Wikitech-l July 2015

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

97 participants
78 discussions

Editing + Reading Meeting Notes
by Adam Baso 27 Jul '15

27 Jul '15

Hi all, James Forrester, Florian, and I met Wednesday, 22-July-2015 to discuss the Editing roadmap, with the backdrop of editing modes available in mobile web and apps but both the mobile web and apps teams now being in the Reading department. Notes: * FY 2015-2016: active Editing development for apps not planned * General plan is to replace the current mobile web editing experiences with new (replacement) VE and wikitext editor maintained by the VE team for mobile web * Q1: VE mobile prototyping (doesn't require Reading involvement) * Q2: Editing for mobile web replacement *coding* starting, but rollout on mobile web would begin in some future quarter _after_ Q2 * Feature submission practices for volunteers submitting editing related stuff for the mobile web for the time being (feature submissions discouraged for now as it will end up being replaced; mainline VisualEditor / next gen wikitext editing in collaboration with VE team would probably make more sense) - ** Create task in reading-web Phabricator board and indicate the details of what you were thinking to work on and roughly when. Add James Forrester and Joaquin Hernandez to card. ** Reach out to James_F (Senior Product Manager, VisualEditor) and joakino (Reading Web engineering product owner and tech lead) on #wikimedia-mobile on Freenode to discuss the idea and to determine who would need to code review and test * Code review for bugfixes for the existing mobile editing code should be done by Reading Web, and code review plus testing should be done by Editing as well. Ping joakino and James_F on IRC to figure out who to add to bugfixes. * As the Editing team gets into the practice of submitting patches for MobileFrontend to swap out the editor, as usual, tasks should be filed well ahead of time in the reading-web Phabricator board so there's a heads up about potential code review. Also, Editing and Reading should be tracking Q2 and subsequent quarter planning together to ensure dependencies are clearly defined and agreed upon. I also spoke to Roan from Collaboration after the Scrum of Scrums the same day. Roan indicated that there isn't an emphasis on rolling out Flow to mobile Wikipedias en masse for FY 2015-2016. And generally, when Flow does become slated for rollout on the mobile Wikipedias and sister projects in a broader sense it shouldn't require work - or anything substantial, anyway - from the Reading team. -Adam

1 0

Alexa?
by Magnus Manske 27 Jul '15

27 Jul '15

We should probably apply for "Alexa, ask Wikipedia ..." before someone else does... https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills-kit

3 2

Geolocation and WikiVoyage
by Sylvain Arnouts 26 Jul '15

26 Jul '15

Hi guys ! I'm working on a website, which find your position using geolocation, and then show the wikipedia's pages around you on an OSM map. For the moment it works. The goal here is to create a full solution dedicated to tourism. For example a tourist is dropped in a city he doesn't know, and he can have informations on what's around thanks to Wikipedia and wikidata. But I'd like to add WikiVoyage informations too. I know it's possible with Wikidata API to enter a position (longitude and latitude), a range, and have all Wikipedia pages around. Is it possible to do the same with WikiVoyage pages ? Thanks a lot ! :) Sylvain.

5 11

Versions of libraries used by MW core
by Jeroen De Dauw 25 Jul '15

25 Jul '15

Hey all, I just noticed that MediaWiki specifies specific versions of the libraries it uses in its composer.json: https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/ca56f1fbc32529622cf430fe2ed4434… To me this is somewhat surprising and not something I've seen often. Why are bugfix releases excluded from the version ranges? And is it really a good idea considering it causes the users of the latest stable MediaWiki release to download outdated versions of various libraries? https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/REL1_25/composer.json#L19-L29 Cheers -- Jeroen De Dauw - http://www.bn2vs.com Software craftsmanship advocate Developer at Wikimedia Germany ~=[,,_,,]:3

3 3

Removal of mobile.wikipedia.org and wap.wikipedia.org in support of browser HSTS preload
by Adam Baso 25 Jul '15

25 Jul '15

There's a ticket for removing mobile.wikipedia.org and wap.wikipedia.org domains/subdomains, which are legacy domain names superceded by m.wikipedia.org and its subdomains. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T104942 The rationale for the removal of these legacy domain names is to help support HSTS preloading in browsers with the existing TLS SAN cert. After review of the ticket, can anyone think of a compelling reason to keep those old domain names? I'm going to open a separate thread on mobile-l about this given this is more mobile-targeted, yet some people only operate on one of wikitech-l or mobile-l. -Adam

