Hello dumps.wikimedia.org users,
The servers that host the dumps.wikimedia.org site are being replaced with
shiny new hardware! The web service migration is set to happen at 14:30 UTC
on Wednesday, April 4 2018. If you are trying to connect to
dumps.wikimedia.org around the migration window, you might experience a
short downtime. The switchover should ideally only take a few minutes, and
we'll keep you posted once it's all done, or if anything changes!
As always, please feel free to reach out to us with any questions or
concerns.
Best,
Madhumitha Viswanathan & Ariel Glenn
Wikimedia Foundation
Those of you that rely on the abstracts dumps will have noticed that the
content for wikidata is pretty much useless. It doesn't look like a
summary of the page because main namespace articles on wikidata aren't
paragraphs of text. And there's really no useful summary to be generated,
even if we were clever.
We have instead decided to produce abstracts output only for pages in the
main namespace that consist of text. For pages that are of type
wikidata-item, json and so on, the <abstract> tag will contain the
attribute 'not-applicable' set to the empty string. This impacts a very few
pages on other wikis; for the full list and for more information on this
change, see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178047
We hope this change will be merged in a week or so; it won't take effect
for wikidata until the next dumps run on April 20th, since the wikidata
abstracts are already in progress.
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.
Ariel
Sorry for cross-posting!
Reminder: Technical Advice IRC meeting again **today, Wednesday 3-4 pm
UTC** on #wikimedia-tech.
The Technical Advice IRC meeting is open for all volunteer developers,
topics and questions. This can be anything from "how to get started" over
"who would be the best contact for X" to specific questions on your project.
If you know already what you would like to discuss or ask, please add your
topic to the next meeting:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_Advice_IRC_Meeting
Hope to see you there!
Michi (for WMDE’s tech team)
--
Michael F. Schönitzer
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 26-0
http://wikimedia.de
Stellen Sie sich eine Welt vor, in der jeder Mensch an der Menge allen
Wissens frei teilhaben kann. Helfen Sie uns dabei!
http://spenden.wikimedia.de/
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
As we shared in October, Facebook has been testing a new feature that uses English Wikipedia content.[1] When users see news articles in their News Feed, the new feature provides more context about the article's source by pulling information about the publishers from English Wikipedia.[2]
The feature was initially made available to a limited number of users based in the United States as a part of their product testing. Today, Facebook will begin making this feature available to all of its users in the United States.
The Wikimedia Foundation first learned of the integration of Wikipedia content into Facebook’s Article Context feature ahead of its initial beta launch in October 2017. This new feature did not come from a partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation, though we were in contact with Facebook’s product and engineering teams ahead of this week’s launch.
During their test, Facebook was utilizing (and regularly updating) XML dumps to get the Wikipedia content. As a part of the full rollout of this feature, they will begin utilizing our API service - which provides them with more up-to-date content. According to Facebook, the results of their tests resulted in ~500 views a day. We are confident that we will be able to handle the scaling up of this feature. However, we will remain in contact with Facebook should any performance tweaks become necessary.
We are always happy to see people, companies, and organizations recognize Wikipedia’s value as a repository of free knowledge. At the same time, we are encouraging companies who use Wikipedia’s content to give back in the spirit of sustainability. Hopefully, Facebook will feel compelled to do so given their increased recognition of the amazing free knowledge repository you all have built together.
In the meantime, we are going to be tracking the impact of this new feature on English Wikipedia. Including looking at how many people click on the link to Wikipedia and seeing which pages are getting the most traffic. We will continue to keep you updated on our conversations with Facebook and impact of this new feature.
[1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017-October/088791.html <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017-October/088791.html>
[2] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/04/news-feed-fyi-more-context/ <https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/04/news-feed-fyi-more-context/>
_____________________
Joe Matazzoni
Product Manager
Wikimedia Foundation, San Francisco
Forwarding.
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
-------- Original message --------From: Victoria Coleman <vcoleman(a)wikimedia.org> Date: 4/2/18 4:46 PM (GMT-08:00) To: "Staff (All)" <wmfall(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, MediaWiki announcements and site admin list <mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Subject: [MediaWiki-l] Announcing the Wikimedia Technical Conference
Hi everyone.
This is a time of important change for technology and the Wikimedia movement. We are evolving our platform to better support, grow, and prepare the movement for the future to realize our strategic goals of Knowledge as a Service and Knowledge Equity.
Our vision is to host a different type of event in 2018 — to make informed decisions in the evolution of our platform while building our technical community engagement and enhancing our product vision. We want to be able to gather and discuss to determine our future direction and that of our shared platform; to communicate more broadly our product vision and to build a solid and stable base for our volunteer developer community. Future years will have have different focuses and themes.
We also want to learn from our experiences during previous technically oriented events to improve our focus, enhance outcomes, and to give ourselves the time and space to have informed, substantive, and timely conversations — this all starts with the overall theme of the event.
The January 2018 Developer Summit (in Berkeley, California) event had a broad goal to look at ways that technology can support our strategic direction. A concrete outcome of those discussions was acknowledging the need to evolve our core platform for the road ahead. In light of that outcome, we will hold future events with themes that reflect our evolving priorities and opportunities to support and enhance the Wikimedia movement with technology. Therefore, our next technical event will be focused on Platform Evolution.
We will hold a 4 day conference with topics that pertain to the Platform Evolution goals that we want to achieve in the next 3 to 5 years with a shared understanding of the product vision around those goals while also enhancing technical engagement within the Foundation and embracing and empowering our large community of volunteer developers.
Day 1: Product driven discussions on the how’s and why’s of our shared goals.
Day 2 & 3: A deep dive into specific technical ideas, concerns, and outcomes around the newly formed Platform Evolution cross-departmental program.
Day 4: An unconference / ‘get stuff done’ format along with sessions on building and sustaining our developer community.
We are also moving the time of year that we’ll hold this new event. The previously established timeframe had been in January, typically adjacent to the annual Foundation All Hands gathering, to allow for co-location of events. However, feedback from both the DevSummit and All Hands participants indicates that both events need more time to accomplish their goals. All Hands is a once-a-year event that many teams use to come together, face to face, for working meetings; as well as the entire Foundation getting together for meetings. Going forward, we will decouple the DevSummit from All Hands, to give both gatherings the time and space that all attendees need to be productive and successful.
This first of the event series will take place in Q2 of our fiscal year 2018-2019, in October 2018, and will be held in Portland, OR, USA. This timing was chosen to give us the opportunity to formulate plans, proposals, and programs in time for the Foundation annual planning cycle which starts in January 2019.
Since we have a new focus and want to expand upon the successes of the Developer Summit events from years past — we will now call this gathering of like-minded technologists the Wikimedia Technical Conference (WM TechCon). Stay tuned for more information on the formation of the program committee and the participant’s selection process, as we are making quite a few changes based on the feedback collected from previous events.
Make sure to follow the event’s mediawiki page <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Conference/2018> for more details.
Best wishes,
Victoria Coleman
Chief Technology Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600
San Francisco, CA 94104
+1-650-703-8112
vcoleman(a)wikimedia.org
_______________________________________________
MediaWiki-l mailing list
To unsubscribe, go to:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
hi, is this list active?
there appears to be a dead link on the group page pointing to this list:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
dead link:
"You can also use the gmane web interface for reading AND posting to the
list.
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/"
also, the welcome email from this list has confusing info:
"send a message to the list by sending it to: wikitech-l(a)wikipedia.org"
and
"To post to this list, send your email to:
wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org"
cheers
For a few years an interest of mine has been the possibility of Wikimedians
collaborating with North American indigenous peoples to educate the public
about North American indigenous languages, cultures, histories, and
religions.
In 2014, the *Signpost *published a report
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-07-02/WikiP…>
regarding English Wikipedia's WikiProject Indigenous Peoples of North
America.
In 2016, a keynote speaker at WikiConference North America was Stanley
Rodriguez, a member of the Santa Ysabel Band of the Iipay Nation and an
instructor of the Kumeyaay language
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumeyaay_language>.
In February 2018, the Affiliations Committee recognized the Wikimedians of
North American Indigenous Languages User Group
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedians_of_North_American_Indigenous_La…>.
Last week, those of us who participated in a United States Wikimedians
meeting had a brief discussion about the new user group.
I am grateful that there is interest in this subject among a variety of
Wikimedians in North America.
Perhaps you are wondering what the word "ullaakuut" means. It is a greeting
in Inuktitut <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut>. (Experts in the
language are welcome to correct me or to provide additional information.)
What's making you happy this week? You are welcome to comment in any
language.
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
Hi Community Metrics team,
This is your automatic monthly Phabricator statistics mail.
Accounts created in (2018-03): 426
Active Maniphest users (any activity) in (2018-03): 975
Task authors in (2018-03): 560
Users who have closed tasks in (2018-03): 278
Projects which had at least one task moved from one column to another on
their workboard in (2018-03): 281
Tasks created in (2018-03): 2586
Tasks closed in (2018-03): 2140
Open and stalled tasks in total: 38023
Median age in days of open tasks by priority:
Unbreak now: 76
Needs Triage: 388
High: 653
Normal: 900
Low: 1167
Lowest: 1113
(How long tasks have been open, not how long they have had that priority)
Active Differential users (any activity) in (2018-03): 19
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 phab1001 at Sun Apr 1 00:00:26 UTC 2018)