Wikitech-l July 2015

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

97 participants
74 discussions

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Please join the "Making the Wiki Ed dashboard work for outreach projects" hackathon session at Wikimania
by Erica Litrenta 15 Jul '15

15 Jul '15

TL;DR, Whether you are an amateur or an expert coder, or if you are a current or interested user of the WikiEduDashboard or of the Education Extension,* please join us at a hackathon session at Wikimania on Wednesday, 15 July in Workplace 2 - Don Genaro at 1pm. [0]* A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the Wikimedia Foundation developed Extension:EducationProgram. It did what we needed it to do at the time, which was to provide a tool that helps organize classes that want to edit Wikipedia articles for course credit. Since its release, the extension has been deployed to 18 Wikimedia projects: it's on 4 sister projects in 16 languages. Recently, the Wiki Education Foundation [1], led by project manager Sage Ross - User:Sage (Wiki Ed), User:Ragesoss - developed a Ruby on Rails app called the WikiEduDashboard [2], which they will use beginning this fall instead of the EducationProgram extension, for the university courses that they support on English Wikipedia. We believe it is possible to use their freely-licensed code to create a clone of this dashboard that can be used for non-Wiki Ed education program courses and other group editing activities on English Wikipedia and, ultimately, on other Wikimedia projects and in other languages. We are asking for community support for this project since this is outside the scope of WMF's engineering team for this year. We see the need for a global dashboard tool and would love to have your help building it! We're planning some exciting improvements to the Wiki Education Dashboard, see Phabricator [3] for the full list. * Full i18n, including right-to-left support. * Generalize the UI to work for any wiki project and not only university courses. * Integration with the Gather extension, to render lists of articles being written and reviewed. * Integration with Campaigns, to track group membership and statistics. * Improvements to the API to simplify some actions taken from the Dashboard. * Potentially using Wikidata as the backend for storing information about courses and editing projects. We look forward to working together to build this powerful tool which will support more education and outreach programs in the movement! Elitre (WMF), on behalf of the WMF's Education team, + Andrew Green, Adam Wight, Sage Ross. [0] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T103623 [1] http://wikiedu.org/ [2] https://github.com/WikiEducationFoundation/WikiEduDashboard [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/education-program-dashboard/

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Plans for mobile editing, VisualEditor [and mobile contributions]
by Florian Schmidt 14 Jul '15

14 Jul '15

Hello all together, some time ago, WMF started to re-organize into a new structure to focus on specific topics. Now, I think, the main tasks are done, so that I want to bring a (for me, and I think and hope for some others, too) very important topic back to the ToDo list: mobile editing. In the past, the mobile web team (in which I mostly contributed, too) maintained the mobile wikitext editor in a very basic state, and the VisualEditor team maintained the VisualEditor for tablet users. Now, most people of the former mobile web team moved to the new vertical “Readership”, so I’m pretty sure, that the responsibility for all editing stuff on mobile isn’t in this team anymore (reading ≠ editing), so I think, that the new editing vertical maintains all the editing stuff, including mobile editing. Now I have some questions around this topic: 1. I’m missing MobileFrontend in the list of maintained extensions on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editing ? Are there plans to move all editing features away from MobileFrontend, or is the editing code in MobileFrontend unmaintained now? How volunteers are able to contribute to the right place? What is the bigger image for editing code in mobile? 2. Is there a roadmap for the mobile VisualEditor? At the moment it’s only available for tablet users (which makes contributing on smartphones a bit hard, there is only a clean wikitext editor, see one of my next points). I know task T93325[1], is that meant to enable mobile VE on smartphones, too? What is the roadmap for it? 3. Are you planning to support a wikitext editor on mobile, too (Like a light WikiEditor)? At the moment, the wikitext editor in mobile is very very basic (basically without any feature). I submitted a change[2] to enable some rally basic features to it, which, technically seems to be merge able, but no-one of editing reviews it, neither it’s possible for a volunteer (me :)) to find out, if such a feature matches the global vision for mobile editing. 4. And the last point (any maybe the most important one): Who is the person (or the group of person) I can contact for mobile related editing things? In the time of the former mobile web team I have known the persons I can ping on irc, e-mail or via mailing lists, now I’m a bit confused, who is responsible for mobile editing, it’s like a gray veil :) It would be great to have these points answered :) [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T93325 [2] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/194945/ Have a nice weekend! Best, Florian

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Please join the 2nd edition of the VisualEditor Translathon
by Erica Litrenta 14 Jul '15

14 Jul '15

(Apologies for crossposting.) Hello! We're pleased to announce the 2nd edition of the *VisualEditor Translathon*. It is a translation rally, focused on interface messages and help pages related to VisualEditor [0]. In order to participate, you need to *sign up on the Translathon page* [1]. The top 3 contributors will each win a Wikipedia t-shirt of their choice from the Wikipedia store [2]. Translations made between *July 15th and July 19th* (CDT time zone [3]) qualify [4]. If you are at Wikimania Mexico this year [5], you are also welcome to join a related sprint during the hackathon in *Workplace 1 - Don Américo, Thursday 16 July at 4pm (CDT)* at the conference venue, so you can meet other fellow translators and get support if you need some [6]. Interface messages have the priority. You will need to create an account at translatewiki.net in order to work on them, if you don't have one. *It is recommended to create the account ASAP*, so that it can be confirmed in time. You can also help translate documentation pages about VisualEditor on mediawiki.org. You can use your Wikipedia account to work there. You will find instructions, links and other details on the Translathon page [1]. Thanks for your attention, and happy translating! Elitre (WMF) and Trizek (WMF) [0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor [1] https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Project:VisualEditor/2015_Translathon [2] https://store.wikimedia.org/ . You can choose between any short-sleeve shirt, or other items for the same value. [3] http://www.timeanddate.com/time/zones/cdt [4] This means both new translations, and updates for messages in the "Outdated" tab of the translation interface. [5] https://wikimania2015.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania [6] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T91108

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statistics about frequent section titles
by Amir E. Aharoni 13 Jul '15

13 Jul '15

Hi, Did anybody ever try to collect statistics about frequent section titles in Wikimedia projects? For Wikipedia, for example, titles such as "Biography", "Early life", "Bibliography", "External links", "References", "History", etc., appear in a lot of articles, and their counterparts appear in a lot of languages. There are probably similar things in Wikivoyage, Wiktionary and possibly other projects. Did anybody ever try to collect statistics of the most frequent section titles in each language and project? -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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Wikitech-l July 2015