5 11

Changes require Verified+2 to be merged by CI
by Antoine Musso 24 Jul '15

24 Jul '15

Hello, I have upgraded Zuul this morning which has a slight regression. To be considered for merging, Zuul require the change to have a Verified +2. In most case that is not a problem since the tests ran and voted V+2 already. But there is a few other cases where Verified is 0 or -1. The workaround is thus to manually vote Verified +2 in addition to Code-Review +2. You might have to remove the prior CR+2 to have the change properly recognized. The task is: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T106531 Will give it a shot tomorrow. -- Antoine "hashar" Musso

2 3

Brad Jorsch -> Senior Software Engineer
by Bryan Davis 24 Jul '15

24 Jul '15

I'm pleased to announce that Brad Jorsch has been promoted to Senior Software Engineer. Brad joined the WMF in October of 2012 as a member of the MediaWiki Core team under RobLa [0]. Prior to joining the WMF, Brad was a strong contributor in a volunteer capacity both on-wiki and via code contributions. He has community earned admin rights on enwiki and his bots (AnomieBOT, AnomieBOT II, MediationBot, MedcabBot, ...) have made over 1.8 million edits on project wikis [1]. His community contributions led directly to his recruitment and hiring following the 2012 Berlin Hackathon. During his tenure at the WMF, Brad has become the de-facto owner of the Scribunto extension and the primary maintainer of the MediaWiki web API (api.php). During the 2014-2015 fiscal year, Brad has focused primarily on the MediaWiki web API (api.php). This largely solo project has included writing an RfC [2] and working on implementation not only in MediaWiki core but also across many affected extensions. Recent improvements have included JSON format updates [3] and the simplification of continuation mode processing for clients [4]. I look forward to working with Brad on the Wikimedia Reading Infrastructure team to continue stewardship of the MediaWiki web API [5] and expect to see continued excellence from his MediaWiki and Wikimedia contributions. [0]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-October/064120.html [1]: https://tools.wmflabs.org/guc/?user=AnomieBOT [2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/API_roadmap [3]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-api-announce/2015-May/00008… [4]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-api-announce/2015-June/0000… [5]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2015-May/081648.html Bryan -- Bryan Davis Wikimedia Foundation <bd808(a)wikimedia.org> [[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] Sr Software Engineer Boise, ID USA irc: bd808 v:415.839.6885 x6855

2 1

Adding extensions under packagist's "mediawiki" vendor
by Daniel Werner 23 Jul '15

23 Jul '15

Hi, I'd like to add my extension https://github.com/DanweDE/mediawiki-ext-UserBitcoinAddresses as "mediawiki/user-bitcoin-addresses" in packagist. When trying to do so, packagist states I should ask someone with the proper rights to maintain the "mediawiki" vendor. I have read up on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Developing_libraries#Packagist_guidel… And I wrote two of the guys listed to have access to the "mediawiki" vendor account but I am not sure I am getting a reply so I thought I'd also try it through this channel. Any advice how I'd get my GitHub repo on packagist under the "mediawiki" vendor would be highly appreciated. Cheers, Daniel

8 9

Min php version
by bawolff 23 Jul '15

23 Jul '15

According to our docs/internal checks, our min php version is 5.3.3. However as of 6e283d394f31, MediaWiki doesn't work with php 5.3.3 (You aren't allowed to implement an interface using an abstract method, on that version of PHP so you get "Fatal error: Can't inherit abstract function IDatabase::getType() (previously declared abstract in DatabaseBase) in git/includes/db/Database.php on line 32"). Is it time we up'd our version requirements (And does anyone know if that would affect lots of third parties?) Or should that change be reverted? --bawolff

14 23

2015-07-22 Scrum of Scrums notes
by Grace Gellerman 22 Jul '15

22 Jul '15

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Scrum_of_scrums/2015-07-22

1 0

Re: [Wikitech-l] FYI: HTMLForm is now available in OOUI format
by Florian Schmidt 22 Jul '15

22 Jul '15

Yay :D Sent from my HTC ----- Reply message ----- From: "Bartosz Dziewoński" <matma.rex(a)gmail.com> To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Subject: [Wikitech-l] FYI: HTMLForm is now available in OOUI format Date: Wed, Jul 22, 2015 15:45 It took a while, but most of the issues are ironed out now. OOUI still doesn't support subsections, as that would require some refactoring of gnarly old code. Everything else should work well enough. -- Bartosz Dziewoński _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

