Hi everyone,
In 2019, the German-speaking wikis selected “Make working with templates
easier” as the focus area of Wikimedia Deutschland’s Technical Wishes
project. Since then, our team has made improvements in different areas, to
help template creators as well as users of the wikitext editor and
VisualEditor. Our work on this focus area is coming to an end, so I’d like
to summarize what happened and lay out the next steps:
Two changes from our Templates project have been available on all* wikis
for a while already:
-
A new attribute “suggested values” was introduced to help you clarify
what values a parameter may expect. [1]
-
Line numbers are shown in the “Template” namespace when syntax
highlighting (CodeMirror extension) is turned on. [2] A few wikis have
these line numbers in _all_ namespaces. If you want this for your wiki as
well, please reach out to us.
Several other changes were deployed to a small group in the past months. A
big thanks to Catalan, Turkish, Greek, Malay, Twi, French, Hungarian,
Hebrew, Finnish, Dagbani and German Wikipedia, to English Wikivoyage and
Nauruan Wiktionary as well as Wikitech wiki for testing these changes and
giving feedback to help us improve these projects. These changes are now
coming to more wikis:
-
Finding and inserting templates will become easier with an improved
search (in the TemplateWizard & in the template dialog of VisualEditor and
New Wikitext mode). [3]
-
In VisualEditor, you’ll be able to remove a template from a page via the
context menu, just like removing a table or an image. [4]
-
In VisualEditor, the template dialog will become bigger and descriptions
will be more visible. [5]
-
When using syntax highlighting (CodeMirror extension)*, matching
brackets will be highlighted [6] and the color scheme will be updated
for better readability [7].
The planned deployment date for all of these changes is March 9 (and March
16 on English Wikipedia).
A few weeks later, we’ll be deploying the last improvements from our
Templates project:
-
For syntax highlighting (CodeMirror extension), a colorblind-friendly
color scheme will be added. You’ll be able to activate it via a user
setting.
-
A range of fundamental changes to the VisualEditor template dialog will
be deployed. They will make it easier to understand what is expected from a
template, to navigate the template dialog, and to add parameters to a
template.
Feedback on all the projects is much appreciated on their respective talk
pages. Thanks a lot on behalf of the Technical Wishes team,
Johanna, Community Communications Technical Wishes
---
* All improvements in the CodeMirror extension, which provides syntax
highlighting, only apply to wikis that have the extension installed. This
is generally true for left-to-right language wikis, because unfortunately
the extension doesn’t work sufficiently for right-to-left languages yet
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Suggested_values_for_…
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Line_Numbering
[3]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Finding_and_inserting…
[4]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Removing_a_template_f…
[5]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/VisualEditor_template…
[6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Bracket_Matching
[7]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Improved_Color_Scheme…
Hello Handgod,
We currently do not have the resources to offer the workshop content in
different languages. We are investigating the possibility of taking this up
in future projects. One thing, though, is that we are presently exploring
Google Meet's live captioning feature, and interestingly, it offers
translations in French. As I have not tested this feature myself,
particularly for non-English translations, I am unsure how reliable it is,
something you might want to try out!
Best,
Srishti
*Srishti Sethi*
Senior Developer Advocate
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
On Fri, Apr 15, 2022 at 1:31 PM Handgod Abraham <sambayo23(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks ! Is a French translation planned please ?
>
> Le ven. 15 avr. 2022 à 15:42, Srishti Sethi <ssethi(a)wikimedia.org> a
> écrit :
>
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>>
>> The third workshop on the topic of "Writing Pywikibot scripts" is coming
>> up - it will take place on Friday, April 29th at 16:00 UTC. You can find
>> more details on the workshop and a link to join here: <
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Small_wiki_toolkits/Workshops#How_to_write_…>
>> [1].
>>
>>
>> This workshop will introduce participants to writing basic scripts via
>> the Pywikibot framework. We will be focusing on examples of scripts that
>> participants have requested to cover in the workshop (e.g., finding and
>> replacing content, archiving discussions, etc.). You can add your ideas to
>> the ongoing discussion in the etherpad doc linked from the workshops page. If
>> you missed attending the previous two workshops, going through the workshop
>> materials beforehand would be beneficial.
>>
>>
>> We look forward to your participation!
