Wikitech-l January 2016

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

93 participants
86 discussions

Modern module loading needing code review
by Jon Robson 23 Jan '16

23 Jan '16

As part of the work of the frontend standards group https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/260071/ adds require and module.exports to MediaWiki ResourceLoader. This will make it easier to share code outside MediaWiki and with nodejs systems as well as discouraging the overloading of the mediawiki variable. I'm looking for code review at the moment. If you are familiar with ResourceLoader's internals I'd appreciate your input. See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T108655 for further background

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Last call on RFC: drop PHP 5.3/5.4 support
by Tim Starling 23 Jan '16

23 Jan '16

This is a last call for new arguments and facts related to the proposal to drop PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.4 support in MediaWiki core git master. If you have anything new to say about this issue, please comment on the Phabricator ticket: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T118932 The Architecture Committee plans on making a decision on this issue on the basis of the Phabricator comments in next week's committee meeting (January 27). -- Tim Starling

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VisualEditor roadmap - extensibility within MediaWiki?
by Daniel Barrett 22 Jan '16

22 Jan '16

I was looking through the VisualEditor roadmap (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Roadmap) and did not notice anything about third-party MediaWiki extensions for the editor. Did I miss it? I do see plans for "non-Mediawiki" extensions (under "Release for third-party non-MediaWiki users"), and also for Mediawiki admins to "easily install and use VisualEditor" (under "Release for third-party MediaWiki users"), but nothing about extending it within MediaWiki. For example, adding a button or menu item to insert a particular parser tag. Is this by design? I did notice "Non-template transclusions" on the roadmap, which looks like a way to insert parser tags & parser functions if you already know their name (the way template transclusions work right now). That will be a big help. However, for (say) inserting a given parser tag, it would be great if we could easily add a button or menu item for it. Thank you very much for any info. DanB

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Fwd: [Wikimedia-l] Launch of Community Consultation on strategic approaches
by Quim Gil 22 Jan '16

22 Jan '16

The Wikimedia Foundation has started a consultation about strategic priorities. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Strategy There is a survey with one question and several possibilities for each of the main themes: Reach, Community, Knowledge. It is a good chance to influence the WMF strategy with your individual voice. I really mean it! Taking the survey took me about 15 minutes and I found the exercise interesting. This survey is being promoted across all Wikimedia projects. I'm forwarding the announcement to this list in order to help assuring that our technical communities are well represented. Please take the survey, and feel free forwarding this message to whoever might be interested as well. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Lila Tretikov <lila(a)wikimedia.org> Date: Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 2:37 AM Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Launch of Community Consultation on strategic approaches To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Dear Wikimedians, We are excited to have you participate in an important Community Engagement regarding our strategic approaches. This is a major step to help us prioritize the work of the Foundation beginning in July 2016 and running for the next 12 to 24 months thereafter into a strategic plan. Throughout 2015 the Foundation has been exploring how to prioritize its work to best support the movement's goals, set forth, but not yet reached, in the 2010-15 strategic plan. The strategic approaches presented here are based on our vision, strategy consultations in 2010 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/2010-2015> and 2015 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Strategy/Community_consultation>, research on external impacts, and input from staff and a few small community think groups on key challenges and potential solutions. Timeline: These are our target dates for this process. - January 11: Put up pages for translation (done) - January 18: Launch of community consultation on key questions - February 15: Close of consultation - By February 26: Release synthesis of consultation - By March 4: Publish first draft strategy for comment We appreciate your time and efforts to help guide the Foundation in its work to support the movement. Warm regards, Lila _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> -- Quim Gil Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil

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Page for newbie/projects?
by Andrew Lih 21 Jan '16

21 Jan '16

Hi devs/techs, Is there a wiki page that acts as a first stop or landing page for computer science students who might be interested in working on coding projects with Wikipedia/Wikimedia projects? We have a page on Wikipedia greeting students/instructors who want to do class projects related to *writing* articles, but do we have a similar thing for CS instructors and students who might want to do an assignment or class project with Mediawiki, APIs, or with database dumps? If anyone could point me to the best of what we have now, that’d be great. This would be a way to find “shovel ready” challenges for students to work on, or contribute to projects in progress. Thanks. -Andrew

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New MediaWiki structure test for API module's i18n completeness
by Legoktm 21 Jan '16

