Wikitech-l January 2015

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

133 participants
118 discussions

MediaWiki release management moves back to the WMF
by Greg Grossmeier 20 Jan '15

20 Jan '15

After 18 months of MediaWiki release management handled externally by Markus Glaser and Mark Hershberger, we have agreed to bring the MediaWiki release work back to the Wikimedia Foundation. From now on, the Release Engineering team coordinated by Greg Grossmeier, which is responsible for the WMF weekly releases, will be also in charge of the MediaWiki releases for third parties. This will be a hit on the WMF Release Engineering team initially, but we plan to make future announcements related to that. About two years ago we explored the outsourcing of MediaWiki releases under the assumption that an external team not conditioned to the Wikimedia priorities would be in a better spot to satisfy the needs of third party MediaWiki users. Over time, this assumption has been overshadowed by the overhead required to keep both release teams in sync, and the difficulties that Mark y Markus have run into when trying to follow the weekly release train. We believe that the situation would be similar with any other external team, so we have decided to go back to in-house releases. Another lesson learned by all of us is that managing MediaWiki releases and promoting a MediaWiki ecosystem are very different specialized tasks, and it is hard to be the individuals in charge of both. Both Mark and Markus were active in the MediaWiki community well before managing MediaWiki releases, and will continue to be active now in the context of the MediaWiki Stakeholders Group, as volunteers and with their own stakeholders' hats. The Engineering Community team, coordinated by Quim Gil, will offer their help in consolidating the Group and aligning their interests with the WMF plans. The Wikimedia Foundation thanks Mark, Markus, and Alexis for the work done releasing MediaWiki and coordinating several community activities in the context of the MediaWiki Stakeholders Group. While we are aware of the disruption that this change of strategy might bring, we believe that the new situation puts us all in a better position to support the needs of the MediaWiki community. This change of course is also a good chance to discuss what is the best mid-term scenario for MediaWiki outside of Wikimedia, and what should we all do in order to get there. The MediaWiki Developer Summit in San Francisco next week is a good place to have this conversation, in addition of our usual online channels, of course. Markus Glaser, Mark Hershberger, Alexis T. Hershberger, Greg Grossmeier, Quim Gil

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Re: [Wikitech-l] The future of shared hosting
by Woozle Hypertwin 19 Jan '15

19 Jan '15

I felt I should respond to this... I run about a dozen MediaWiki wikis singlehandedly. I've been using MediaWiki since 2005, and I think only once did I run into a substantial problem doing an upgrade. Upgrading has only gotten easier over the years, too... and I use a lot of extensions, including some I've customized or written from scratch. Mind you, I generally only do upgrades when either (a) migrating a site to a new server, (b) I want to install an extension not supported by the current version, or (c) I want new features -- but this is only because the process takes a fair amount of time, not because it is especially difficult. I could probably write up a guide to safe MediaWiki upgrading in a printed page or so. There is some truth to what Ryan says, but the impression he left on me -- that maintaining MediaWiki is a hopeless mess for most admins -- is rather at odds with my own experience. (Side note, with regard to preserving old MediaWiki content when maintenance becomes too much of a chore: Dkosopedia has apparently abandoned MediaWiki; their content is now static HTML. I'd be interested in finding out both why and how they did this.) Woozle On 01/19/2015 07:01 AM, wikitech-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org wrote: > What you're forgetting is that WMF abandoned MediaWiki as an Open > Source project quite a while ago (at least 2 years ago). There's a > separate org that gets a grant from WMF to handle third party use, and > it's funded just well enough to keep the lights on. Take a look at the > current state of MediaWiki on the internet. I'd be surprised if less > than 99% of the MediaWiki wikis in existence are out of date. Most are > probably running a version from years ago. The level of effort > required to upgrade MediaWiki and its extensions that don't list > compatibility with core versions is past the skill level of most > people that use the software. Even places with a dedicated ops team > find MediaWiki difficult to keep up to date. Hell, I find it difficult > and I worked for WMF on the ops team and have been a MediaWiki dev > since 1.3. I don't think adding a couple more services is going to > drastically alter the current situation. - Ryan

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More prominent display of other format available for download in image description pages
by Thanuditha Ruchiranga 17 Jan '15

17 Jan '15

Hi, I am working on this bug <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T64305> and I want to make sure that I understood the bug right. Can somebody please help? So for a JPEG image, right under the image something like only "Full resolution: JPEG" should be there? and same goes for a PNG and GIF files as well(something like only "Full resolution: PNG" and only "Full resolution: GIF" respectively) And for other formats like SVG and TIFF, does media wiki automatically converts them to something that all browsers can display? I just checked for it here <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22Single%22Japanese_castle_Tenshu_…>, it is a SVG file and it provides those other format links in PNG. And here <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22Ammunition!%22_And_remember_-_bo…>, it is a tiff file and clicking other resolutions would give a JPEG file even though it is not explicitly and clearly mentioned. So only for formats like that(SVG, TIFF and others of that sort), those PNG or JPEG links of the maximum possible image size also should be clearly provided right under the image in addition to the link to the original file? Is this what is exactly expected to be fixed from this bug? Thanks in advace.

