Hello everyone,
"Fantastic MediaWikis and How to Maintain Them" is a one-day conference track designed for people who work with the open source software MediaWiki in their organisation, company or business [1]. The conference track is curated by the MediaWiki Stakeholders Group and hosted by Wikimedia Austria.
The track is part of Wikimedia's biggest annual tech-event, the Wikimedia Hackathon [2]: For three days each year, about 200 developers come together to improve MediaWiki. Among the participants are coders from the Wikimedia Foundation as well as volunteers from all over the world.
We're using this opportunity to connect the people who work with MediaWiki in their enterprise, company, or organisation to the people who actually develop the code. We invite all MediaWiki stakeholders - power-users, maintainers, and service providers, who have a professional or semi-professional interest in the software - to join us for a day full of MediaWiki knowledge and networking!
This is a call for participation. We are specifically looking for contributions of your experience in running MediaWikis. These include but are not confined to:
* Use Cases. Tell us how and why you use MediaWiki in a specific area or to solve a specific problem.
* Best Practices. Talk about the most effective way you have found to use particular MediaWiki features.
* Enhancements. Have you improved MediaWiki to fit your needs? Show us your solution.
* Challenges. How can we all add to MediaWiki functionality? Do you have specific ideas you want to collaborate on?
Share your experience and submit a presentation here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Stakeholders%27_Group/Fantastic_Me…
Important dates:
* 20th March 2017: Call for Participation opens
* 5th April 2017: Submission deadline
* 10th April 2017: Notification of acceptance
* 19th - 21st May 2017: Vienna Hackathon
We are looking forward to your submissions!
Best,
Markus (User:Mglaser)
MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group
[1] https://www.wikimedia.at/hackathon/fantastic-mediawikis/
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Hackathon_2017
Hey, I am Keerthana in sophomore year of undergraduate college. I am
interested in working on this project
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T158679> under Wiki-Ed organisation.
Here is my proposal <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T160840> for working
on it for GSoc/Outreachy. It would be great to get some suggestions on it.
Thanks,
Keerthana S,
Engineering Physics, IIT Madras.
Hi all,
I'd like to plead for advice on testing Recitation-bot to demonstrate we
have resolved a bug that resulted in a ban for splitting image pages into
two separate incomplete pages last month.
The log of attempts to test the fix is in this bug
<https://github.com/wpoa/recitation-bot/issues/69>.
Here are the key points / open questions:
- Each wiki I have successfully tried to test on, including the
production wikis, test.wikipedia.org, and testwiki.wiki, seems to
redirect the bot to a page with information about permissions / blocks,
something I had never seen prior to the block.
- What is the appropriate place to test? Seems to be www.thetestwiki.org
- Could we appeal the block on the strength of the apparent correctness
of the edit to fix the bug, at least temporarily so as to be able to
demonstrate the fix on a wiki we were running successfully on in the recent
past? Who would be best to approach with such a request?
Thanks any and all for any advice you can offer.
Anthony
Hi all!
Here are the minutes from this week's ArchCom meeting. You can also find the
minutes at <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_committee/2017-03-15>.
See also the ArchCom status page at
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_committee/Status> and the RFC board
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/mediawiki-rfcs/>.
Here are the minutes, for your convenience:
Notable activity:
* "Disabling LocalisationUpdate on WMF wikis" is being worked on; After some
discussion, it looks like it’ll be rewritten rather than removed.
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T158360>
* CURL to become an optional dependency of MediaWiki, managed by composer
* Template styling RFC has reached agreement.
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T155813>
* Thumbnail API RFC has seen no activity last week.
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T66214>
* Brion is working with Jaime on a tool to check for DB schema inconsistencies
between server.
Public meeting on Mobile Frontend Requirements:
* Overview:
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jlBl_qAIrGPF7zqOmK77Db8y4InO1j3qX1qqipz…>
* Outcome: Collected feedback, will reiterate. Log:
<https://tools.wmflabs.org/meetbot/wikimedia-office/2017/wikimedia-office.20…>
Using hangout was an experiment to see whether this is feasible and useful. We
do not currently plan to make Hangout the default meeting mode. Observations:
* We failed to get the youtube stream to work.
* We did not come close to the 25 person limit for hangout.
* Using IRC for logging is useful. Relaying questions and notes between IRC and
Hangout works, but takes effort.
* Please give feedback about using Hangout for this kind of meeting!
No public meeting planned for next week (March 22)
--
Daniel Kinzler
Principal Platform Engineer
Wikimedia Deutschland
Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
--
Daniel Kinzler
Principal Platform Engineer
Wikimedia Deutschland
Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Forwarded as received.
Dear Wikimedians,
The Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce a small new program called
the Hardware Donation Program. In a word, it is a program designed to
donate depreciated (but fully working) hardware from the WMF office to
community members who would put it to good use.
The program, including instructions on how to apply, is described on Meta,
here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hardware_donation_program
Please read the information carefully. I especially encourage you to pay
attention to the program's design considerations, which determine most of
the decisions we'll be making.
We currently have approximately 20 laptops ready to be donated.
Applications are welcome.
The upcoming Wikimedia Conference in Berlin (in about two weeks) would be
an excellent opportunity to deliver some of those laptops in person to
approved applications, so if you think you might be interested, I'd
encourage you to apply as soon as possible.
Please also help spread the word about this program, by forwarding this
e-mail to other Wikimedia lists you're on, and posting the link to the
program page on village pumps and *community* (not public) social media
channels or other communication forms you use.
Special thanks to User:Anntinomy from Wikimedia Ukraine, who had the idea
of asking about possible donation of older machines from WMF, and inspired
this program.
Mini-FAQ:
Q: Why are you doing this?
A: WMF's Office IT determines a lifetime for work machines, and regularly
replaces older machines. This creates a stock of older, working machines,
that are available for donation. We can donate them locally to San
Francisco charities, but figure that if we can find low-cost ways to
deliver them to our own community members, that's so much better.
Q: Am I eligible?
A: Read the fine program documentation.
Q: If I'm eligible, am I guaranteed a donated laptop?
A: no.
Q: Once these 20 laptops are donated, will there be others?
A: yes, eventually.
Q: How can you ensure people would use the machines for Wikimedia purposes?
A: We can't. We'll be making a good-effort assessment of the likelihood of
Wikimedia use, and make a decision to donate (or not) the equipment. Once
donated, the equipment no longer belongs to WMF. We encourage, but can't
enforce, reporting on impact achieved using the equipment.
Q: I need a few laptops for my event in two weeks! Can I get them through
this program?
A: No. Read the fine program documentation.
Q: I'm really happy about this!
A: So are we! :)
Q: I'm really angry about this!
A: So it goes.
Q: I have more questions!
A: Hit 'Reply'. :)
Cheers,
Asaf
Hello,
After several months of hard work by the Discovery Search
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/Search> team, we're
happy to announce that the CirrusSearch
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CirrusSearch> backend has been
upgraded to ElasticSearch
<https://www.elastic.co/products/elasticsearch> version
5. This update was bit tedious and difficult for the team; you can browse
the various tickets <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T154501> in
Phabricator if you'd like to know more.
This upgrade to ES5 is great, because we now have a new Ukrainian analyzer
to experiment with, a new reindexing API and soon, we’ll have an updated
completion suggester - all of which makes our backend more standard and
reduced a significant amount of technical debt.
Cheers from the Discovery Search Team!
--
deb tankersley
irc: debt
Product Manager, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation