Wikitech-l October 2020

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49 participants
56 discussions

October 2020 Technical Community Newsletter
by Sarah R 09 Oct '20

09 Oct '20

Hi Everyone, We’re happy to announce the October 2020 edition of the Technical Community Newsletter <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_Community_Newsletter/2020/October> is now available. The newsletter is compiled by the Wikimedia Developer Advocacy Team. It aims to share highlights, news, and information of interest from and about the Wikimedia technical community. Check it out, and learn about what technical contributors have been up to this past quarter, upcoming conferences & calls for papers, and how to get involved. The Wikimedia Technical Community is large and diverse, and we know we can't capture everything perfectly. We welcome your ideas for future newsletters. Let us know what you would like to see or highlights you would like us to include. Subscribe to the Technical Community Newsletter <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Newsletter:Technical_Community_Newsletter>, if you'd like to keep up with essential updates and information Kindly, Sarah R. Rodlund Senior Technical Writer, Developer Advocacy <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Developer_Advocacy> srodlund(a)wikimedia.org

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Upcoming Search Platform Office Hours—October 7th, 2020
by Trey Jones 09 Oct '20

09 Oct '20

Hi everyone, 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, Wikidata Query Service, Wikimedia Commons Query Service, etc.! Feel free to add your items to the Etherpad Agenda for the next meeting. Details for our next meeting: Date: Wednesday, October 7th, 2020 Time: 15:00-16:00 GMT / 08:00-09:00 PDT / 11:00-12:00 EDT / 17:00-18:00 CEST Etherpad: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Search_Platform_Office_Hours Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/vyc-jvgq-dww Join by phone in the US: +1 786-701-6904 PIN: 262 122 849# Hope to talk to you in a week! —Trey Trey Jones Sr. Computational Linguist, Search Platform Wikimedia Foundation UTC-4 / EDT

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The Second round of voting for mediawiki logo just started!
by Amir Sarabadani 09 Oct '20

09 Oct '20

Hello, The subject line is self-explanatory, you can go to the voting page <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Proposal_for_changing_logo_of_MediaW…> and cast your vote. This is going to continue for a month and it's about different variants of the top contender (different colors, different wordmarks, etc.). You need to order logos based on your preference (the most preferred one first, the least preferred one the last) and then cast your vote. The final winner will be chosen using Schulze method <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method>. If you have mistakenly voted in the test phase, you can just copy your vote from the test page <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Ladsgroup/Round_2/votes> to the actual voting page <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Proposal_for_changing_logo_of_MediaW…> (the numbers of logos haven't changed). Special thank you to Chuck Roslof from WMF legal for doing the preliminary clearance of the proposal. Have a nice weekend! -- Amir (he/him)

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RFC: Drop support for database upgrade of mediawiki older than two LTS releases
by Amir Sarabadani 09 Oct '20

09 Oct '20

Hello, If you're not maintaining a mediawiki instance or don't work with mediawiki's installer/updater, feel free to ignore this email (sorry for spam). The aforementioned RFC has reached phase 3, which means we need to reach out to stakeholders and since this RFC is going to impact third party installations, hence this email. Currently and in theory, mediawiki supports upgrading from 1.2 (released in 2004) to its current version but if this RFC is approved, you wouldn't be able to upgrade from versions older than two LTS releases. So for example for upgrading to 1.35, you can't upgrade to it from 1.26 or lower, 1.26 was released in end of 2015 and EOL'd in end of 2016, if you want to upgrade from 1.26, you have to first upgrade to 1.34 and then you would be able to upgrade to 1.35 [Note that this is an example, 1.35 is already released and thus not affected by this RFC, this is going to affect future releases]. Here's the RFC: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T259771 Feel free to chime in and spread the word to other stakeholders. Thanks -- Amir (he/him)

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TechCom meeting 2020-10-06
by Giuseppe Lavagetto 07 Oct '20

07 Oct '20

This is the weekly TechCom board review in preparation of our meeting on Wednesday. If there are additional topics for TechCom to review, please let us know by replying to this email. However, please keep discussion about individual RFCs to the Phabricator tickets. Activity since Monday 2020-09-28 on the following boards: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/techcom/ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/techcom-rfc/ Committee inbox: - T264334 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T264334>: Could the registered module manifest be removed from the client? - New task about the possibility of removing the huge module registry from the js sent to the client. The idea is being discussed. Committee board activity: Nothing to report, besides inbox New RFCs: none. Phase progression: - T262946 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T262946>: Bump Firefox version in basic support to 3.6 or newer - Moves to P3 (explore) - It is pointed out that we’ve dropped support in production for TLS 1.0/1.1 in january, so de facto only Firefox 27+ is able to connect to the wikimedia sites - In light of that, it’s suggested that we might bump the minimum supported versions of browsers further. IRC meeting request: none Other RFC activity: - T260714 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T260714>: Parsoid Extension API. - Last call to be approved, that will end on October 7 (tomorrow) - T487 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T487>: RfC: Associated namespaces. - On last call to be declined, there is some opposition to the opportunity of marking it as declined on phabricator. Last call should end on October 7 (tomorrow) - T263841 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T263841>: RFC: Expand API title generator to support other generated data. - Erik asks if this is going to be generally applied to all generators or not. Cheers, Giuseppe -- Giuseppe Lavagetto Principal Site Reliability Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation

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Scrum of scrums/2020-10-07
by Deb Tankersley 07 Oct '20

07 Oct '20

Hello, This email contains updates for October 7, 2020. For the HTML version, see: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Scrum_of_scrums/2020-10-07 Cheers, Deb ------------------------ *= 2020-10-07 =* == Callouts == * SRE: MediaWiki DC switchback to eqiad will be Tuesday, October 27. Services switchback will be either the following day or the day before, TBD. == Product == === Structured Data === * Updates: "beta" milestone for mediasearch == Technology == === Site Reliability Engineering === * Updates: ** S5 replication broke on some hosts https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T263842, IR draft https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation/20200925-s5-repl… ** MediaWiki DC switchback to eqiad will be Tuesday, October 27. Services switchback will be either the following day or the day before ** Service 2 Service communication now all encrypted ** Digicert unified cert renewal still in purchasing, we’re using LetsEncrypt at all edges for now, with Globalsign also available as a backup if necessary. -- deb tankersley (she/her) sr program manager, engineering Wikimedia Foundation

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Interested in working on the project "Refactor Selenium tests and perform cleanup"
by Ratnabali Dutta 07 Oct '20

07 Oct '20

Hi, I'm Ratnabali, I'm an Outreachy applicant. I went through the "Refactor Selenium tests and perform cleanup" project description and found it to be really interesting. I would like to work on the project and would appreciate any help on how to get started with first-time contributions. Best Regards, Ratnabali Dutta.

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pageview dumps for 2020-09?
by Gabriel Altay 06 Oct '20

06 Oct '20

Apologies if this is the wrong list, but it appears that the page views dumps for september were stalled on the 24th https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/merged/2020/2020-09/ <https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/merged/2020/2020-09/> and the full month dump (pagecounts-2020-09-views-ge-5-totals.bz2) was not generated, https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/merged/ does anyone know what the situation is? best, -Gabriel

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cloud-vps vulnerability discovered -- please check project membership
by Andrew Bogott 06 Oct '20

06 Oct '20

Earlier today a vulnerability was uncovered that might have permitted unauthorized users to manipulate project membership or create or delete VMs within cloud-vps. That issue has since been resolved, and there is currently no evidence that anyone exploited it. Nevertheless, out of an abundance of caution: if you are a project admin, please review the members and projectadmins of your project. If you see any unknown or untrusted users or unexpected instances, remove them and notify me directly about what you found and what you've done. Thank you! -Andrew + the WMCS team

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Fwd: Public API for Wikimedia map tiles to be discontinued in 45 days
by Erica Litrenta 06 Oct '20

06 Oct '20

[crosspost from Maps-l] Today the Wikimedia Foundation is announcing the deprecation of the public API for Wikimedia map tiles. Around mid October the Foundation will end support for the Wikimedia Maps Service API [1]. This change affects people using Wikimedia maps on their own website or app. Maps on the Wikimedia sites, in Wikimedia-hosted tools and gadgets, and on maps.wikimedia.org won't be affected. This decision was made based on recent outage incidents, primarily due to spikes in third party usage, along with an analysis showing that more than a third of maps provided are to non-Wikimedia services (including many to for-profit organizations). After the most recent incident [2], the service was limited so that only cached maps tiles would be available. While this protected the servers, it made the service unpredictable and highlighted the unsustainability of our tile service. So, we have made the decision to discontinue the maps APIs for non-Wikimedia users. This change will allow our teams working on Maps to focus on the sustainability of the maps used within Wikimedia projects. You can follow the implementation of this change on Phabricator [3]. Best, Erica Litrenta [1] https://maps.wikimedia.org/osm-intl/ [2] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation/20200204-maps [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T261424 -- Erica Litrenta Manager, Community Relations Specialists https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Elitre_(WMF)

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Wikitech-l October 2020