Hi all,
We've just landed a patch to the master branch of CentralAuth[0] that
helps avoid timing attacks with token comparisons. The Phabricator
task is T125290[1].
If you are are using CentralAuth (which is probably not many of you), please
update your installations with this patch.
-Chad
[0] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/284237/
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T125290
Hi,
The 1.27 release cycle is coming to a close. We're due for a release of it
come next month. Looking at the calendar, I'm going to pencil in the
following dates for branching and so forth:
* May 2nd - Cut REL1_27 and bump master to 1.28.0-alpha. The train
cycle that week would then switch over to 1.28.0-wmf.1
* Week of May 16th - Do a release candidate
* May 30/31st - Release MediaWiki 1.27.0
If you've got any big things you were wanting to land for 1.27, now would
be the time to polish them up and get then in master branches :)
-Chad
Please join for the following tech talk:
*Tech Talk**:* UX Prototype Labs: Understanding Wikipedia Readers
*Presenter:* Sherah Smith (user: pizzacat)
*Date:* April 18th, 2016
*Time: *17:00 UTC
<http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Tech+Talk%3A+UX+Pr…>
*Length:* 30 minutes
Link to live YouTube stream <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZymyC7tUTI8>
*IRC channel for questions/discussion:* #wikimedia-office
*Summary: *Have you ever wondered what our users think about their reading
experiences on Wikipedia? We may know how *we* interact with features
ourselves, but when we put prototypes in front of others, we find out that
plenty of people feel or do things differently. To catch some of these
insights, I run regular sets of 1-hour interview sessions with Wikipedia
readers. This talk outlines how this works, from idea to recruit to
interview and analysis.
*Feel free to forward this email to any other relevant wikimedia lists.*
We have decided to officially retire the rest.wikimedia.org domain in
favor of /api/rest_v1/ at each individual project domain. For example,
https://rest.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia.org/v1/?doc
becomes
https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/?doc
Most clients already use the new path, and benefit from better
performance from geo-distributed caching, no additional DNS lookups,
and sharing of TLS / HTTP2 connections.
We intend to shut down the rest.wikimedia.org entry point around
March, so please adjust your clients to use /api/rest_v1/ soon.
Thank you for your cooperation,
Gabriel
--
Gabriel Wicke
Principal Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation
BMJ, the publishers of the *British Medical Journal* and other top-tier
biomedical journals, have kindly recruited the best minds they can get to
review the en.Wikipedia's article, "Parkinson's disease".
We began the review by passing the article, in a Word document, from one
reviewer to the next by email. Each made proposed changes to the article
text and left comments in the document, using Word's "Review" and "Track
changes" features.
At that point we needed to start a discussion, and Word isn't ideal for
that. So I pasted the relevant paragraphs from the Word document into the
left column of a wiki table, and the reviewers' comments into the right
column, where the discussion could happen. [1] I manually applied
background colours to distinguish deletions from additions in the left
column, using <span style="background:#xxxxxx">.
That discussion has now begun but one of the many things I've learned
during all this is, the top researchers and theorists spend a lot of time
in the air (travelling to conferences, lectures, meetings), and it is then,
free from the demands of job and family, when they do their reviewing.
So, I have pasted that wiki table into Word and have made it available to
the reviewers here: [2]. Now they can download a copy before they get on a
flight, and email it back to me with their comments when they're online
again, and I'll transcribe their comments into the wiki table for
discussion.
This may be as simple as it gets but I just thought I'd put this before
you, in case you may have thoughts on a better technical approach for next
time. (BMJ have offered to do more of these.) I'm finding the construction
of the wiki table tedious (particularly highlighting the deletions and
additions) though I'm getting faster, and transcribing offline comments
from the Word document into the wiki table will be a small chore. The wiki
table pastes easily into Word with highlighting and formatting intact, but
not vice versa. (I've also asked at Village pump (technical).)
Any thoughts on making this easier or smarter would be much appreciated.
Anthony Cole
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Anthonyhcole/sandbox
2.
https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?resid=C1FF29217E209194!2141&ithint=file…
Luke081515 set up #wikimedia-codereview on freenode and I'm going to try to
figure out some time slots that might work. I think we should start with
once or twice a week and expand from there.
Further input is welcome either here or on the task:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T128371
On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 3:33 PM, Greg Grossmeier <greg(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Forwarding to engineering@ to get more visibility from WMF engineers who
> have +2 and/or who want to experiment with a possible way of doing
> code-review office hours.
