Wikitech-l July 2016

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

81 participants
87 discussions

Microsoft adding research tool to Office
by Pine W 26 Jul '16

26 Jul '16

I'm wondering if MS will pull citations from Wikipedia and/or make use of Wikidata. I'm also wondering if this will decrease Wikimedia site traffic in a similar way to how search engine knowledge panels may have decreased Wikimedia site traffic, particularly in this case from users who have access to MS Office. https://blogs.office.com/2016/07/26/the-evolution-of-office-apps-new-intell… Pine

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The Revision Scoring weekly update
by Amir Ladsgroup 26 Jul '16

26 Jul '16

Hey, This is the 14th weekly update from revision scoring team that we have sent to this mailing list. New developments: - We have a new grafana dashboard for requests that the ORES beta feature makes [1] [2] - There is a grafana chart in ORES service showing total number of requests (including requests hitting cache). Showing we had 20 million requests last month! [3] - ORES extension can be set to score edits only in a given set of namespaces. This was useful to reduce failure rate of jobs in ORES extension from 4% to 1% [4] - Scap3 now automatically deploys to canary node for ORES first (it's scb2001.codfw.wmnet). So we can better test deployments beforehand. [5] Maintenance and robustness: - We are removing a redundant index on ores_classification. No harm would be made but we'll save disk space. [6] - In footer of ores.wikimedia.org, we had "Hosted in Wikimedia Labs". It got fixed now. [7] - Cache.php in ORES extension which stores the scores into database has a better structure for handling errors.[8] 1. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T141169 2. https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/db/ores-extension 3. https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/db/ores 4. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T139660 5. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T139825 6. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T140803 7. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T139028 8. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T137880 Sincerely, Amir from the Revision Scoring team

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How to find a repository?
by Purodha Blissenbach 26 Jul '16

26 Jul '16

Hi, https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T129442 says to belong to Tool-Labs-tools-Pageviews but how to find the repository for it, if I want to work on it? Gerrit does not find anything when I enter this sring in its repository search. Is there any tool or tutorial for this question? Purodha

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Canary Deploys for MediaWiki
by Tyler Cipriani 25 Jul '16

25 Jul '16

tl;dr: Scap will deploy to canary servers and check for error-log spikes in the next version (to be released Soon™). In light of recent incidents[0] which have created outages accompanied by large, easily detectable, error-rate spikes, a patch has recently landed in Scap[1] that will: 1. Push changes to a set of canary servers[2] before syncing to proxy servers 2. Wait a configurable length of time (currently 20 seconds[3]) for any errors to have time to make themselves known 3. Query Logstash (using a script written by Gabriel Wicke[4]) to determine if the error rate has increased over a configurable threshold (currently 10-fold[5]) Big thanks to the folks that helped in this effort: Gabriel Wicke, Filippo Giunchedi and Giuseppe Lavagetto, Bryan Davis and Erik Bernhardson (for their mad Logstash skillz)! It is noteworthy, that in instances where expedience is required—we're in the middle of an outage and who cares what Logstash has to say—the `--force` flag can be added to skip canary checks all together (i.e. `scap sync-file --force wmf-config/InitialiseSettings 'Panic!!'`). The RelEng team's eventual goal is still to move MediaWiki deployments to the more robust and resillient Scap3 deployment framework. There is some high-priority work that has to happen before the Scap3 move. In the interim, we are taking steps (like this one) to respond to incidents and keep deployments safe. Hopefully, this work and the error-rate alert work from Ori last week[6] will allow everyone to be more conscientious and more keenly aware of deployments that cause large aberrations in the rate of errors. <3, Your Friendly Neighborhood Release Engineering Team [0]. https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation/20160601-MediaWi… is the recent example I could find, but there have been others. [1]. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/D248 [2]. https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/294742/ [3]. https://github.com/wikimedia/scap/blob/master/scap/config.py#L19 [4]. https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/292505/ [5]. https://github.com/wikimedia/scap/blob/master/scap/config.py#L18 [6]. https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/300327/

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Wednesday, 3-August-2016 CREDIT
by Adam Baso 25 Jul '16

25 Jul '16

Hello! The next CREDIT showcase is Wednesday, 3-August-2016 at 1800 UTC (1100 SF). https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/CREDIT_showcase Please add your demos to the Etherpad. See you soon! -Adam

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Gerrit 2.12.2 test instance - PLEASE TEST
by Chad Horohoe 25 Jul '16

