Wikitech-l April 2016

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

100 participants
90 discussions

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 19 Apr '16

19 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 19 Apr '16

19 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 19 Apr '16

19 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 18 Apr '16

18 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 18 Apr '16

18 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 18 Apr '16

18 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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Deprecating rest.wikimedia.org in favor of /api/rest_v1/
by Gabriel Wicke 18 Apr '16

18 Apr '16

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

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Technical advice on expert review?
by Anthony Cole 17 Apr '16

17 Apr '16

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…

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How can someone get code reviews from the Wikidata dev team?
by Pine W 16 Apr '16

16 Apr '16

A concise illustration from Lydia Pintscher that shows an innovative way to notify the Wikidata dev team that patches are ready for review: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:How_to_get_Wikidata_code_review_don… Pine

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Wikitech-l April 2016