2 1

Phabricator board: reading-admin
by Adam Baso 22 Jul '15

22 Jul '15

Hi all - you've probably seen the reading-web, android, and ios related boards in Phabricator, but I wanted to share another with you: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/reading-admin/ This is a place the Reading management team adds and tracks more manager oriented tasks. As tasks get moved to Done, we will in the future probably actually want to check into whether they should be moved farther left in the board to be repeated / re-reviewed or figure out some appropriate lightweight workflow for such things. -Adam

1 0

FYI: HTMLForm is now available in OOUI format
by James Forrester 22 Jul '15

22 Jul '15

As part of the on-going UI standardisation work[0], we have just merged into MediaWiki master a patch that will allow users of HTMLForm[1] to easily switch over to use OOUI[2]. This allows you to make your code use the standard UI styling and components with very little effort, improving consistency and accessibility. To convert your code over from the existing styling of MediaWiki's HTMLForm (or its VForm version), you can replace the instantiation command of - $form = new HTMLForm( … ); - or: - $form = HTMLForm::factory( 'vform', … ); - with - $form = HTMLForm::factory( 'ooui', … ); … and everything Should Just Work™. This doesn't break anything for existing use of this code, and you can explicitly retain the existing styling by using $form = HTMLForm::factory( 'table', … ); or 'div' or 'vform' instead if you wish. Feel free to add your code to the epic task on Phabricator which is the central liaison point for this work[3]. Finally, please be careful to check your interfaces after converting them – although we have tested this and believe it works well, there may be some edge cases where it doesn't quite work. We're still missing a few features [4] (such as prettier radio buttons), which we're hoping to have ready in a week or two. If do you find any such issues, please report them so we can fix them. Also note that OOUI already implements the new "MediaWiki" theme for all users, so please ensure you advertise the visual changes as they roll out to minimise disruption. [0] - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T49145 [1] - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/HTMLForm [2] - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T85291 [3] - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T100270 [4] - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T100279 Yours, -- James D. Forrester Product Manager, Editing Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester

3 2

AccountAudit extension will be undeployed soon
by Legoktm 21 Jul '15

21 Jul '15

Hi, Now that SULF is over, we have no need for the AccountAudit extension anymore. If you have been relying on it for any statistics, please be aware that a) it is going away soon and b) the data is generally inaccurate for global users (which all users are now). Please follow <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T105894> for updates. Thanks, -- Legoktm

1 1

Wikimedia authentication on an external website?
by Paul Arzelier 21 Jul '15

21 Jul '15

Hi! We're trying to use the collections (a beta wikipedia feature) on a wikimedia external website, http://wikijourney.eu, which delivers wikipedia-driven tourist tours. In order to use the collections' API, we need the user to log in his wikipedia account, and it would be nice to have a log-in form directly on the website. Does anyone know if it's possible?

4 4

VE plugin related questions
by Nischay Nahata 20 Jul '15

20 Jul '15

Hi all, I have been working on a small VE plugin that provides the functionality of adding SMW annotations. I am mostly done with the script but need to understand some minor coding practices for VE plugins to complete it. Would appreciate some help on these questions. When the script makes some changes to the document model, sometimes the "Save" button stays greyed out. Is there a way I should trigger the save button to become active? Or maybe I am doing something in the wrong way. The "undo" doesn't seem to automatically work for my code, what's the best way to develop that functionality? I have a couple more doubts, but these are the major ones right now. Here's my code if needed, its a mess right now and needs lot of refactoring, etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nischayn22/veSMW.js Thanks and regards, Nischay Nahata

2 1

Wikimedia video community editing tools & infrastructure status
by Brion Vibber 20 Jul '15

