[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)
Hello,
Recently, I stumbled upon a technical writing course which I found very
useful and I wanted to share it and thought of sending an email to
wikitech-l recommending it. Also, I've been looking for a resource about
VueJS with not much luck and wanted to send an email asking if anyone knows
any.
Instead, I have this idea to have a virtual library for developers so they
can share useful resources with each other. You go to a wiki page and see
list of courses, books, conference videos, on each topic and different
people recommanding them. You can also request a resource for a topic and
people respond to you. If the wiki page grows too big, we can split them to
sub pages based on topics, and so on.
I started the page in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Ladsgroup/Library
but I'm planning to move it to the main namespace if no one objects. Please
take a look, add more recommandations, co-sign, request for a resource,
respond to a request for a resource, etc.
What do you think? Please let me know if you think it's a horrible idea or
you have feedback on details (mediawiki.org? maybe we should move it to
wikitech.wikimedia.org?)
Hope that'd be useful.
Best
--
Amir (he/him)
It does the same as the @ operator, except that it takes care to prevent a
very bad bug that existed before PHP 7. Details at
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T253461
If there are other issues or benefits, please write them on the task. The
overhead of AtEase is prerty minor, so really any benefit at all is likely
to tip the balance toward keeping it. But, in the event that there isn't
any, then perhaps we should slowly phase it out.
Best,
-- Timo
Hello,
Due to the current situation, there are more and more collaborations
happening online instead. and now you can see Wikimedia-related discussion
groups in Slack, Discord, Telegram, Facebook, and many more. Besides being
scattered and inaccessible to people who don't have accounts in those
platforms (for privacy reasons for example), these platforms use
proprietary and closed-source software, are outside Wikimedia
infrastructure and some harvest our personal data for profit.
IRC on freenode is a good alternative but it lacks basic functionalities of
a modern chat platform. So we created Wikimedia Chat, a mattermost instance
in Wikimedia Cloud. Compared to IRC, you have:
* Ability to scrollback and read messages when you were offline
* Push notification and email notification
* You don't need to get a cloak to hide your IP from others
* Proper support for sharing media
* Two factor authentication
* A proper mobile app support
* Ability to add custom emojis (yes, it's extremely important)
* Profile pictures
* Ability to ping everyone with @here
* much much more.
You can use Wikimedia Chat by going to https://chat.wmcloud.org, anyone can
make an account. This is part of Wikimedia Social suite [1], the oher
similar project is "Wikimedia Meet". [2]
Some notes:
* This is done in my volunteer capacity and has been maintained by a group
of volunteers. If you're willing to join the team (either technical or
enforcing CoC, kicking out spammers, other daily work), drop me a message.
* Privacy policy of Wikimedia Cloud applies: https://w.wiki/aQW
* As a result, all messages older than 90 days get automatically deleted.
* As a Wikimedia Cloud project, all of discussions, private and public are
covered by Code of conduct in technical spaces: https://w.wiki/AK$
Hope that would be useful for you, if you encounter any technical issues,
file a bug in the phabricator.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Social_Suite
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Meet
Best
--
Amir (he/him)
Hello,
The current logo of MediaWiki was adapted slightly more than fifteen years
ago and hasn’t changed since. This logo despite having the nice concept of
sunflower, is old. The sunflower represents the diversity, the constant
growth and also the wildness.
Among its biggest issues I can point out that it’s a bitmap picture so it’s
unusable in large sizes (like large posters) and it’s too realistic making
it unusable in small sizes.
Most, virtually all, software products use a simpler and more abstract
form. For example, docker, kubernetes, Ubuntu, VueJs, React, Apache Kafka,
and many more. It’s a good time for MediaWiki to follow suit.
My request is for changing the logo of MediaWiki and I have no plans or
interest in changing logo of any other project.
Please show your support, oppose or your comments in the discussion page.
You can also add more suggestions.
The discussion page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Proposal_for_changing_logo_of_mediaw…
Best
--
Amir (he/him)
Hi all!