21 Jan '16

Hi, Anomie has written a new structure test[1] that checks whether API modules have all the proper i18n messages needed for their documentation. It's possible that your extension's tests will start failing due to this; if you need help figuring it out, please ping one of us and we can help out. [1] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/260598/ -- Legoktm

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meta: AbuseFilter on mediawiki.org and related sites
by Amir E. Aharoni 21 Jan '16

21 Jan '16

Hi, At least twice I found AbuseFilters that prevented people from testing extensions that I develop or posting feedback about them on MediaWiki.org and the beta testing sites (such as http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page ). By their nature, the extensions I am working on have a lot to do with different (human) languages, and these AbuseFilters relied on the assumption that on these sites everything is supposed to be in English, and whatever is not English is probably spam. One of them filtered out the whole Russian alphabet, so the extension couldn't be tested by Russian-speaking users. Another one didn't allow submitting Flow posts that don't have a sufficient amount of English words from users who have less than 6 edits, so users who have a lot of edits in their home wikis, but no edits in mediawiki.org, and who want to post in languages other than English are blocked. Luckily, one of those people pinged me directly, but I don't know how much useful feedback was filtered out and lost. I acknowledge that spam is a problem and that there may be a better solution for multilingual testing and feedback than doing it all on one site English site, but till there are solutions for this, please consider non-English languages when defining AbuseFilters on our tech sites. Thanks for understanding :) -- 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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Community Wishlist Survey: Status report #1
by Danny Horn 21 Jan '16

21 Jan '16

Hi everyone, We've posted the Community Tech team's first status report on our progress with the Community Wishlist Survey, and you're invited to come and check it out: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Status_repor… In November and December, we invited active contributors to Wikimedia projects to propose, discuss and vote on the features and fixes that they most want to see. 634 people participated in the survey, voting on 107 proposals. Our team has committed to investigating and responding to the top 10 wishes. In many cases, our team will be designing and building tools ourselves, or collaborating with other teams and volunteers who are working in that area. For the wishes that we can't build this year -- because it's too big for our team, or there's a problem that we can't solve -- then we can at least offer open discussion on the problem, and detailed documentation explaining what we've learned, so the information can be used by other developers in the future. We've done a preliminary assessment of the top 10, which is described in the status report. As of right now (mid-January), the two items that we're actively working on are #1) Migrate dead links to the Wayback Machine, and #7) Pageview Stats tool. Why are we working on those two and not the others? Check out the status report for all the answers. I'm going to post the quick overview of the top 10 wishes here. Each of these wishes is discussed in detail on the status report page. 1. Migrate dead links to the Wayback Machine: Currently in progress, working with a community developer and the Internet Archive. This is one of the two projects we're actively working on now (mid-January). 2. Improved diff compare screen: Needs investigation and community discussion to define the problems that we want to solve. 3. Central repository for templates, gadgets and Lua modules: Needs underlying technical work that's currently under discussion by another team. 4. Cross-wiki watchlist: Needs technical investigation on the existing Crosswatch tool, and the Collaboration team's cross-wiki notifications. 5. Numerical sorting in categories: Investigation is underway. There are a couple potential solutions that we need to figure out. 6. Allow categories in Commons in all languages: Currently talking with Wikidata about using structured metadata to solve the underlying problem. 7. Pageview Stats tool: Currently talking with the Analytics team about their new pageview API. Needs some community discussion to define the front-end spec. This is one of the two projects we're actively working on now (mid-January), because the Analytics team is eager to use the new API that they've developed. 8. Global cross-wiki talk page: Needs community discussion to define the product. 9. Improve copy and paste detection bot: Need to work with volunteer developers to define scope on improving the existing Plagiabot. 10. Add a user watchlist: We've heard significant pushback about the vandal-fighting use case, because of the risk of enabling harassment. Currently investigating an opt-in version that would be useful for mentors, classes, editathons and WikiProjects. Here's the status report link again, for lots more information: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Status_repor… Our team is really excited about the work that we'll get to do this year, and we're looking forward to talking and working with you as we go along. Thanks, Danny Horn Product Manager WMF - Community Tech User:DannyH (WMF)

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RESTBase 0.9.2 (security release)
by Gabriel Wicke 21 Jan '16

21 Jan '16

A vulnerability has been found in RESTBase v0.9.1 and earlier that allowed attackers to read arbitrary files on the host system by passing a specially crafted URL. This vulnerability has been fixed in [1]. All RESTBase users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to v0.9.2 immediately. Files readable by the RESTBase service user might have been accessed by third parties, so appropriate measures should be taken. mediawiki-containers [2] users with automatic updates enabled have already been upgraded to v0.9.2. -- Gabriel Wicke Principal Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation [1]: https://github.com/wikimedia/restbase/commit/1ea649306ae4e85ab2cee5a36318e9… [2]: https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-containers