20 Jul '15

There were a fair number of folks interested in video chatting at Wikimania! A few quick updates: * An experimental 'Schnittserver' ('Clip server') project has been in the works for a while with some funding from ze Germans; currently sitting at http://wikimedia.meltvideo.com/ (uses OAuth, has a temporary SSL cert, UI is very primitive!) It is currently usable already for converting MP4 etc source footage to WebM! The Schnittserver can also do server-side rendering of projects using the 'melt' format such as those created with Kdenlive <https://kdenlive.org/> and Shotcut <http://www.shotcut.org/> -- this allows uploading your original footage (usually in some sort of MP4/H.264 flavor) and sharing the editing project via WebM proxy clips, without generational loss on the final rendering. Once rendered, your final WebM output can be published up to Commons. I would love to see some more support for this project, including adding a better web front-end for managing projects/clips and even editing... * Mozilla has an in-browser media editor thing called Popcorn.js <http://popcornjs.org/>; they're unfortunately reducing investment in the project, but there's some talk amon people working on it and on our end that Wikimedia might be interested in helping adapt it to work with the Schnittserver or some future replacement for it. Unfortunately I missed the session with the person working on Popcorn.js, will have to catch up later on it! * I'm very close to what I consider a 1.0 release of ogv.js <https://github.com/brion/ogv.js/>, my JavaScript shim to play Ogg (and experimentally WebM) video and audio in Safari and MS IE/Edge without plugins. Recently fixed some major sound sync bugs on slower devices, and am finishing up controls which will be used in the mobile view (when not using the full TimedMediaHandler / MwEmbedPlayer interface which we still have on the desktop). Demo of playback at https://brionv.com/misc/ogv.js/demo2/ A slightly older version of ogv.js is also running on https://ogvjs-testing.wmflabs.org/ with integration into TimedMediaHandler; I'll update those patches with my 1.0 release next week or so. * Infrastructure issues: I had a talk with Faidon about video requirements on the low-level infrastructure layer; there are some things we need to work on before we really push video: - seeking/streaming a file with Range subsets causes requests to bypass the Varnish cache layer, potentially causing huge performance problems if there's a usage spike! - very large files can't be sharded cleanly over multiple servers, which makes for further performance bottlenecks on popular files again - VERY large files (>4G or so) can't be stored at all; which is a problem for high-quality uploads of things like long Wikimania talks! For derivative transcodes, we can bypass some of these problems by chunking the output into multiple files of limited length and rigging up 'gapless playback', as can be done for HLS or MPEG-DASH-style live streaming. I'm pretty sure I can work out how to do this in the ogv.js player (for Safari and IE) as well as in the native <video> element playback for Chrome and Firefox via Media Source Extensions <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Build/Audio_and_video_delivery/Liv…>. Assuming it works with the standard DASH profile for WebM, this is something we can easily make work on Android as well using Google's ExoPlayer <https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media/exoplayer.html>. DASH playback will also make it easier to use adaptive source switching to handle limited bandwidth or CPU resources. However we still need to be able to deal with source files which may be potentially quite large... * List and phab projects! As a reminder there's a wikivideo-l list: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikivideo-l and a Wikimedia-Video project tag in phabricator: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikimedia-video/ Folks who are interested in pushing further work on video, please feel free to join up. There's a lot of potential awesomeness! -- brion

1 0

Slides from Lila's presentation at Wikimania
by Pine W 19 Jul '15

19 Jul '15

Courtesy of WMF Comms: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimania_2015_presentation_by_Lila… Pine

3 4

Wikimedia email list spam filtering
by Pine W 19 Jul '15

19 Jul '15

Is it possible to set up a universal spam filter that will apply for all Wikimedia email lists? For example, would it be possible to have a master list of blackslisted sender email addresses that all lists will check for blocked senders before putting an email into the moderation queue for individual lists? Thanks, Pine

3 2

Provide a well-performing API to rotate an image
by Steinsplitter Wiki 17 Jul '15

17 Jul '15

Hi, I am not sure if this is the correct mailinglist to write. Every week on commons a bot is rotating hunderts of files, however this bot will stop working soon. In the last years tens of thousands files has been rotated. Rotating files is a vital feature on commons and therefore indispensable. The bugreport [1] on phabricator is open since three years, but, unfortunately no dev is working on it. The bug has also a lot of +1 (tokens). I am wonder if it is possible to enable and code review this feature asap. :-) Best, Steinsplitter [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T35186

9 16

Phabricator tag for bugs in local projects
by Amir E. Aharoni 16 Jul '15

16 Jul '15

Hi, In the past it happened to me a few times that I opened bugs about something wrong that happened on a Wikimedia site, and it was closed as invalid because the issue was not in MediaWiki code, but in a local gadget, style or template on that project. The bugs were actually fixed, but I'd like to question the "invalid" closure. They were real bugs in real products. The fact that the software is not in Gerrit doesn't mean that they don't affect the product de facto. Just for the sake of example, if a bug in a local Gadget affects the Flow extension, for example, I find it perfectly valid to add tag the Flow tag to it. Core and extension developers should be curious about how what they developed behaves in the wild. I do wonder what other tags are there to add to such a bug? I'm going to open one now. (P.S. Yes, this raises an issue of whether non-Wikimedia sites should count. I say - yes, and it shouldn't be limited unless it gets seriously out of hand. But a URL with reproduction instructions must always be provided.) -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