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+2 for TTO in mediawiki/
by Legoktm 17 Jan '15

17 Jan '15

Hi! I have nominated TTO for +2 in mediawiki/ repositories: <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gerrit/Project_ownership#TTO_for_.2B2_in_med…>. Please comment :) Additionally, there are some other requests on that page that could use some comments. Thanks, -- Legoktm

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(Reduced) Deployment schedule for the next two weeks (weeks of Jan 19th and 26th)
by Greg Grossmeier 16 Jan '15

16 Jan '15

The next two weeks will hopefully be quiet, deployment-wise. This is due to two weeks of in-person events that will take the majority of the attention of WMF and community engineers. == Week of January 19th == Summary: * No MediaWiki train deploy due to WMF All Hands ** WMF All Hands is all day Wed and Thurs * No deploys Mon/Wed/Thurs/Fri * SWAT/etc on Tues OK == Week of January 26th == Summary: * No MediaWiki train deploy due to MediaWiki Dev Summit ** MediaWiki Dev Summit is Mon and Tues all day * SWAT all week as normal * No other deploys Mon/Tuesday Thanks and as always, questions and comments welcome, Greg -- | Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E | | identi.ca: @greg A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |

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[CfP] Linked Data Quality #LDQ2015 Call for Papers
by Dimitris Kontokostas 16 Jan '15

16 Jan '15

LDQ 2015 CALL FOR PAPERS 2nd Workshop on Linked Data Quality co-located with ESWC 2015, Portorož, Slovenia May 31 or June 1, 2015 http://ldq.semanticmultimedia.org/ Important Dates * Submission of research papers: March 6, 2015 * Notification of paper acceptance: April 3, 2015 * Submission of camera-ready papers: April 17, 2015 Since the start of the Linked Open Data (LOD) Cloud, we have seen an unprecedented volume of structured data published on the web, in most cases as RDF and Linked (Open) Data. The integration across this LOD Cloud, however, is hampered by the ‘publish first, refine later’ philosophy. This is due to various quality problems existing in the published data such as incompleteness, inconsistency, incomprehensibility, etc. These problems affect every application domain, be it scientific (e.g., life science, environment), governmental, or industrial applications. We see linked datasets originating from crowdsourced content like Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap such as DBpedia and LinkedGeoData and also from highly curated sources e.g. from the library domain. Quality is defined as “fitness for use”, thus DBpedia currently can be appropriate for a simple end-user application but could never be used in the medical domain for treatment decisions. However, quality is a key to the success of the data web and a major barrier for further industry adoption. Despite the quality in Linked Data being an essential concept, few efforts are currently available to standardize how data quality tracking and assurance should be implemented. Particularly in Linked Data, ensuring data quality is a challenge as it involves a set of autonomously evolving data sources. Additionally, detecting the quality of datasets available and making the information explicit is yet another challenge. This includes the (semi-)automatic identification of problems. Moreover, none of the current approaches uses the assessment to ultimately improve the quality of the underlying dataset. The goal of the Workshop on Linked Data Quality is to raise the awareness of quality issues in Linked Data and to promote approaches to assess, monitor, maintain and improve Linked Data quality. The workshop topics include, but are not limited to: * Concepts * - Quality modeling vocabularies * Quality assessment * - Methodologies * - Frameworks for quality testing and evaluation * - Inconsistency detection * - Tools/Data validators * Quality improvement * - Refinement techniques for Linked Datasets * - Linked Data cleansing * - Error correction * - Tools * Quality of ontologies * Reputation and trustworthiness of web resources * Best practices for Linked Data management * User experience, empirical studies Submission guidelines We seek novel technical research papers in the context of Linked Data Quality with a length of up to 8 pages (long) and 4 pages (short) papers. Papers should be submitted in PDF format. Other supplementary formats (e.g. html) are also accepted but a pdf version is required. Paper submissions must be formatted in the style of the Springer Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). Please submit your paper via EasyChair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ldq2015. Submissions that do not comply with the formatting of LNCS or that exceed the page limit will be rejected without review. We note that the author list does not need to be anonymized, as we do not have a double-blind review process in place. Submissions will be peer reviewed by three independent reviewers. Accepted papers have to be presented at the workshop. Important Dates All deadlines are, unless otherwise stated, at 23:59 Hawaii time. * Submission of research papers: March 6, 2015 * Notification of paper acceptance: April 3, 2015 * Submission of camera-ready papers: April 17, 2015 * Workshop date: May 31 or June 1, 2015 (half-day) Organizing Committee * Anisa Rula – University of Milano-Bicocca, IT * Amrapali Zaveri – AKSW, University of Leipzig, DE * Magnus Knuth – Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, DE * Dimitris Kontokostas – AKSW, University of Leipzig, DE Program Committee * Maribel Acosta – Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, AIFB, DE * Mathieu d’Aquin – Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK * Volha Bryl – University of Mannheim, DE * Ioannis Chrysakis – ICS FORTH, GR * Jeremy Debattista – University of Bonn, Fraunhofer IAIS, DE * Stefan Dietze – L3S, DE * Suzanne Embury – University of Manchester, UK * Christian Fürber – Information Quality Institute GmbH, DE * Jose Emilio Labra Gayo – University of Oviedo, ES * Markus Graube – Technische Universität Dresden, DE * Maristella Matera – Politecnico di Milano, IT * John McCrae – CITEC, University of Bielefeld, DE * Felix Naumann – Hasso Plattner Institute, DE * Matteo Palmonari – University of Milan-Bicocca, IT * Heiko Paulheim – University of Mannheim, DE * Mariano Rico – Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, ES * Ansgar Scherp – Kiel University, DE * Jürgen Umbrich – Vienna University of Economics and Business, AT * Miel Vander Sande – MultimediaLab, Ghent University, iMinds, BE * Patrick Westphal – AKSW, University of Leipzig, DE * Jun Zhao – Lancaster University, UK * Antoine Zimmermann – ISCOD / LSTI, École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne, FR * Andrea Maurino – University of Milan-Bicocca, IT More details can be found on the workshop website: http://ldq.semanticmultimedia.org/

