Wikitech-l September 2015

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

126 participants
105 discussions

What does "Director of Architecture" mean anyway?
by Rob Lanphier 02 Sep '15

02 Sep '15

Hi everyone, It's been a while since I've been involved here, and I've got a pretty good excuse. I'm going to avoid going into too much detail, but in short, I was involved in a pretty nasty traffic collision, and have only recently returned to work. It turned out the way that a lot of bike versus car collisions go, which is to say, I lost :-( The good news (for me at least), I've largely recovered. The surgeons here did a remarkable job putting me back together again. I returned to part-time work a couple of weeks ago, and I'm getting back up to speed on things. I still have a number of personal obligations that keep me from working full-time, but I'll keep my user page on mediawiki.org <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:RobLa-WMF> updated with the latest (or point you to where I plan to keep that info). Though we hadn't announced it in April, we had *just* talked about making my title "Director of Architecture" in the big reorg we had here at WMF. We hadn't worked out exactly what that meant when I was in the wreck, but I had a vague idea which I intend to flesh out. In the short term, I want to facilitate the activity of the Architecture Committee <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture%20committee>. I've started chairing the private meetings of that group, and I'm taking on a bunch of the administrivia. I'll make things clearer as they become clearer in my head :-) Well, maybe after that, and after I get a chance to write down what I'm thinking. I'm really happy to be back involved! \o/ If you have any questions, or you simply want to wave back, feel free to drop a comment on my MediaWiki talk page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_talk:RobLa-WMF Rob

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What happened to our user agent requirements?
by Oliver Keyes 02 Sep '15

02 Sep '15

According to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User-Agent_policy and the associated mailing list threads, user agent headers are now required (and have been for some time) but on the request log side, we see a lot of requests with the user agent "-" - IOW, an empty field. Is the blocking of requests absent a user agent simply happening at a 'higher' stage (in mediawiki itself?) and so not registering with the varnishes, or is sending an /empty/ header simply A-OK? -- Oliver Keyes Count Logula Wikimedia Foundation

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Discovery Department A/B testing an alternative to prefix search next week
by Dan Garry 02 Sep '15

02 Sep '15

Hi everyone, *tl;dr: Discovery Department to run A/B test <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T111078> comparing new search suggester to prefix search, to see if it can reduce zero results rate.* As I'm sure you're all aware, the search box at the top right of every page on desktop uses prefix search to generate its results. The main reason for this is that prefix search is incredibly fast and performant; that search box sees a lot of traffic, and it's important to keep it scalable. However, we know that there are numerous problems with prefix search. Prefix searches are prone to give you no results; if you make even a slight typo, then you won't get the result you want. And thus a complex system of manually curated redirects were born to try to alleviate this navigation issue. Wouldn't it be nice if we could work towards a solution that doesn't require the manual curation of redirects, thus freeing up Wikimedians to do other more meaningful tasks? And make search a bit better in the process, too? That's a long term goal of mine... emphasis on the long. ;-) The Q1 2015-17 (Jul - Aug 2015) goal of the Search Team in the Discovery Department is to reduce the zero results rate <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2015-16_Q1_Goals#Search>. Amongst other things, we've been working to build an alternative to prefix search <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T105746>. Documentation on the API is pretty light right now because we're scrambling to get it up and running (but there's a task for that! <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T111139>). An initial version of the suggestion API is now in production on enwiki and dewiki [1], but is currently not being used for anything. Our initial tests <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T109729> of the API show that it's incredibly promising for reducing the zero results rate. But we need more data! We're planning on running an A/B test on whether this API is better at reducing zero results. We're targeting beginning on Tuesday 8th September, for two weeks. This is documented in T111078 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T111078>. A very important note here is that we currently have no way of quantitatively measuring result relevance (although we're working on it <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T109482>), so this test will be highly limited in scope, only measuring the zero results rate. Given the limits of this, even seeing massive success in this test is not enough to deploy this API as a full replacement of prefix search; we'd need additional data. But, that's not stopping us from gathering initial data from this test. As always, if you have any questions, let me know. Thanks, Dan [1]: The API is actually live on all wikis, but we only built the search indices for enwiki and dewiki since they're our biggest content wikis and this is an early test. Attempting to use the API on any other wiki will get you a cirrus backend error. -- Dan Garry Lead Product Manager, Discovery Wikimedia Foundation

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Delays in loading pages on Wikimedia sites
by Pine W 01 Sep '15

01 Sep '15

Yesterday and today, I've experienced a number of delays in getting pages to load on Wikimedia sites. My connectivity to other websites is normal, so I think something may be going on internally with Wikimedia connectivity. I recall seeing discussions during Mexico Wikimania about testing connections to Wikimedia sites systematically from geographically dispersed locations. Is that kind of testing being done? Are there any other tools which might explain the delays in getting connections and loading pages? Thanks, Pine

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Semantic MediaWiki Conference Fall 2015: Call for Participation
by kghbln 01 Sep '15

01 Sep '15

Dear users, developers and all people interested in semantic wikis, We are very happy to announce that early bird registration to the 12th Semantic MediaWiki Conference is now open! *Important facts reminder:* * Dates: October 28th to October 30th 2015 (Wednesday to Friday) * Location: Fabra i Coats, Art Factory. Carrer Sant Adrià 20 (Sant Andreu), Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. * Conference page: https://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Fall_2015 * Participants: Everybody interested in semantic wikis, especially in Semantic MediaWiki, e.g. users, developers, consultants, business representatives and researchers. *We welcome new contributions from you:* * We encourage contributions about applications and development of semantic wikis; for a list of topics, see [1]. * Please propose regular talks, posters or workshops on the conference website. We will do our best to consider your proposal in the conference program. An interesting variety of talks has already be proposed, see [2]. * Presentations will generally be video and audio recorded and made available for others after the conference. * If you've already announced your talk it's now time to expand its description. *News on participation and tutorials:* * You can now officially register for the conference [3] and benefit from early bird fees until October 5, 2015. * The tutorial program has been announced and made available [4]. *Organization:* * Amical Wikimedia [5] and Open Semantic Data Association e. V. [6] have become the official organisers of SMWCon Fall 2015 * Thanks to Institut de Cultura - Ajuntament de Barcelona [7] for providing free access to the conference location and its infrastructure If you have questions you can contact Lia Veja and Karsten Hoffmeyer (Program Chairs), Alina Mierluș (General Chair) or Toni Hermoso (Local Chair) per e-mail (Cc). We will be happy to see you in Barcelona! Lia Veja, Karsten Hoffmeyer (Program Board) [1] <http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Fall_2015/Announcement> [2] <https://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Fall_2015#Program_proposals> [3] <https://ti.to/wikisofia/smwcon2015-fall> [4] <http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Fall_2015#Program> [5] <https://www.wikimedia.cat/> [6] <https://opensemanticdata.org/> [7] <http://lameva.barcelona.cat/barcelonacultura/en/>

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Wikitech-l September 2015