow the instructions, including installing the arc certificate
The Phabricator people are really quick and helpful with reviewing
patches, and the Phabricator code is easy to use (I haven't used PHP
in ages, but I had my patch[3] ready in an hour or so), so if you want
something in Phabricator to improve, {{sofixit}}! ;-)
A few Wikimedia-related requests can be found at [4].
Also, I'll be at the hackathon in Amsterdam next weekend, and I'd be
happy to give anyone a hand there getting started.
Merlijn
[1] https://github.com/bloomberg/phabricator-tools
[2] https://github.com/valhallasw/phabricator-tools
[3] https://secure.phabricator.com/D10823
[4] https://secure.phabricator.com/tag/wikimedia/
Hi all,
I'm very pleased to announce that as of this week, Yuvi Panda is part of
the Wikimedia Technical Operations team, to work on our Wikimedia Labs
infrastructure. Yuvi originally joined the Wikimedia Foundation Mobile team
in December 2011, where he has been lead development for the original
Wikipedia App and its rewrite, amongst many other projects.
Besides his work in Mobile, Yuvi has been volunteering for Ops work in
Wikimedia Labs for a long time now. One of the notable examples of his work
is a seamlessly integrated Web proxy system that allows public web requests
from the Internet to be proxied to Labs instances on private IPs without
requiring public IP addresses for each instance. This very user friendly
system, which he built on top of NGINX, LUA, redis, sqlite and the
OpenStack API, sees a lot of usage and has dramatically reduced the need
for Labs users to request (scarce) public IP address resources via a manual
approval process.
Another example of his work that has made a big difference is the
initiation of the Labs-Vagrant project; bringing the virtues of the
Mediawiki:Vagrant project to Wikimedia Labs, and allowing anyone to bring a
MediaWiki development environment up in Labs with great ease. More recently
Yuvi has been working on our much needed infrastructure in Labs for
monitoring metrics (Graphite) and service availability (Shinken). We expect
this will give us a lot more insight into the internals and availability of
software and services running in Wikimedia Labs and its many projects, and
we should be able to deploy it in Production as well.
Of course all of this work didn't go unnoticed, and about half a year ago
we've asked Yuvi if he was interested to move to Ops. With his extensive
development experience and his demonstrated ability to join this with solid
Ops work to create stable and highly useful solutions, we think he's a
great fit for this role.
Yuvi recently had his VISA application accepted, and is planning to move to
San Francisco in March 2015. Until then he will be working with us remotely
from India.
Please join me in congratulating Yuvi!
--
Lead Operations Architect
Director of Technical Operations
Wikimedia Foundation
Greetings,
The Affiliations Committee is pleased to announce the recognition [1] of
the MediaWiki Stakeholder's Group - a user group for "MediaWiki developers,
admins, users, consultants, and hosting providers who cooperate in order to
improve the software and advocate the needs of MediaWiki users outside the
Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) and its projects."
This group shows great promise and potential for helping organize folks who
are interested in making MediaWiki even better and give a voice to the many
non-WMF users of the software.
So, now we have them joining the family of affiliates. Please, let's give
them a warm welcome!
More info about the group:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Stakeholder%27s_Group
Congratulations!
-greg aka varnent
Vice-Chair, Affiliations Committee
1:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliations_Committee/Resolutions/MediaWik…