>
> There's a vote on the task to show your interest if you have it:
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T128371
>
> Greg
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Greg Grossmeier <greg(a)wikimedia.org> -----
>
> > Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2016 14:22:03 -0700
> > From: Greg Grossmeier <greg(a)wikimedia.org>
> > To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > Subject: [Wikitech-l] Code review office hours (was Re: Improving
> Wikimedia's Code Review process)
> > Reply-To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> >
> > Changing subject to focus on the code-review office hours idea.
> >
> > Also, a request at the end for people with +2 to indicate if they would
> > be willing to participate in an experiment or not :)
> >
> > <quote name="Jon Robson" date="2016-03-16" time="15:47:49 -0700">
> > > We have two swat windows every day. It's magical... I post a request
> for a
> > > deploy on a Wiki page and someone deploys it.
> >
> > :) glad you like it
> >
> > > Could we try a similar thing with code review. Code review window
> (maximum
> > > 1 patch per person) and have a group of +2ers look at a maximum set of
> > > patches?
> > >
> > > It would need a few more rules than that and a bit of tweaking but
> seems
> > > like a good experiment. I'd sign up to help it if it was a maximum 2
> > > windows for me a week.
> >
> > That sounds like an interesting idea indeed, Jon.
> >
> > An action item from me from the DevSummit was
> > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T128371, which is basically "setup
> > code-review office hours" without much more detail than that (it was a
> > drive-by idea during one of the sessions that I volunteered to follow-up
> > with).
> >
> > My initial idea was very minimal (basically just a time and a virtual
> > place to do code-review together) but adding in the explicit support of
> > +2ers helping merge ready patches during the time gives it more
> > effectiveness.
> >
> > The hardest part will, I assume, be getting enough people with commit
> > rights to volunteer for at least one day/week.
> >
> > Any one reading this far with +2 willing to? If so, please comment on
> > the task (to save the mailing list):
> > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T128371
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Greg
> >
> > --
> > | Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E |
> > | identi.ca: @greg A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |
>
>
>
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
> --
> | Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E |
> | identi.ca: @greg A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |
>
> _______________________________________________
> Engineering mailing list
> Engineering(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/engineering
>
I recently transferred from the Reading Infrastructure team to the
Community Tech team [0]. The move happened because I want to spend
more of my time working with the developers who build tools and bots
to help the Wikimedia communities. I've been thinking about needs of
the Tool Labs developers for a while, and in November I finally wrote
up a proposal about a job focused on this work [1]. I was ready for a
lengthy discussion with management to defend my ideas about this need,
but to my surprise the feedback I got instead was mostly "it's about
time" and "when can you start?". My draft position proposal is now
"official" and posted on meta [2]. This project will be my major focus
on the Community Tech team, but I will also be helping out with code
review, deployments, and other things that the rest of the team is
working on.
People watching wikitech, labs-l, and Phabricator may have noticed
that I have been poking at various things since January like a
redesign of the wikitech main page [3], a new namespace for tool
documentation [4], and generally being more active in discussing
problems and possible solutions. Now that I am working on these issues
full time I want to start talking about bigger issues. I have drafted
a "vision" document on meta [5] describing some of the larger issues
with Tool Labs (and Labs and wikitech) that are making things harder
than they could be. This vision comes with a straw dog project roadmap
that I think we could work towards. This is not a set in stone
timeline, but rather a very high level description of a series of
projects that I believe would move Tool Labs towards being an easier
environment for collaborative FLOSS projects to thrive in. I will
continue to refine these project ideas and create Phabricator tasks to
track them, but before I dive too deeply into that I would like to
solicit input on both the problems and the general solution roadmap.
The project page is on meta rather than wikitech to make it easier for
existing Wikimedians who aren't wikitech users to participate. The
talk page is open for comments [6] and I look forward to hearing about
problems and solutions that I have not yet imagined. I hope that as
the various sub-projects solidify some of you will join me in getting
the work done.
[0]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Staff_and_contra…
[1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:BDavis_%28WMF%29/Projects/Tool_Labs_sup…
[2]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Tool_Labs_support
[3]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
[4]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Tool_Labs_tools
[5]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Tool_Labs_support/Tool_Labs_…
[6]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Tech/Tool_Labs_support/Tool_…
Bryan
--
Bryan Davis Wikimedia Foundation <bd808(a)wikimedia.org>
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] Sr Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
irc: bd808 v:415.839.6885 x6855
