Wikitech-l November 2019

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

53 participants
66 discussions

How to make commits from mirrored Wikimedia repos show up on your GitHub profile
by Bartosz Dziewoński 27 Jun '24

27 Jun '24

I know it has been annoying a couple of people other than me, so now that I've learned how to make it work I'll share the knowledge here. tl;dr: Star the repositories. No, seriously. (And yes, you need to star each extension repo separately.) (Is there a place on mw.org to put this tidbit on?) ------- Forwarded message ------- From: "Brian Levine" <support(a)github.com> (GitHub Staff) To: matma.rex(a)gmail.com Cc: Subject: Re: Commits in mirrored repositories not showing up on my profile Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 06:47:19 +0200 Hi Bartosz In order to link your commits to your GitHub account, you need to have some association with the repository other than authoring the commit. Usually, having push access gives you that connection. In this case, you don't have push permission, so we don't link you to the commit. The easy solution here is for you to star the repository. If you star it - along with the other repositories that are giving you this problem - we'll see that you're connected to the repository and you'll get contribution credit for those commits. Cheers Brian -- Matma Rex

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Research FAQ gets a facelift
by Dario Taraborelli 25 Jun '24

25 Jun '24

We just released a new version of Research:FAQ on Meta [1], significantly expanded and updated, to make our processes at WMF more transparent and to meet an explicit FDC request to clarify the role and responsibilities of individual teams involved in research across the organization. The previous version – written from the perspective of the (now inactive) Research:Committee, and mostly obsolete since the release of WMF's open access policy [2] – can still be found here [3]. Comments and bold edits to the new version of the document are welcome. For any question or concern, you can drop me a line or ping my username on-wiki. Thanks, Dario [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:FAQ [2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Open_access_policy [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Research:FAQ&oldid=15176953 *Dario Taraborelli *Head of Research, Wikimedia Foundation wikimediafoundation.org • nitens.org • @readermeter <http://twitter.com/readermeter>

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bluejeans
by Jeremy Baron 22 Feb '23

22 Feb '23

Hi, On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 3:36 PM, David Strine <dstrine(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > We will be holding this brownbag in 25 minutes. The Bluejeans link has > changed: > > https://bluejeans.com/396234560 I'm not familiar with bluejeans and maybe have missed a transition because I wasn't paying enough attention. is this some kind of experiment? have all meetings transitioned to this service? anyway, my immediate question at the moment is how do you join without sharing your microphone and camera? am I correct thinking that this is an entirely proprietary stack that's neither gratis nor libre and has no on-premise (not cloud) hosting option? are we paying for this? -Jeremy

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realtime notifications disabled in Phabricator
by Daniel Zahn 17 Aug '20

17 Aug '20

Phabricator users, this is to let you know that the "aphlict" service has been disabled on Phabricator (for now) because it caused stability issues. This means you will not get realtime (pop-up) notifications on Phabricator. (If you had those enabled in the first place). Regular notifications (that do not pop-up) and emails are not affected by this. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238593 -- Daniel Zahn <dzahn(a)wikimedia.org> Operations Engineer

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New DB_REPLICA constant; DB_SLAVE deprecated
by Aaron Schulz 04 Jul '20

04 Jul '20

As of 950cf6016c, the mediawiki/core repo was updated to use DB_REPLICA instead of DB_SLAVE, with the old constant left as an alias. This is part of a string of commits that cleaned up the mixed use of "replica" and "slave" by sticking to the former. Extensions have not been mass converted. Please use the new constant in any new code. The word "replica" is a bit more indicative of a broader range of DB setups*, is used by a range of large companies**, and is more neutral in connotations. Drupal and Django made similar updates (even replacing the word "master"): * https://www.drupal.org/node/2275877 * https://github.com/django/django/pull/2692/files & https://github.com/django/django/commit/beec05686ccc3bee8461f9a5a02c607a023… I don't plan on doing anything to DB_MASTER, since it seems fine by itself, like "master copy", "master tape" or "master key". This is analogous to a master RDBMs database. Even multi-master RDBMs systems tend to have a stronger consistency than classic RDBMs slave servers, and present themselves as one logical "master" or "authoritative" copy. Even in it's personified form, a "master" database can readily be thought of as analogous to "controller", "governer", "ruler", lead "officer", or such.** * clusters using two-phase commit, galera using certification-based replication, multi-master circular replication, ect... ** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master/slave_(technology)#Appropriateness_of_… *** http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/master?utm_campaign=sd&utm_medium… -- -Aaron

