Wikitech-l February 2015

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

134 participants
136 discussions

Re: [Wikitech-l] [Wikimedia-l] Types of allowed projects for grant funding (renamed)
by Pine W 22 Feb '15

22 Feb '15

Hi Luis, Thank you for agreeing to consider grant funding for software projects. It sounds like you also plan a broader review of funding for community needs and growth. I have a list of requests for changes, which boil down to removing policy barriers and greatly improving communications and workflows so that community growth is fostered and volunteer time is used wisely. I imagine that we will have an opportunity to discuss these matters in person in Berlin. I look forward to seeing you there, and I greatly appreciate your interest in supporting communities and contributor growth. Pine On Feb 21, 2015 6:12 PM, "Luis Villa" <lvilla(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > On Sat, Feb 21, 2015 at 5:39 PM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > > > Damon, Luis and members of their teams will need to weigh in on this, > > and will want to think through the implications for their respective > > areas, but it's a good conversation to have -- keeping in mind that > > Luis is just starting in his new role, so please give him at least a > > few days to get up to speed. ;-) > > > > Thanks for at least a few hours of cushion, Erik ;) > > I'm a big believer in the power of/need for software tools, and at least > philosophically I'm very open to funding software development outside the > Foundation (though obviously there are lots of pragmatic difficulties - > code review, etc.) So, yes, as part of our broader review of how we support > communities and contributor growth, CE will look at funding code very > seriously. > > Luis > > -- > Luis Villa > Sr. Director of Community Engagement > Wikimedia Foundation > *"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the > sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment."* > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Types of allowed projects for grant funding (renamed)
by Pine W 22 Feb '15

22 Feb '15

(Now continuing this discussion on Wikimedia-l also, since we are discussing grant policies.) For what it's worth, I repeatedly advocated for allowing IEG to support a broader range of tech projects when I was on IEGCom. I had the impression that there was a lot of concern about limited code review staff time, but it serms to me that WMF has more than enough funds to to pay for staffing for code review if that is the bottleneck for tech-focused IEGs (as well as other code changes). I also think that the grant scope policies in general seem too conservative with regard to small grants (roughly $30k and under). WMF has millions of dollars in reserves, there is plenty of mission-aligned work to be done, and WMF itself frequently hires contractors to perform technical, administrative, communications, legal and organizing work. It seems to me that the scope of allowed funding for grants should be similar to the scope of allowed work for contractors, and it would serve the purposes that donors have in mind when they donate to WMF if the scope of allowed purposes for grants is expanded, particularly given WMF's and the community's increasing skills with designing and measuring projects for impact. In the past I think there were probably some wasteful uses of grant funding, and the response at the time might have been to prohibit or refuse to fund entire categories of expenses. Now that everyone has more planning and evaluation capacity, it seems to me that this is a good time to rethink the categorical prohibitions and replace at least some of them with appropriate expectations for impact that would better serve our overall mission of creating and sharing knowledge. Pine On Feb 21, 2015 12:05 PM, "Brian Wolff" <bawolff(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On 2/21/15, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > In general WMF has a conservative grant policy (with the exception of > IEG, > > grant funding seems to be getting more conservative every year, and some > > mission-aligned projects can't get funding because they don't fit into > the > > current molds of the grants programs). Spontaneous cash awards for > previous > > work are unlikely. However, if there is an existing project that could > use > > some developer time, it may be possible to get grant funding for future > > work. > > > > [Rant] > > I find this kind of doubtful when IEG's (which for an individual > developer doing a "small" project is really the type of funding that > applies) have been traditionally denied for anything that even > remotely touches WMF infrastructure. (Arguably the original question > was about toollabs things, which is far enough away from WMF > infrastructure to be allowed as an IEG grant, but I won't let that > stop my rant...). Furthermore, it appears that IEGs now seem to be > focusing primarily on gender gap grants. > > I find it odd, that we have grants through GSOC and OPW to people who > are largely "newbies" (although there are exceptions), and probably > not in a position to do anything "major". IEG provides grants as long > as they are far enough away from the main site to not actually change > much. But we do not provide grants to normal contributors who want to > improve the technology of our websites, in big or important ways. > > Ostensibly this is done in the name of: > >Any technical components must be standalone or completed on-wiki. > Projects are > >completed without assistance or review from WMF engineering, so MediaWiki > >Extensions or software features requiring code review and integration > cannot be > >funded. On-wiki tech work (templates, user scripts, gadgets) and > completely > >standalone applications without a hosting dependency are allowed. > > Which on one hand is understandable. WMF-tech has its own priorities, > and can't spend all its time babysitting whatever random ideas get > funded. So I understand the fear that brought this about. On the other > hand it is silly, since a grant to existing tech contributors is going > to have much less review burden than gsoc/opw, and many projects might > have minimal review burden, especially because most review could > perhaps be done by non-wmf employees with +2, requiring only a final > security/performance sign off. In fact, we do already provide very > limited review to whatever randoms submit code to us over the internet > (regardless of how they are funded, or lack thereof). If IEG grants > were allowed in this area, it would be something that the grantee > would have to plan and account for, with the understanding that nobody > is going to provide a team of WMF developers to make someone else's > grant happen. We should be providing the same amount of support to IEG > grantees that we would to anyone who submitted code to us. That is, > not much, but perhaps a little, and the amount dependent on how good > their ideas are, and how clean their code is. > > > [End rant] > > Politically, I think its dangerous how WMF seems to more and more > become the only stakeholder in MediaWiki development (Not that there > is anything wrong with the WMF, I just don't like there being only 1 > stakeholder). One way for there to be a more diverse group of > interests is to allow grants to groups with goals consistent with > Wikimedia's. While not exactly super diverse (all groups have similar > goals), at least there would then be more groups, and hopefully result > in more interesting and radical projects. > > --bawolff > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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Thread subjects
by Bináris 21 Feb '15