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Scrum of Scrum notes - 2016-01-20
by Greg Grossmeier 21 Jan '16

21 Jan '16

= 2015-01-20 = == Reading == === Android === * v2.1.137 promoted to production. * Reviewing Gather API re: multiple lists on multiple languages === Web === * Planning === iOS === * Beta has been rolled out to over 1000 testers, there have been 422 installs to date ** Is there a way to mesaure beta API usage (i.e. CPU time?) * Investigating using pageviews/top API as part of iOS "Explore" feature. Main blocker is filtering out things like non-main namespace, main page, Special: Search, etc. ** https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T123442 (Dan: Joseph commented on this) ** https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T118841 ? (Dan: this might be a misunderstanding, this sanitization is internal for privacy protection) ** https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T121912 (Dan: redirects are quite confusing, I have some reading to do on this and it's hard to carve out time right now. But this is a priority) ** https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T124082 (Dan: I'll comment on the ticket) === Reading Infrastructure === * Block: Could use a quick security look at https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/264309/. * Hey Mobile people: Authmanager is replacing API action=login with action=clientlogin, and action=createaccount is going to completely change. We're currently aiming at end of February for the deployment. ** See https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/265201/ for details, then talk to Brad if you have questions. == Technology == === Research === * ORES serving ~100 external requests per minute * ORES moving to new meso-level (Labs < Meso < Prod) support -- blocked on Ops time to set up machines * See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T106867 -- working with Yuvi to flesh out sub-tasks -- need to know who to CC === Security === * kartographer, Ex:ORES, TextCat reviews in progress * Patch to parser/stripmarkers (T110143) deploying today. Contact Security if you see an issue with Xml::escapeTagsOnly. === Services === * Mobile Content Service pre-generation enabled :* running enwiki dump to populate it * /page/definition/ end point for wiktionaries :* functional only on en.wiktionary :* pre-generated * Move to Jessie and Node 4.2 :* Graphoid and Citoid - tomorrow :* CXServer - please check! ::* Apertium pkgs? :* Parsoid - needs testing === Release Engineering === * Blocking: none * Blocked: none * Updates: ** scap 3.0 will be tagged soon *** finalizing changes to simplify configuration deployment *** also working on puppet provider === Technical Operations === * Blocking: Research on ORES * Blocked by: none * Updates: * RESTBase/Kernel security incident * OTRS upgrade on Jan 28th to be rescheduled for Feb 2nd * HHVM 3.11 packaging moving on, almost done === Analytics === * Event Logging replication to analytics-store has been slow for a long time. Right now it's behind by about 3 days for a lot of major schemas. The problem is not obvious but we're on it. * Geowiki stopped updating on December 18th because one of the servers it was using was read-only, that's now fixed * Piwik has been optimized and is working reasonably well with the 15.wikipedia.org website, other **low** traffic apps/sites can use piwik now if they wish (already talking to reading about doing this with their iOS client) == Editing == === Parsing === * No blockers * Not blocking anyone (as far as I know) * Updates: ** QR today (done) ** RT test server (ruthenium) being updated to jessie and node 4.2 *** Needs puppetization fixes to migrate upstart files to systemD ** Parsoid node 4.2 testing with a focus on memory usage / GC behavior === Language === * Delay in adding parallel corpora tables for Content Translation ** seems to be resolving now such that we are going to add them ourselves === Collaboration === * Cross-wiki notification Beta Feature now on test and test2. * Coordinating on Flow dumps from production. Ariel is working on this - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T119511 === Fundraising Tech === * Investigating queue outages during December campaign * Updating DonationInterface session handling to work with 1.27 ** Trying to figure out how to run CI tests against the core branch deployed in payments, with 1.27 as non-voting * More CiviCRM enhancements == Discovery == * Portal A/B test is running * Working on Dallas cluster load tests, so far it doesn't appear to hold the peak load, more work is needed * WDQS Blazegraph 2.0 testing successful, will upgrade when GA is released. Started to work on geospatial search implementation. * Quarterly review this Thursday * Waiting for security review on TextCat -- | Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E | | identi.ca: @greg A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |

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Wikitech-l January 2016