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Math at the Wikimedia Technical Conference 2019
by Physikerwelt 28 Dec '19

28 Dec '19

Hi all, I was happy to be invited by the Wikimedia Foundation to the Wikimedia Technical Conference 2019 in Atlanta~[1]. At this conference, I represented the technical needs of the mathematical community~[2]. Apart from a lot of great achievements for the whole Wikimedia movement with regard to the five focus areas of the conference~[3], there were also several math-specific achievements. In this message, I will focus on those aspects: 1) Bold italic capital greek symbols are now possible. Please join me in thanking Petr Kadlec (aka. Mormegil) for his perennial effort to make this possible~[4]. 2) We will - very soon - have a demo on the Wikimedia beta cluster enabling links from formulae to a dedicated special page that displays definitions and explanations regarding mathematical objects of interest, i.e., identifiers, symbols, terms. Thank you André Greiner-Petter for the implementation of this feature~[5]. 3) In a session on 'Integrating contributions from other teams or volunteers` organized by Christoph Jauera (aka. Fisch). We derived definitive action items on improving the participation opportunities to the Math on wikis~[6]. 4) We discussed the future of Math rendering with Petr Pchelko (WMF) which will simplify the setup of mathoid and eventually get rid of fallback images while maintaining support for MathML disabled browsers~[7]. I am grateful to the Wikimedia Foundation and the organizers of the event, in particular, Rachel and Greg to get the chance to enjoy this well-organized conference with amazing people and a wonderful program. All the best Moritz (physikerwelt) http://moritzschubotz.de | +49 1578 047 1397 [1]:https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Conference/2019 [2]:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_User_Group_Math [3]:https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238406 [4]:https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T218295 [5]:https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T208758 [6]:https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T234662#5660102 [7]:https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T237516 Some more details on item 4, from my personal, biased perspective: I started working on the Math extension in 2012 and implemented the main functionality of the new rendering method which is based on MathJax rather than on LaTeX in 2013 at the Wikimedia Foundations Headquarter in San Francisco. At that time the vision was to replace the monolithic PHP based framework MediaWiki, with a large number of small dynamic JavaScript modules. The idea was that those modules are developed as isomorphic platform-independent components using interfaces of a management framework that takes care of caching and efficient execution. The long-term goal was that the functionality could be executed either on the client or on the server and that the management layer would figure out the best execution strategy based on the current prerequisites. In the first step, a framework based on HTTP requests was set up to handle services such as math rendering. Mathoid the math rendering service was one of the first instances of this service template. From the retro perspective that might have been too early. Neither a convenient type and schema description language existed, nor a way to specify rich metadata on the execution characteristics existed. However, a fine-grained I/O schema seems desirable for implementing robust and durable services. Moreover, rich metadata on the execution characteristics such as runtime, memory footprint, I/O data distributions seem required to allow an execution management layer for effective execution strategy planning. After the services went into production schema improvement was difficult and never happened. Today, it seems pretty certain that MediaWiki will be PHP based for the foreseeable future. Given this situation, we did now plan to improve Math support by making the best use of the build-in MediaWiki core functionality. We will rely on the MediaWiki core caching functionality to continue providing an instant user perception of math rendering and continue using a stateless node-based math rendering service. Our hope is that by incorporating the 'new` MathJax 3 rendering mode 'common HTML` also MathML disabled browsers will be able to display high-quality mathematical formulae without to rely on disturbing images. We plan to enable this rendering mode as opt-in in a first step and thereafter have a community vote if the new imageless rendering mode should become the default. If that won't work, we will need to evaluate inline SVG images that would require either SVG or JavaScript support on the client. Given the situation that only a very small number of visitors use browsers that neither support SVG images nor allow JavaScript this second alternative seems to an ethical option as well. I will update the associated ticket phabricator ticket~[7] as soon as we have derived a more detailed plan for the implementation.

