Hey everyone,
This is an email about Tech News. Partly to introduce or explain what
it is to those who might be unfamiliar with it, or have seen it but
don't know it well. Partly to ask if there's anything we could do
better. If you know all there’s to know, there’s a request for
feedback towards the bottom of this email.
ABOUT TECH NEWS
a) What is Tech News?
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News
Tech News is a newsletter for reaching out with technical updates to
the general Wikimedia editor communities, to make sure they can keep
track of what's happening. It's typically distributed in 15–20
languages, reaching roughly 90 community pages (Village Pumps etc) and
some 600 individual subscribers, in addition to those who read it on
Meta, see it included in the Signpost or get it in their email inbox.
b) How is Tech News written?
Simplification is key. Technical news for non-technical readers.
Should be easy to translate as well as be written with en-1 and en-2
readers in mind. A couple of sentence per item, then a link to a Phab
task, wiki page or email if they need more information. Too long and
we put an unreasonable burden on the translators.
c) I've done something technical. The communities should know. How do I add it?
* There's a "user-notice" tag in Phabricator. Add it to the task
together with a simple 1–3 sentence explanation of what this is and
how it affects editors. Don't worry about polish, we'll take care of
that.
* You can add it yourself!
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/Next will take you to the
relevant issue. Remember to link to a relevant Phab task, wiki page or
email.
* You can always write on https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Tech/News
d) When is it distributed?
Weekly, each Monday afternoon/evening UTC. The deadlines for additions
are several days prior to that to give the translators time to do
their work.
See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/For_contributors#When_is_the_work…
for when to add things to have them included in the next newsletter.
e) What is Tech News not?
* A general Wikimedia newsletter. Everything in the Wikimedia world is
at most one step removed from being technical. This doesn't mean Tech
News is the best place. Typical items are new or upcoming features or
potential breaking changes.
* The way to reach the Wikimedia technical community. If you want to
reach Wikimedia developers, an email to wikitech-l is usually better
than an item in Tech News. Tech News is a way to keep Wikimedia
contributors up-to-date with technical changes.
* A way to talk about all the important things that happen in the
background. They're often awesome and we should talk more about them,
but if they don't affect how contributors interact with the sites,
then this is not the place.
* A place for updates about one wiki. If it's just relevant for
English or German Wikipedia, you should update English or German
Wikipedia, not the entire Wikimedia community. Exceptions to this rule
are Commons and Wikidata, because they're used by so many other
Wikimedia wikis.
More:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/For_contributors#What_is_typicall…
HOW CAN WE MAKE TECH NEWS BETTER?
Are there ways we could make Tech News better at spreading information
about technical updates that are relevant for Wikimedia contributors?
Something we do that's unnecessary? Things we're often missing? Things
we fail to explain? Anything we're particularly good at and should
keep doing? Tell us – on the list, on
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Tech/News, or privately (:
And, specifically – are there other places (wiki pages etc) where this
information should be available? Anything we could do to make this
easier for you?
//Johan Jönsson
--
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Scrum_of_scrums/2017-08-02
= *2017-08-02* =
contact: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering
== Callouts ==
*** Android App: We are investigating user reports of reading list pages
saved for offline not functioning correctly; trying to reproduce issues.
*** WikiData: Wikidiff2 patches about moved paragraphs need review:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T146781
***Tech Ops: Still ongoing issues with pdfrender getting stuck
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T159922
*** Scoring Platform: Large file support in git: subscribe to this task if
you might have similar requirements!
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T171758
== Audiences ==
=== Readers ===
==== Web ====
Starting work on new page summary API
Desktop print styles
==== iOS native app ====
* Blocked by: none
* Blocking: none
* Updates: 5.6.0 (Reading themes, on this day) final bug fixes & polish,
submit to App Store on Friday 8/4
==== Android native app ====
* *Blocked by:* n/a
* Blocking: n/a
* Updates:
** Cookie release work is all in QA/design review –
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/2763/
*** We are investigating user reports of reading list pages saved for
offline not functioning correctly; trying to reproduce issues. Want to
nail this down before the release.
** Offline compilations MVP client-side work is nearly complete –
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/2833/
*** Work on file generation and storage is underway (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T170843 )
** One engineer is newly hired, one more offer still to be made; PM search
is in progress
==== Reading Infrastructure ====
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates:
** Extracting structured reference lists (JSON).
** Fixing pronunciation parsing.
** Gergo on vacation until Wikimania
==== Discovery (maps) ====
* Blocked by: none
* Blocking: none
* Deploying mapframe/maplink to four more wikis that the community has
requested
* Progressing with reloading test server
== Community tech ==
Updates:
* Human-readable sections merged, wikitech-l announcement today
* CodeMirror and LoginNotify hopefully deploying soon
* Started work on GlobalPreferences and ArticleCreationWorkflow
Not blocking and not blocked
=== Contributors ===
==== Global Collaboration ====
===== Language =====
* No blockers.
* Niklas looking at, T170591. See:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T170591#3492148
* Update:
** cxserver's adaption changes merged; deploy pending.
** CX-VE work continue.
===== Collaboration =====
* Updates
** RCFilters
*** Filter duplicates when filtering for multiple tags
** RCFilters: Improve loading animation
*** Make 'related links' collapsible
*** Create a sticky preference for days/limit groups
*** Allow setting a new query as default
*** Ability to page through the results in the new UI
*** Some bug fixes
* Blocking
** Flow dumps - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T172025
==== Parsing ====
* Language Converter support code in Parsoid was deployed y'day -- the
second part of rendering a page in the desired language variant is the next
part in development
* Going to be publishing weekly linter count change stats on wiki --
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsing/Replacing_Tidy/Linter/Stats/July31 for
example
** Weekly plug :-) if you are an editor on a wiki, please help fix these
high-priority linter issues on your home wiki.
==== UI Standardization ====
* Updates:
** OOjs UI: v0.22.4 released, among changes:
*** (continued from last week): Further aligning OOjs UI with WikimediaUI
Base
**** WikimediaUI theme: Directly use the Less values from WikimediaUI Base
(James D. Forrester)
*** Accessibility FieldsetLayout: Use `<legend>` now that Chrome 55 bug is
less important (James D. Forrester)
*** Apex theme: Introduced focus states on all widgets as accessibility/UX
improvement
*** WikimediaUI theme: Work around a Firefox rendering bug for checkboxes
and radios (Bartosz Dziewoński)
== Wikidata ==
* Further improvements on the Query Service UI:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T170279
* Preparing for Wikimania: cleaning up Lexeme demo data, widgets, and
design.
== German Technical Wishlist ==
* Blocked by:
** Waiting for C++ reviews of the wikidiff2 patches for changes in moved
paragraphs https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T146781
*** the plan is to get at least +1s and then poke Tim
*** https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/356582
*** https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/319866
=== Search Platform ===
* Blocked by: none
* Blocking: none
* Updates:
** Continuing work on ML-assisted ranking
** Working on A/B test with interleaving search results (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T150032 )
** Vietnamese analyzer will be re-evaluated after upstream bugfixes (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T170423 )
** Archive search enabled everywhere (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T163235 ), needs bugfix (
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/369696/ )
** Wikidata prefix search with Elastic testing continues, some feedback
received & processing (test: http://elastic-wikidata.wmflabs.org/wb.html,
announcement:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata/2017-July/010964.html )
** Trey published docs for tools used to analyze language analysers:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:TJones_(WMF)/Notes/Analysis_Analysis_To…
=== Services ===
* Blockers: none
* Updates:
** Will truncate stored HTML soon to free up space for Cassandra 3 migration
*** No disruptions for VE
*** A bit elevated latencies for some time
** Testing new data model in the RESTBase-dev cluster. Please ignore alerts
from it
** Recommendation service API going public tomorrow
** Low team availability next week due to Debconf
=== Technical Operations ===
* Blocked by:
** Flow dumps speedup still blocked on revision content retrieval issue,
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T172025
** Still ongoing issues with pdfrender getting stuck
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T159922
* Blocking:
* Updates:
** Wikidata and dewiki read only for 1hour+
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation/20170728-s5_(Wik…
=== Fundraising Tech ===
* CentralNotice: working on clone campaign feature, fixed a couple little
bugs
* Working on generic script to clear up stranded payments
* Loading ever more mailing data into Civi from our 3rd party bulk mailer
* Continuing work on API update for our main credit card processor
* Also updating our audit parser for the same processor
=== Scoring Platform ===
* Blocked by:
**Note git-fat is still a long-term blocker, and some solutions are being
discussed.
* Blocking others:
**Mention that we're trying to resolve our blocker to using the new ORES
server cluster, by doing stress tests to estimate capacity. When we're
done, the celery workers will be moved off of SCB nodes
* Updates:
**Revscoring 2.0 is coming -- going break ORES "model_info" JSON structure
& add new functionality
***Will be deployed on labs before in prod, so code can be updated and
tested
***Announcement coming -- probably during Wikimania
***"Thresholds" is something Roan knows about
-
=== Security ===
* Reviews
** vue.js
** Kartography extension
** review of tables replicated to sanitarium
Hi!
I'd like to welcome you to join us at the CREDIT showcase next week,
Wednesday, 2-August-2017 at 1800 UTC / 1100 Pacific Time. We'd like to see
your demos, whether they're rough works in progress or polished production
material, or even just a telling of something you've been studying
recently. For more information on the upcoming event, as well as recordings
of previous events, please visit the following page:
<http://goog_1968694156/>
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/CREDIT_showcase
And if you'd like to share the news about the upcoming CREDIT showcase,
here's some suggested verbiage. Thanks!
*Hi <FNAME>*
*I hope all is well with you! I wanted to let you know about CREDIT, a
monthly demo series that we’re running to showcaseopen source tech projects
from Wikimedia’s Community, Reading, Editing, Discovery, Infrastructure and
Technology teams. *
*CREDIT is open to the public, and we welcome questions and discussion. The
next CREDIT will be held on August 2nd at 11am PT / 2pm ET / 18:00 UTC. *
*There’s more info on MediaWiki, and on Etherpad, which is where we take
notes and ask questions. You can also ask questions on IRC in the Freenode
chatroom #wikimedia-office (web-based access here). Links to video will
become available at these locations shortly before the event.*
*Please feel free to pass this information along to any interested folks.
Our projects tend to focus on areas that might be of interest to folks
working across the open source tech community: language detection,
numerical sort, large data visualizations, maps, and all sorts of other
things.*
*If you have any questions, please let me know! Thanks, and I hope to see
you at CREDIT.*
*YOURNAME*
--
Lani Goto
Project Assistant, Engineering Admin
If you are an extension maintainer, or are interested in helping out, your help
with the following task would be appreciated:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T172146
As per T165149, the contract of Title::getTalkPage changes to throw an exception
if called on a page in a namespace that does not have a talk namespace associated.
All calls to Title::getTalkPage must either be changed to
getTalkPageIfDefined(), or they must first check canHaveTalkPage(). These checks
can be omitted only for the User namespace, since user pages can always have
talk pages. Note that some of the below may be calls to User::getTalkPage
instead; those also don't need checks, since users can always have talk pages.
Offending calls to getTalkPage() should be removed from all extensions. They
MUST be removed from all extensions deployed on the Wikimedia cluster before
merging Icee208dc.
Below is a list of extensions with potentially offending calls to
getTalkNamespace(). Please go through them, and tick them off in the phabricator
task once the fix has been merged. If you made a patch bit it is not merged yet,
you can link to it in the respective line of the task description.
[] ArticleComments
[] ArticleFeedbackv5
[] BlueSpiceExtensions
[] BlueSpiceFoundation
[] CommentPages
[] ConfirmAccount
[] ConventionExtension
[] DumpHTML
[] Duplicator
[] EditSubpages
[] EducationProgram
[] Favorites
[] FlaggedRevs
[] Flow
[] GoogleNewsSitemap
[] InterwikiIntegration
[] LiquidThreads
[] News
[] ReaderFeedback
[] WatchSubpages
[] WikiLove
[] WikibaseQualityConstraints
[] Wikidata
[] XMLContentExtension
[] CologneBlue
[] Nimbus
[] Tempo
For a more detailed list, see the phabricator task.
--
Daniel Kinzler
Principal Platform Engineer
Wikimedia Deutschland
Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Please note that we've upgraded the version of npm used in the Wikimedia
continuous integration infrastructure. This means that CI should be more
consistent with developers' local set-ups, and lets us test in a more
normal environment. This change will only affect node-based CI tasks, like
the standard eslint/stylelint/jsonlint/banana tasks.
This is a breaking change for npm, as it will no longer silently install
peer dependencies – you need to specify them manually. If your repo was
previously warning about peer dependencies, it may now no longer work,
though we think we've fixed these. If you have this situation, you can fix
it by adding the appropriate peer dependencies to your repo's package.json
file, and if you can't work out how to fix it feel free to ask me or others
in IRC; #wikimedia-releng is normally best.
Thanks all!
--
James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester at wikimedia.org
<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l> |
@jdforrester
http://www.technollama.co.uk/us-court-declares-gpl-is-a-contract :
[...]
In a strong declaration that online open source licences are contracts,
the court declares:
“Defendant contends that Plaintiff’s reliance on the unsigned GNU
GPL fails to plausibly demonstrate mutual assent, that is, the
existence of a contract. Not so. The GNU GPL, which is attached to
the complaint, provides that the Ghostscript user agrees to its
terms if the user does not obtain a commercial license. Plaintiff
alleges that Defendant used Ghostscript, did not obtain a commercial
license, and represented publicly that its use of Ghostscript was
licensed under the GNL GPU. These allegations sufficiently plead the
existence of a contract.”
Hi Community Metrics team,
This is your automatic monthly Phabricator statistics mail.
Accounts created in (2017-07): 432
Active Maniphest users (any activity) in (2017-07): 888
Task authors in (2017-07): 499
Users who have closed tasks in (2017-07): 280
Projects which had at least one task moved from one column to another on
their workboard in (2017-07): 293
Tasks created in (2017-07): 2776
Tasks closed in (2017-07): 2267
Open and stalled tasks in total: 35168
Median age in days of open tasks by priority:
Unbreak now: 25
Needs Triage: 295
High: 532
Normal: 720
Low: 966
Lowest: 946
(How long tasks have been open, not how long they have had that priority)
Active Differential users (any activity) in (2017-07): 24
TODO: Numbers which refer to closed tasks might not be correct, as
described in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T1003 .
Yours sincerely,
Fab Rick Aytor
(via community_metrics.sh on iridium at Tue Aug 1 00:00:23 UTC 2017)