21 Feb '15

Hi folks, could we by any chance return to the conservative Netiquette way of creating subjets, or the New Era of inadequate subjects has just begun, and we trend to soil the list with these marketing-based whatnots? Shall I go to the details or are we all informatics-minded people here? -- Bináris

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Progress report: Hierator
by Max Semenik 21 Feb '15

21 Feb '15

Hi, this is a status update for my WikiHiero rewrite! [1] I've made a first pass on comparison, based on all hieroglyphic texts on English Wikipedia: [2] You can see the difference yourselves, in my opinion the general quality is considerably better, and far more hieroglyphs are supported. However, a few problems were identified, mostly related to WikiHiero accidentally allowing invalid syntax in the past. I'm working on either fixing them in tokenizer, e.g. converting "ra::" to something like "ra:.:." or making a fallback to the old HTML renderer and adding a tracking category for future fixage by editors. Some of the known problems are listed at [3]. Unfortunately, this also includes some cases where WikiHiero's hieroglyphs deviated from what was said in standards, resulting in a mess that needs manual conversion during a transitional period. These will also fall back on the old renderer and be tracked. The code is still being worked on, it can be seen in [4] (Hierator) and [5] (WikiHiero). ----- [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Hierator [2] http://staging.wmflabs.org/w/extensions/wikihiero/comparison/ [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WikiHiero/JSesh_migration [4] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/178970 [5] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/178269 -- Best regards, Max Semenik ([[User:MaxSem]])

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w3c editing task force
by Amir E. Aharoni 21 Feb '15

21 Feb '15

Hi, I just found out that w3c has an editing task force, which tries to address the nightmare that is contenteditable: http://w3c.github.io/editing-explainer/tf-charter.html Does Wikimedia participate in it in any way?

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My experiences with PHPCS and PHPMD
by Jeroen De Dauw 21 Feb '15

21 Feb '15

Hey, I've written some stuff about my experiences with PHPCS and PHPMD in the context of MediaWiki development, which might be of interest to people here. http://www.bn2vs.com/blog/2015/02/20/phpcs-and-phpmd-my-experiences/ Also, in case you want to see how easy it is to add these tools to a MediaWiki extension, see https://github.com/SemanticMediaWiki/SemanticMetaTags/pull/25/files Cheers -- Jeroen De Dauw - http://www.bn2vs.com Software craftsmanship advocate Evil software architect at Wikimedia Germany ~=[,,_,,]:3

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Parser tests failing due to clickable anchors for section headers
by Vivek Ghaisas 20 Feb '15

20 Feb '15

In I562e437e, clickable anchors for section headers were added to the parser's output, which is causing many extensions' tests to fail . I will try to update some of the extensions' tests, but I'm hoping the extension maintainers will update their tests to reflect this change since I don't think I'll be able to update them all as of now. Sincere apologies for the late notification. Regards, polybuildr

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RuboCop is now voting
by Željko Filipin 20 Feb '15

20 Feb '15

Antoine and I have paired on making the RuboCop[0] Jenkins jobs voting. The details are in Phabricator[1] and Gerrit[2]. If you are not familiar with Rubocop, there is some documentation at mediawiki.org[3] and my blog[4]. If a repository is set up to run RuboCop, all you have to do is to execute this is terminal: gem install bundler bundle install bundle exec rubocop If you have any questions, or if you notice any problems, let me know. Željko -- 0: https://github.com/bbatsov/rubocop 1: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T84979 2: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/191861/ 3: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Coding_conventions/Ruby#RuboCop 4: http://filipin.eu/rubocop/

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Preparing Google Summer of Code 2015 and Outreachy
by Quim Gil 20 Feb '15

20 Feb '15

Today Google Summer of Code 2015 and Outreachy (was FOSS Outreach Program for Women, now open to other groups) have announced their call for organizations. Wikimedia will apply to both programs. The deadlines are February 20 and 17, respectively. THIS IS 7-10 DAYS FROM NOW! We need to update the ideas page, but this time we will do it differently: all project ideas need to be presented as a Phabricator task only (no excerpt in wiki page page is needed). We will use a workboard to track the readiness of project ideas. If you are interested in participating as intern or mentor, follow https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T921 If you are interested in proposing a project idea, associate your task to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/possible-tech-projects/ (work-in-progress drafts and other proposals subject to discussion are welcome too) I'm looking for a co-organizer to drive this round. We have a process that works, a motivated pool of mentors, and room for creativity and improvement. Between two people, the job is actually simple, and the rewards are literally priceless (including the possibility to attend the Mentors Summit). Nemo was a great co-organizer of Google Code-in, setting a precedent that we want to consolidate. If you are interested, contact me. -- Quim Gil Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil

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(no subject)
by Angela lum neh 19 Feb '15

19 Feb '15

Hello everyone, am Angela. Am happy to be part of this mailing list.

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Wikitech-l February 2015