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[Tech Talk - Special Edition] Camille Fournier: The Manager's Path | 5, December 2019, 8 PM UTC
by Sarah R 06 Dec '19

06 Dec '19

Hi All, On* 5, December 2019, 8 PM UTC*, we'll welcome Camille Fournier for a special edition of Wikimedia Tech talks! Camille will share insights from her career and discuss her book, “The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change <https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth-ebook/dp/B06…> .” Camille Fournier is the head of Platform Engineering at Two Sigma, a financial company in New York City. Prior to joining Two Sigma, she was the Chief Technology Officer of Rent the Runway <https://www.renttherunway.com/>, a transformative brand that offers unprecedented access to designer fashion, disrupting the way millions of women get dressed. She is an Open Source contributor and project committee member for both Apache ZooKeeper and the Dropwizard web framework. Prior to working for Rent the Runway, Camille served as a software engineer at Microsoft, and most recently, spent several years as a technical specialist at Goldman Sachs, creating distributed systems for managing risk analysis and firmwide infrastructure. She has a BS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Camille is a well-respected voice within the tech community, speaking on a variety of topics such as engineering leadership, distributed systems, scaling teams, and technical architecture. You can view the talk live and ask questions here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNtFUt0vR58 Questions will also be taken through #wikimedia-office IRC *Feel free to share this announcement! * Kindly, Sarah R. Rodlund Technical Writer, Developer Advocacy <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Developer_Advocacy> srodlund(a)wikimedia.org

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Phabricator upgrade window next Wednesday 00:00 UTC
by Daniel Zahn 05 Dec '19

05 Dec '19

Next Wednesday, December 4th, at 00:00 UTC (4pm San Francisco) there will be a Phabricator upgrade window that might last up to 2 hours. While we expect downtime to be much shorter than that Phabricator might be unreachable in that time frame. We are switching the production Phabricator server to a buster (Debian stable) machine. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238956 -- Daniel Zahn <dzahn(a)wikimedia.org> Operations Engineer

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First and last call: removing ApiQueryReferences
by Adam Wight 05 Dec '19

05 Dec '19

The Cite extension implements an API `action=query&prop=references`[1], which was written to support a reference lazy-loading feature for mobile clients but never used. This was a beta feature and the API was never enabled on Wikimedia sites.[2] If you query it, you'll see nothing but an error response. My team is currently refactoring the Cite extension, and we would prefer to remove the API rather than continue maintaining dead code. Please respond by the end of the week if you know of any non-Wikimedia sites where the API is enabled and in use, otherwise we'll continue with the plan to remove it without a deprecation period. Thank you, Adam [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query%2Breferences [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T222373 -- Adam Wight - Developer - Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. - https://wikimedia.de

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Major trouble with Cirrus forceSearchIndex.php script
by Aran 02 Dec '19

02 Dec '19

Hi all, We're having terrible trouble with the Cirrus search maintenance script for initialising the elastic indexes: forceSearchIndex.php --skipLinks --indexOnSkip... It's happening with MW 1.31 .. 1.33, we're using redis job queue and a single instance of Elastic on the same host (these are low traffic wikis). Debian 10.2, PHP 7.3. No matter what parameters we use (--queue or not, different --maxJobs, or --fromId/--toId, --batchSize etc etc) we're always finding that hundreds of elastic docs are not being created. There's nothing about the articles themselves that are preventing it, if we run the maintenance script on just a single missing one afterwards it gets created no problem, and also each time this problem happens, there are many differences in the missing docs. Please if anyone has heard of this kind of things and could point us in the right direction here that would be awesome! Thanks a lot, Aran

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Wikitech-l November 2019