Wikitech-l July 2015

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

97 participants
74 discussions

Upcoming in October: Seattle GNU/Linux conference
by Pine W 02 Jul '15

02 Jul '15

The 2015 Seattle GNU/Linux conference (SeaGL) call for proposals is now open. I've submitted a proposal for a 50-minute workshop regarding how to edit Wikipedia, and may submit more proposals in collaboration with my colleagues in Cascadia Wikimedians. I'm sure that SeaGL would be happy to consider technical presentations about MediaWiki, Wikimedia analytics, Wikimedia Labs, our upstream tools, etc. if you're interested. Please consider submitting a proposal and coming to Seattle for the conference. http://seagl.org/ Regards, Pine

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Phabricator monthly statistics - 2015-06
by communitymetrics＠wikimedia.org 02 Jul '15

02 Jul '15

Hi Community Metrics team, this is your automatic monthly Phabricator statistics mail. Number of accounts created in (2015-06): 265 Number of active users (any activity) in (2015-06): 794 Number of task authors in (2015-06): 456 Number of users who have closed tasks in (2015-06): 255 Number of projects which had at least one task moved from one column to another on their workboard in (2015-06): 190 Number of tasks created in (2015-06): 3445 Number of tasks closed in (2015-06): 2701 Number of open and stalled tasks in total: 23697 Median age in days of open tasks by priority: Unbreak now: 15 Needs Triage: 77 High: 145 Normal: 343 Low: 710 Needs Volunteer: 518 (How long tasks have been open, not how long they have had that priority) TODO: Numbers which refer to closed tasks might not be correct, as described in T1003. Yours sincerely, Fab Rick Aytor (via community_metrics.sh on iridium at Wed Jul 1 00:00:07 UTC 2015)

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MediaWiki needs a governance model
by Mark A. Hershberger 02 Jul '15

