Wikitech-l July 2015

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

97 participants
78 discussions

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

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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

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Slides from Lila's presentation at Wikimania
by Pine W 20 Jul '15

20 Jul '15

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

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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

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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 17 Jul '15

17 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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Wikitech-l July 2015