Wikitech-l November 2019

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53 participants
71 discussions

Math at the Wikimedia Technical Conference 2019
by Physikerwelt 29 Dec '19

29 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 06 Dec '19

06 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 03 Dec '19

03 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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Upcoming Search Platform Office Hours—December 6th
by Trey Jones 03 Dec '19

03 Dec '19

The Search Platform Team <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Search_Platform> usually holds office hours the first Wednesday of each month. Come talk to us about anything related to Wikimedia search! Feel free to add your items to the Etherpad Agenda for the next meeting. Details for our next meeting: Date: Wednesday, Dec 6th, 2019 Time: 16:00-17:00 GMT / 08:00-09:00 PST / 11:00-12:00 EST / 17:00-18:00 CET Etherpad: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Search_Platform_Office_Hours Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/vyc-jvgq-dww Hope to talk to you in a week! *Note that our January Office Hours will be on January 8th.* Trey Jones Sr. Software Engineer, Search Platform Wikimedia Foundation UTC-5 / EST

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Fwd: Wikimedia Café online meeting for December 2019
by Pine W 30 Nov '19

30 Nov '19

Hello Wikitech-l, Usually I send emails that announce Wikimedia Café meetings only to WIkimedia-l, but because December's meeting agenda includes discussing the documentation for Wikitext, I am forwarding this announcement to WIkitech-l. Regards, Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> Date: Fri, Nov 29, 2019 at 10:50 PM Subject: Wikimedia Café online meeting for December 2019 To: Wikimedia Mailing List <Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Hello colleagues, For the next Wikimedia Café online video meeting, agenda items include: * Documentation for Wikitext <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext> * The NavWiki <https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/NavWiki> project Last month's Wikimedia Café had a problem with an inaccurate time conversion from USA Eastern time to UTC. People attempted to join the meeting at different times based on whether they referred to UTC or to US Eastern time. I apologize for the error, and I think that it has been corrected for December. The meeting style for the Café will emphasize discussion rather than presentation. People are welcome to participate as listeners only if they prefer. Please see the page on Meta <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Caf%C3%A9> for more information about the Café. Please watch the page for any updates, particularly to the schedule or the agenda. Signing up for the meeting is optional, but is helpful to the organizers so that we can estimate how many people will attend. Signing up for the meeting also informs us who we should notify individually if there are significant changes, such as to the schedule. If there are any problems with connecting to the meeting or if you have any questions or comments then please write on the Meta talk page. Regards, Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )

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Scrum of scrums/2019-11-27
by Željko Filipin 28 Nov '19

28 Nov '19

Hi, for HTML version see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Scrum_of_scrums/2019-11-27 Željko -- = 2019-11-27 = == Callouts == * Release Engineering - unusual train schedule: *** This week: 1.35.0-wmf.8 - group0 only because of Thanksgiving *** Next week: 1.35.0-wmf.8 - group1 + group2 * RelEng blocking Product Infrastructure: to create node10/buster images for Proton service migration [[phab:T237911]] * Biggest fundraising campaign of the year hits enwiki (and in Canada also frwiki) on Dec 2. Let's keep CentralNotice stable! == Product == === Android native app === * Updates: ** Suggested Edits v3 features and fundraising banner updates are now live in production. ** Working on mobile-html integration: [[phab:project/view/4318]] === Product Infrastructure === * Blocked by: ** RelEng: to create node10/buster images for Proton service migration [[phab:T237911]] * Updates: ** Maps: *** Investigating new OSM replication engine [[phab:T238554]] ** Proton: *** Moving Proton to debian buster, blocked on RelEng for node10/buster images [[phab:T237911]] === Structured Data === * Blocking: ** Search Platform: Data dumps for SDC: [[phab:T221917]] * Updates: ** finishing off computer-aided tagging ** finishing off Lua support ** finishing off blockers for structured data in dumps ** adding new input types === Inuka === * Updates: ** KaiOS app settings menu [[phab:T236265]] [[phab:T236312]] [[phab:T236314]] == Technology == === Fundraising Tech === * Updates: ** Battening down the hatches for the December fundraiser ** CiviCRM *** Fixing duplicate mailing event records imported from bulk mail house *** Investigating weird output from audit file parser for backup credit card processor *** Adding UI buttons to send end-of-year rollup emails on demand ** CentralNotice *** Reviewing and finishing up sub-national geotargeting *** Still comparing stats between new and old data pipelines ** Paymentswiki *** small tweaks to CSS and fraud filters === Core Platform === * Updates: ** Page history REST endpoints out on train ** "Endgame" API gateway planning ** MCR Schema conversion === Engineering Productivity === ==== Release Engineering ==== * Blocking: ** Product Infrastructure: to create node10/buster images for Proton service migration [[phab:T237911]] * Updates: ** Train Health *** Last week: no train because of team offsite *** This week: 1.35.0-wmf.8 - [[phab:T233856]] - group0 only because of Thanksgiving *** Next week: 1.35.0-wmf.8 - [[phab:T233856]] - group1 + group2 === Search Platform === * Blocked by: ** Structured Data: Data dumps for SDC: [[phab:T221917]] * Updates: ** Log Wikidata Query Service queries (sparql) to the event gate infrastructure [[phab:T101013]] (soon to be deployed) ** Increase logging sampling rates for search metrics from 12.5% to 100% (8x) [[phab:T197129]]

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Documentation/Examples on enabling localization in Gadgets
by Egbe Eugene 28 Nov '19

28 Nov '19

Hi All, Is there any documentation or Gadget I can have a quick look at yo be able to learn how to enable translation in gadgets? Thanks in advance. — Eugene233

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Wikibase: new security fix available for the Query Service GUI
by Léa Lacroix 27 Nov '19

27 Nov '19

Hello all, This message is important to everyone running an instance of Wikibase including the Query Service GUI. We just released a new version of the Wikidata Query Service GUI. This release is primarily to fix several security issues described in T238822 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238822> and T238824 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238824> (these tasks will be made public soon). These are different from the previous fix we deployed on November 7th. The fix has been successfully deployed for the Wikidata Query Service. In order to keep your instance safe, please make sure to update your Query Service GUI! Git repositories, releases and currently active version docker images also include the latest fixed code (see links below). If you have a local test setup using the docker-compose example then see: https://gist.github.com/addshore/36f8d6fe2331d28ca8f70df5abda20fd Gerrit repositories: - https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/wikidata/query/gui/+/553311/ - https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/wikidata/query/gui-deploy/+/553313/ Docker images: - latest: digest: sha256:6570acb916b429f10ccb3bf3479b66aa6697b3fb3982166a09aba87eeaba7c90 - legacy: digest: sha256:4503257bbe1744ce389f07f6dcbaf53db7569cc3e570e30dd5a85c8d0073a39d If you have any questions or issues updating your code, please let us know (you can write me an email, or ask in the Wikibase Telegram group <https://t.me/joinchat/HGjGexZ9NE7BwpXzMsoDLA>) Thanks for your understanding, Cheers, -- Léa Lacroix Project Manager Community Communication for Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 10963 Berlin www.wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.

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Wikitech-l November 2019