02 Jul '15

I just posted this at http://mwstake.org/mwstake/wiki/Blog_Post:18 and I would like to invite your comments. = MediaWiki needs a governance model = Eighteen months ago, at the [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_Summit_2014 MediaWiki Architecture Summit], a manager from Wikia said, repeatedly, that he was there to find out where MediaWiki was going to be in five years. This year, at the [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Developer_Summit_2015 MediaWiki Developer's Summit], Damion Sicore, the new VP of Engineering for Wikimedia, asked about MediaWiki's governance model. Both these people were relative outsiders to the core of MediaWiki development and both of them described the same problem: MediaWiki doesn't have direction. During the [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Hackathon_2015 Wikimedia Hackathon] this year, I cornered Damon and asked him what he thought needed to be done. After some back-and-forth, Damon said that if we could come up with a governance model for MediaWiki that the stakeholders would endorse, that would be a great start. I only had two questions: What was a governance model? And, could I get the stakeholders for MediaWiki to buy into one? == Stakeholders == This past year Markus Glaser and I started the [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Stakeholders'_Group MediaWiki Stakeholders] user group. This is a group of people interested in MediaWiki as software because we use it in our businesses and organisations. We want to have a voice in its development. We do have issues – some of the most visible users of MediaWiki, such as Wikia and WikiHow – are not involved – but we've also had some really good successes that we can point to, like our [http://mwstake.org/mwstake/wiki/Category:Events monthly meetings], our [http://mwstake.org/ own wiki], and the meeting at the Wikimedia Hackathon this spring. If you use MediaWiki for your own projects and you're interested in the future of the software, we ask you to [http://mwstake.org join us]. We especially need your involvement if you are a large, visible user of MediaWiki like Wikia or WikiHow. == Governance == That brings me to the first, less intuitive, question: What is a governance model? Why is it needed? Research done on [https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/06/28/research-newsletter-june-2015/#How_Wi… Wikipedia's governance model] is instructive. Online social production "is contrasted with traditional, contract-bound, hierarchical production models that characterize most organizational settings." Despite this contrast with traditional production, Wikipedia's governance model is "becoming less open and more codified…a positive change." Indeed, Wikipedia and MediaWiki are closely related but they cannot share governance models since [https://wikiapiary.com/wiki/Main_Page most MediaWiki installations] are outside of the Wikimedia Foundation, and, as a result MediaWiki development cannot be driven only by the needs of the Foundation. Instead, we need to begin to use the governance model to separate its development from the Foundation and establish it as an independent open source software product. As a result, we need to start looking at MediaWiki development in the context of the larger world of open source software. The [http://oss-watch.ac.uk/ OSS Watch] [http://wiki.oss-watch.ac.uk/StartPage Wiki] has a lot of relevant information about how open source software projects are run. See, for example, the explanation given on the [http://wiki.oss-watch.ac.uk/GovernanceModel GovernanceModel] page: A clear governance model allows potential contributors to understand how they engage with the project, what is expected of them and what protections are provided to ensure their contributions will always be available to them. It also describes the quality control processes that help assure potential users of the viability of the project. ''[…]'' [Governance] provides a mechanism for allowing the community as a whole to define the direction they feel the project should take, '''while ensuring that the core project team does not lose control'''. == Why does the MediaWiki community need to do anything? What is wrong with the status quo? == Now, some members of the MediaWiki developer community will not see a need for such a model. Indeed, they'll tell you there is already one in place. One problem is that this model is only sporadically documented and isn't well communicated. So each person in the community ''thinks'' they know what the rules of the game are, but their individual models can differ drastically. Another problem, especially when it comes to features of MediaWiki that are not used on Wikipedia, is that it is developer-focused instead of user-focused. For example, if you've used MediaWiki's built-in hitcounter in the past, you'll be [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T74420 surprised and shocked] when that [https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/150699/ functionality is removed] without any ready replacement, As the [http://wiki.oss-watch.ac.uk/GovernanceModel GovernanceModel] page goes on to explain: There are almost as many variations on open source management strategies as there are open source projects. '''It is therefore critical that you clearly communicate your policies''' and strategy '''to potential users''' and developers of your product as it is one of the most important steps towards sustainability through open development. == Who needs to agree to this? == The easy answer is easy: the stakeholders. Here I don't mean the Stakeholders User Group, though we will certainly be involved in the discussion. We need the developers, the project managers, the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_sharing knowledge sharing] specialists inside organisations that use MediaWiki and even the end users of MediaWiki to be involved. Each of these groups exists inside and outside of the Wikipedia community. We need to get people who represent Wikia; executives from Hallo Welt!; independent consultants like myself; and end users of sites like [http://wikipathways.org/index.php/WikiPathways WikiPathways]. Over the next few weeks and months we need to develop a governance model and answer questions like * How will governance be enforced? How will things change? * Who proposes new or revised rules/directions? * Who approves changes to the rules/directions? * Where does the roadmap fit in to this governance? * How are conflicts mitigated? = Where do we start? = Some other members of the MediaWiki stakeholders and I have already begin discussing the governance model. During our next [https://plus.google.com/events/c0kd2on1qe5kj0di0j9d1pfuba0?authkey=CPeZ0K6F… online meeting using Google Hangouts], we'll continue the discussion in the wider group. However, we have a distinct limitation there in that G+ only lets 10 people in at a time. In a couple of weeks we'll be [https://wikimania2015.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/MediaWiki_Stakeholders'_Meetup meeting again at Wikimania] and, hopefully, inviting broader participation.

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global cleanup of <nowiki>
by Amir E. Aharoni 01 Jul '15

01 Jul '15

Hi, In the last few days I've been looking for reasons for the appearance of unnecessary <nowiki> tags. This mostly happens because of various VisualEditor and Parsoid issues. The developers have been very good at fixing them, and now it happens very rarely, but there are still lots of these useless tags lurking in pages. Two examples are: * '''<nowiki/>''' - this doesn't do anything at all. I couldn't reproduce it in any way, so it's probably a bug that was fixed. * <nowiki> </nowiki> in the beginning of a paragraph. This was added in the past to avoid putting the paragraph in <pre>, but it's entirely useless, because the spaces are trimmed. Now they are pre-trimmed, so this is also a fixed bug, but a lot of pages still have it. There may be more - I'm still looking for these. It would be easy to write bots to fix such easy common cases, but they would have to run on every project. Would it make sense to write them as maintenance scripts that update them everywhere when people upgrade VE? -- 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