7 8

Failed jobs will never run again
by Henning Vreyborg 16 Jul '15

16 Jul '15

Hi there, it seems that failed jobs will never be executed again. My extension creates jobs that talk with an external server via soap. This connection might fail (e.g. server maintenance) which then means that my job fails and needs to be reexecuted later. On my wiki I am running $wgJobRunRate = 0, my extension job is in $wgJobTypesExcludedFromDefaultQueue. To run my jobs I have a cronjob with "php runJobs.php --maxjobs 10 --type CreateTicket". My job has allowRetries() implemented with "return true". From my observations the "job_token" and "job_token_timestamp" fields in the job table are used as a LOCK so that no job gets executed twice. The only problem is that these fields are never emptied, if the job fails (return false), so that the job scheduler can reexecute them. Is this intended behaviour or is this a bug? Does anyone have an idea how to solve this issue? Thank you. Regards Henning Vreyborg

3 4

Wikimedia Foundation quarterly reviews for April-June 2015
by Tilman Bayer 16 Jul '15

16 Jul '15

Hi all, the Wikimedia Foundation's quarterly reviews of teams' work in the past quarter (April-June 2015) took place last week. Minutes and slides for those meetings are now available: Community Engagement, Advancement (Fundraising and Fundraising Tech): https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF_Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarter… Discovery (formerly "Search & Discovery"): https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF_Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarter… Reading (formerly mobile web and apps): https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF_Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarter… Editing (comprising the Collaboration/Flow, Language Engineering, Multimedia, Parsing, and VisualEditor teams): https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF_Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarter… Infrastructure (comprising the Analytics, Release Engineering, Services, TechOps, Labs, Performance, Research & Data, Design Research, and Security teams): https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF_Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarter… Legal, Finance & Administration, Human Resources, Communications and Team Practices: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF_Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarter… As usual, much of this information will also be available in consolidated form as part of the general WMF quarterly report for Q4, which is planned to be published on July 30. -- Tilman Bayer Senior Analyst Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB

1 0

Upcoming SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi changes
by Ori Livneh 15 Jul '15

15 Jul '15

Hello, Over the course of the next two days, a major update to the SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi extension will be rolled out to Wikimedia wikis. The change swaps geshi, the unmaintained PHP library which performs the lexical analysis and output formatting of code, for another library, called Pygments. The roll-out will remove support for 31 languages while adding support for several hundred languages not previously supported, including Dart, Rust, Julia, APL, Mathematica, SNOBOL, Puppet, Dylan, Racket, Swift, and many others. See <https://people.wikimedia.org/~ori/geshi_changes.txt> for a full list. The languages that will lose support are mostly obscure, with the notable exception of ALGOL68, Oz, and MMIX. The change is expected to slightly improve the time it takes to load and render all pages on all wikis (not just those that contain code blocks!), at the cost of a slight penalty (about a tenth of a second) on the time it takes to save edits which introduce or modify a block of highlighted code to an article. Lastly, the way the extension handles unfamiliar languages will change. Previously, if the specified language was not supported by the extension, instead of a code block, the extension would print an error message. From now on, it will simply output a plain, unhighlighted block of monospaced code. The wikitext syntax for highlighting code will remain the same. -- Ori

12 24

Users without a global SUL account will no longer be able to login
by Legoktm 15 Jul '15

15 Jul '15

Hi, As part of concluding SUL finalization, users who do not have a global SUL account will no longer be able to login. They will receive an error message indicating that their password is invalid. This should affect practically nobody. There are a few unattached accounts left (e.g. T98156) but those shouldn't cause issues. If a user is complaining that they are unable to login, you can check [[Special:CentralAuth/$username]] to see if their account is in fact unattached. If that is the case, please file a bug in the SUL-Finalization project[1] and I'll take a look. We are also logging denied logins, so I'll be checking that log over the next few days. [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/create/?projects=SUL-Final… -- Legoktm

2 1

2026

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

Wikitech-l July 2015