25 Jul '16

Hi, Daniel and I have been spending a lot of time in the last week preparing a smooth upgrade path for Gerrit to a new (and supported version). The migration will be coming soon but I could use your help testing things in the meantime. https://gerrit-new.wikimedia.org/r/ The database is a snapshot from last week and the git data is up to date as of a few hours ago. Please use this opportunity to test the new installation and make sure it works for you. Make a change. Do some reviews. Do the things you usually would. Again, this is snapshot data so: A) Don't worry about messing up the real install, and B) Don't expect any changes to persist after the migration. If nobody identifies any major blockers, we'll go ahead and set an upgrade time for the immediate future. Thanks so much! -Chad & Daniel

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Gerrit downtime this Monday!
by Chad Horohoe 25 Jul '16

25 Jul '16

Hi, So the time is upon us to finally upgrade Gerrit. I thank everyone in advance for all of your patience and good work testing things out for us. The plan is outlined in detail on Phabricator[0], but I'll give everyone the short version here. The downtime will be on Monday, July 25th from 01:00 to 04:00 UTC; that's Sunday night for those of us who are US-based. This time was picked based because it's one of our lowest traffic times on Gerrit. There's never a *good* time to bring it down, it's always being used, but this looks like it'll impact the fewest number of users. I do not anticipate the process actually taking the full 3 hours, but I'm giving us a lot of extra time just in case. Jaime will be on hand to assist with a final DB snapshot of the old version and possible rollback, and Daniel Z. is going to assist me with the puppet work. Most of this is already prepared so the amount of "change" to do the swap has been kept to a minimum. Gerrit is a critical service to all developers, so the plan includes a generous provision to roll back if things are not operating properly--I'd rather us be on the old version that works on a Monday morning than be stuck broken going into the work week. I'll be sure to send a last minute reminder Sunday night prior to taking services offline. Thanks again! -Chad [0] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T70271#2482308

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MediaWiki pingback
by Ori Livneh 23 Jul '16

23 Jul '16

What proportion of MediaWiki installations run on 32-bit systems? How much memory is available to a typical MediaWiki install? How often is the Oracle database backend used? These are the kinds of questions that come up whenever we debate changes that impact compatibility. More often than not, the questions go unanswered, because we don't have good statistical data about the environments in which MediaWiki is running. Starting with version 1.28, MediaWiki will provide operators with the option of sharing anonymous data about the local MediaWiki instance and its environment with MediaWiki's developer community via a pingback to a URL endpoint on MediaWiki.org. The configuration variable that controls this behavior ($wgPingback) will default to false (that is: don't share data). The web installer will display a checkbox for toggling this feature on and off, and it will be checked by default (that is: *do* share data). This ensures (I hope) that no one feels surprised or violated. The information that gets sent is described in < https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schema:MediaWikiPingback>. Here is a summary of what we send: - A randomly-generated unique ID for the wiki. - The chosen database backend (e.g., "mysql", "sqlite") - The version of MediaWiki in use - The version of PHP - The name and version of the operating system in use - The processor architecture and integer size (e.g. "x86_64") - The name of the web server software in use (e.g. "Apache/1.3.14") Neither the wiki name nor its location is shared. The plan is to make this data freely available to all MediaWiki developers. Before that can happen, I will need to solicit reviews from security folks and from the WMF's legal team, but I don't expect any major issues. Please chime in if you have any thoughts about this. :) The change-set implementing this functionality is < https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/296699/>, if you want to take a look.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki pingback
by Greg Sabino Mullane 22 Jul '16

22 Jul '16

> The configuration variable that controls this behavior ($wgPingback) will > default to false (that is: don't share data). The web installer will > display a checkbox for toggling this feature on and off, and it will be > checked by default (that is: *do* share data). This ensures (I hope) that > no one feels surprised or violated. Sounds sane, as long as the installer makes it quite clear what it is going to be doing. > - The chosen database backend (e.g., "mysql", "sqlite") Would love to have DB version information as well (getServerVersion) Lua version? > Please chime in if you have any thoughts about this. :) Many of the wikis I install are on intranets behind heavy firewalls. I'd be happy to submit this data however if there were an optional method to do so. -- Greg Sabino Mullane greg(a)endpoint.com End Point Corporation PGP Key: 0x14964AC8

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How widely is Flow being used?
by Pine W 22 Jul '16

22 Jul '16

Hi Wikitech, I believe that Flow is being used on an opt-in basis on Wikidata and Catalan Wikipedia, and is used on user talk pages by default on MediaWiki. Is that correct? Are there any wikis other than MediaWiki where Flow is enabled on all talk pages by default? Are there any wikis where Flow is widely used on an opt-in basis, even if it's not the default? Thanks, Pine

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Wikitech-l July 2016