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Fun with code coverage
by James Douglas 16 Jan '15

16 Jan '15

Howdy all, Recently we've been playing with tracking our code coverage in Services projects, and so far it's been pretty interesting. We've learned about where the gaps are in our testing (which has even revealed holes in our understanding of our own specifications and use cases), and had fun watching the coverage climb with (nearly) each pull request. I've slapped together some notes about our experience here: https://github.com/wikimedia/restbase/tree/master/doc/coverage#code-coverage I'd love to hear your thoughts and learn about your related experiences. What are your favorite code coverage tools and services? Cheers! James

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Mediawiki Manual:Skinning #Footer area
by Nasir Khan 15 Jan '15

15 Jan '15

Hi, I was working to develop a theme [1] for Mediawiki. I was following the Manual:Skinning page on Mediawiki site. I wanted to make some changes in the footer area but could not find in the list. I am going to add a list in the following section. Can anyone please tell me how can i show this sections and is there any better doc than the one i am following now. - what is the easier way to add/remove links from the footer links - show/hide lastmod - show/hide viewcount - show/hide numberofwatchingusers - show/hide credits on web view and print page - show copyright link as a link - show license, powered by mediawiki and other images as text links [1] - https://github.com/nasirkhan/mediawiki-bootstrap [2] - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Skinning regards Nasir Khan -- *Nasir Khan Saikat* www.nasirkhn.com Founding member, Wikimedia Bangladesh Public Lead, Creative Commons Bangladesh Fellow, Institute of Open Leadership

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Best for strategy for filtering and rebroadcasting RCstream?
by Maximilian Klein 15 Jan '15

15 Jan '15

Hello Wikiwizards, I have developed an application that reads the RCstream, performs a filter/augmentation operation[1] and then rebroadcasts the filtered RCstream. The problem I am running into on Tools-Labs is that when I submit to the grid, the rebroadcasting of the filtered websocket stream is happening on a different server with each submission to the grid (i.e. task(a)tools-exec-##.eqiad.wmflabs). So how can I have submit the rebroadcast job to the grid and have the rebroadcasted websocket be accessed by a static address, so that external people can read it? What is the best strategy? Some solutions I can think of: *Should I make an instance for this? *Write out to the filesystem and rebroadcast from a webserver? *Dynamically bind incoming requests to the jobs-grid? [1]the operation is to look at the content of all changes and filter only those that involve addition or deletion of specific wikitext template parameters. Make a great day, Max Klein ‽ http://notconfusing.com/

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New provider of RC changes - XmlRcs
by Petr Bena 15 Jan '15

15 Jan '15

Hi folks, Most of you probably heard about new stream of RC changes as alternative to IRC: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/RCStream I simply found it complex beyond the edge of usability for most of solutions that use low level languages or frameworks that don't support modern technologies like JSON or websocket.IO and don't want to be overbloated with 3rd libs, so I launched this alternative provider: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/XmlRcs If you aren't using JavaScript or Python and you found new RC provider (RCStream) too complex, you might find this useful.

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Wikitech-l January 2015