If you've never created a repo or fork on the Wikimedia GitHub
organization you can skip this email.
I know that some repos are developed on our GitHub org for reasons.
What is developed on our GitHub org? How many things are actively
being developed on GitHub org? I have no idea :)
I recently realized that there's not a great way to figure this
out[0], but I've been able to narrow the scope a bit. Now I have a
list of repos that are (a) in our GitHub org and (b) not in our Gerrit
that I could use some help sorting through[1].
== Help, please ==
* Look through repos on The List™[1]
If your repos are on the list, for each of your repos either:
* Archive or Delete it if it's no longer maintained or empty/useless,
respectively (and remove them from the list on mw.org)[2]
Or:
* put a "{{tick}}" in the "Active" column on the list on mw.org
== Why==
In a more perfect future we could add the "mirror"[3] tag to repos on
GitHub that are mirrored from Gerrit (with a link to their canonical
repo locations; for example, gnome-deskop has this[4] and I'm very
jealous).
Hopefully, this will help folks wanting to contribute -- either a
Wikimedia GitHub repo is a mirror (in which case there's a link to
Gerrit in the description) or it's actively being developed on GitHub.
<3
-- Tyler
[0]: <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T237470#6407509>
[1]: <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gerrit/GitHub#Projects_on_GitHub>
[2]: <https://docs.github.com/en/github/creating-cloning-and-archiving-repositori…>
[3]: <https://docs.github.com/en/github/getting-started-with-github/finding-ways-…>
[4]: <https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-desktop>
This is a request for granting merge privileges on the mediawiki group
(MediaWiki core and all extensions) per the gerrit privilege policy.
You can find the relevant ticket at <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T261656>.
Martin Urbanec is a long term contributor, both on the wikis and to the code
base. As a Steward, he has the trust of the community. His contributions in code
include improvements to extensions like OATHAuth and CentralAuth. He is also
helping with decoupling classes in core to improve code health, and provides
configuration patches on behalf of the community.
Martin has been particularly helpful in investigating and fixing a recent
security issue (T260485). Working with him on that, I was surprised to find out
that he doesn't have +2 rights. From what I have seen, it seems empowering him
to merge patches is long overdue.
Gerrit: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/owner:martin.urbanec%2540wikimedia.cz
Wikipiedia: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedista:Martin_Urbanec
--
Daniel Kinzler
Principal Software Engineer, Core Platform
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi all!
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 to the phabricator tickets.
Activity since Monday 2020-08-26 on the following boards:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/techcom/https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/techcom-rfc/
Committee inbox: none
Committee board activity:
* Added "Parsoid Extension API" (T260714), see below.
New RFCs: none
Phase progression: none
IRC meeting request: none
Other RFC activity:
* Drop support for database upgrade older than two LTS releases:
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T259771>
- Leaderboard suggests to support 3 LTS releases
- Bawolff says that upgrades from versions as old as 1.16 are common enough,
but that we should drop support for anything older than 1.6.
* Parsoid Extension API:
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T260714>
- Subbu wrote in response to las week's digest email that they are looking for
feedback "not from users, but TechCom" and "if TechCom is happy with it, it
can go to Last Call."
- DISCUSS: should we move this to last call?
--
Daniel Kinzler
Principal Software Engineer, Core Platform
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi everyone,
do you usually find all the technical documentation you are looking
for? Yes? Great! For everyone else, this email is an early heads-up
announcement about the idea to create a Wikimedia Developer Portal. :P
For more info (that's currently only the problem definition, goal,
scope, and past research, hence "idea" and not yet "plan"):
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_Advocacy/Developer_Portal
If you have thoughts and opinions, please share them on the wiki
discussion page! Please focus comments on the current sections on the
page, as it is not the time yet to discuss content categorization or
implementation details - that will happen later in the process.
More info to come when things are a bit more worked out.
Thanks & Cheers,
andre
--
Andre Klapper (he/him) | Bugwrangler / Developer Advocate
https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/