Wikitech-l April 2016

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100 participants
93 discussions

Discovery Weekly Update for the week starting 2016-04-11
by Chris Koerner 23 Apr '16

23 Apr '16

Hello, A few updates from the Discovery department this week. * Portal team brainstormed ideas for the future of the Portal work and beyond; read more here <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia.org_Portal_brainstorming_ideas_for…> . * The zero results rate <http://discovery.wmflabs.org/metrics/#kpi_zero_results> [for search] was updated to no longer count queries that it should've been excluding. This shows that the completion suggester had a bigger effect than previously thought, actually reducing the zero results rate from roughly 33% to roughly 22%. ---- Feedback and suggestions on this weekly update are welcome. The full update, and archive of past updates, can be found on Mediawiki.org: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Discovery/Status_updates -- Yours, Chris Koerner Community Liaison - Discovery Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Data center switch-over moving ahead next week: please stay available :)
by Mark Bergsma 22 Apr '16

22 Apr '16

Hi everyone, After we've been successfully serving our sites from our backup data-center codfw (Dallas) for the past two days, we're now starting our switch back to eqiad (Ashburn) as planned[1]. We've already moved cache traffic back to eqiad, and within the next minutes, we'll disable editing by going read-only for approximately 30 minutes - hopefully a bit faster than 2 days ago. [1] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/04/11/wikimedia-failover-test/ On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 6:00 PM, Mark Bergsma <mark(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > Hi all, > > Today the data center switch-over commenced as planned, and has just fully > completed successfully. We are now serving our sites from codfw (Dallas, > Texas) for the next 2 days if all stays well. > > We switched the wikis to read-only (editing disabled) at 14:02 UTC, and > went back read-write at 14:48 UTC - a little longer than planned. While > edits were possible then, unfortunately at that time Special:Recent Changes > (and related change feeds) were not yet working due to an unexpected > configuration problem with our Redis servers until 15:10 UTC, when we found > and fixed the issue. The site has stayed up and available for readers > throughout the entire migration. > > Overall the procedure was a success with few problems along the way. > However we've also carefully kept track of any issues and delays we > encountered for evaluation to improve and speed up the procedure, and > reducing impact to our users - some of which will already be implemented > for our switch back on Thursday. > > We're still expecting to find (possibly subtle) issues today, and would > like everyone who notices anything to use the following channels to report > them: > > 1. File a Phabricator issue with project #codfw-rollout > 2. Report issues on IRC: Freenode channel #wikimedia-tech (if urgent) > 3. Send an e-mail to the Operations list: ops(a)lists.wikimedia.org > > We're not done yet, but thanks to all who have helped so far. :-) > > Mark > -- Mark Bergsma <mark(a)wikimedia.org> Lead Operations Architect Director of Technical Operations Wikimedia Foundation

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2016-04-20 Scrum of Scrums meeting notes
by Grace Gellerman 22 Apr '16

22 Apr '16

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Scrum_of_scrums/2016-04-20

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MOOC Extension
by René Pickhardt 20 Apr '16

20 Apr '16

Hey Everyone, I am an active contributer to Wikiversity (German and English). Over the years we realized that Mediawiki is not really providing everything a student and teacher needs in the classroom. Therefor Sebastian Schlicht and me have created a bunch of javascript, Lua modules and templates in order to pimp the user interface and some processes on the english wikiversity. A community poll has showed that our scripts should have been moved to common.js https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity_talk:MOOC_Interface#Support The improvements can be seen live in this course: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Web_Science/Part1:_Foundations_of_the_web/I… Over the time we have realised that it would be better to create a standalone Mediawiki extension since this is more stable. So we propsed our Idea to this years fOERder award which gave us some founding for this OER (Open educational resources) related project. Today Sebastian and I started our process. * We have been installing vagrant and have a mediawiki running locally! This is great and was well documented. * I have created: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MOOC * We need a gerrit Project extension/MOOC * We need a vagrent role for this Abraham Taherivand suggested to send a mail to this list with our needs and our introduction. Being new in the Wikimedia world it can be a little bit confusing - even though everything is well documented - so I am sorry if we had overseen something in the documentation. So we would be really happy for support, pointers and hints and especially for a gerrit project and a vagrent role. My username in gerrit as in other wikis is renepick Best regards Sebastian Schlicht and Rene Pickhardt -- -- www.rene-pickhardt.de <http://www.beijing-china-blog.com/> Skype: rene.pickhardt mobile: +49 (0)176 5762 3618 office: +49 (0) 261 / 287 2765 fax: +49 (0) 261 / 287 100 2765

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Unique Devices data available on API
by Nuria Ruiz 20 Apr '16

20 Apr '16

Hello! The analytics team is happy to announce that the Unique Devices data is now available to be queried programmatically via an API. This means that getting the daily number of unique devices [1] for English Wikipedia for the month of February 2016, for all sites (desktop and mobile) is as easy as launching this query: https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/metrics/unique-devices/en.wikipedia.org/a… You can get started by taking a look at our docs: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Unique_Devices#Quick_Start If you are not familiar with the Unique Devices data the main thing you need to know is that is a good proxy metric to measure Unique Users, more info below. Since 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation used comScore to report data about unique web visitors. In January 2016, however, we decided to stop reporting comScore numbers [2] because of certain limitations in the methodology, these limitations translated into misreported mobile usage. We are now ready to replace comscore numbers with the Unique Devices Dataset . While unique devices does not equal unique visitors, it is a good proxy for that metric, meaning that a major increase in the number of unique devices is likely to come from an increase in distinct users. We understand that counting uniques raises fairly big privacy concerns and we use a very private conscious way to count unique devices, it does not include any cookie by which your browser history can be tracked [3]. [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Unique_Devices [2] [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ComScore/Announcement [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Unique_Devices#How_do_we_count_uni… devices.3F

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CentralAuth timing security
by Chad 20 Apr '16

20 Apr '16

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

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Help review/test AuthManager
by Gergo Tisza 20 Apr '16

20 Apr '16

Hi all, AuthManager [1][2] is getting close to being completed. It will replace AuthPlugin as the interface for authentication extensions, and involves a rewrite of most authentication code in core (password handling in User, login/signup/password change/password reset APIs and special pages). It will be more flexible than AuthPlugin, allowing multiple authentication extensions to live together, providing a proper interface for redirect-based authentication, and much more. If you would like to make sure that some feature you are interested in will be supported, or would just like to help along, this is the right time! The gist of AuthManager is in these patches: * https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/195297 Add AuthManager * https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/240052 Use AuthManager on special pages * https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/265201 API changes for AuthManager * https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/282202 AuthManager release notes If you would like to try it out, there is a test installation at http://authmanager.wmflabs.org/ All feedback welcome, code reviews especially so. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Anomie/SessionManager_and_AuthManager [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/AuthManager

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Also on wmf branching...
by Chad 19 Apr '16

19 Apr '16

Hi, Friendly reminder that we're not branching 1.27.0-wmf.22 this week for the Dallas switchover work. We'll resume the week after :) -Chad

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Branching and such
by Chad 19 Apr '16

19 Apr '16

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

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Tech Talk: UX Prototype Labs: Understanding Wikipedia Readers: April 18th
by Rachel Farrand 19 Apr '16

19 Apr '16

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.*

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Wikitech-l April 2016