>>
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Srishti
>>
>>
>> On behalf of the SWT Workshops Organization team
>>
>>
>> [1]
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Small_wiki_toolkits/Workshops#How_to_write_…
>>
>>
>> *Srishti Sethi*
>> Senior Developer Advocate
>> Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines
>> at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
>> Public archives at
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org…
>> To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
>
Hello,
I will upgrade our Gerrit from 3.3.10 to [version 3.4.4] this Thursday
April 28th at 8:00 UTC. I will first upgrade the [Gerrit replica] then
the primary server. The service will thus be unavailable for a few
minutes while I restart the service.
Upstream release notes highlights three new features:
1) Checks UI: we do not plan to use this feature
2) Unresolved Comments ported to latest patchset
Unresolved comments that were left on older patchsets will now also be
shown on newer patchsets.
3) Comment Chips and Context
Comment state (resolved, unresolved, draft) is summarized by chips below
the commit message. The Comments Tab and the Change Log will not just
show the comment thread, but also the snippet of code (where the comment
was made) as context.
And various small UI changes, see [version 3.4.4] for a full list.
[version 3.4.4] https://www.gerritcodereview.com/3.4.html
[Gerrit replica]
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gerrit-replica.wikimedia.org
Upgrade task: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T292759
--
Antoine "hashar" Musso
Wikimedia Release Engineering
Hi everyone,
We’re happy to announce the April 2022 edition of the Technical Community
Newsletter:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_Community_Newsletter/2022/April
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.
The Wikimedia Technical Community is large and diverse, and we know we
can't capture everything perfectly. We would love to hear your ideas for
future newsletters. Let us know what you would like to see or highlights
you would like us to include.
If you'd like to keep up with updates and information, subscribe to the
Technical Community Newsletter:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Newsletter:Technical_Community_Newsletter
Thanks,
Melinda
--
Melinda Seckington
Developer Advocacy Manager
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hello,
We are updating composer in the CI images from 2.1.8 to 2.3.3 which
update most jobs relying on PHP.
The "Quibble" jobs have not been upgraded due to prerequisites tasks
that have not been completed yet.
If you find something suspiciously related to the composer upgrade,
please report on the upgrade task or as a subtask:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T303867
Thank you!
--
James Forrester & Antoine Musso
Hello all,
It's coming close to the time for annual appointments of community members
to serve on the Code of Conduct committee (CoCC). The Code of Conduct
Committee is a team of five trusted individuals (plus five auxiliary
members) with diverse affiliations responsible for general enforcement of
the Code of conduct for Wikimedia technical spaces. Committee members are
in charge of processing complaints, discussing with the parties affected,
agreeing on resolutions, and following up on their enforcement. For more on
their duties and roles, see
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct/Committee.
This is a call for community members interested in volunteering for
appointment to this committee. Volunteers serving in this role should be
experienced Wikimedians or have had experience serving in a similar
position before.
The current committee is doing the selection and will research and discuss
candidates. Six weeks before the beginning of the next Committee term,
meaning 07 May 2022, they will publish their candidate slate (a list of
candidates) on-wiki. The community can provide feedback on these
candidates, via private email to the group choosing the next Committee. The
feedback period will be two weeks. The current Committee will then either
finalize the slate, or update the candidate slate in response to concerns
raised. If the candidate slate changes, there will be another two week
feedback period covering the newly proposed members. After the selections
are finalized, there will be a training period, after which the new
Committee is appointed. The current Committee continues to serve until the
feedback, selection, and training process is complete.
If you are interested in serving on this committee or like to nominate a
candidate, please write an email to techconductcandidates AT wikimedia.org
with details of your experience on the projects, your thoughts on the code
of conduct and the committee and what you hope to bring to the role and
whether you have a preference in being auxiliary or main member of the
committee. The committee consists of five main members plus five auxiliary
members and they will serve for a year; all applications are appreciated
and will be carefully considered. The deadline for applications is *the end
of day on 30 April 2022*.
Please feel free to pass this invitation along to any users who you think
may be qualified and interested.
Best,
Martin Urbanec, on behalf of the Code of Conduct Committee
How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!
Incidents
We've had quite the month, with 8 documented incidents. That's more than double the two-year median of three a month (Incident graphs <https://codepen.io/Krinkle/full/wbYMZK>).
2022-03-01 ulsfo network <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incidents/2022-03-01_ulsfo_network>
Impact: For 20 minutes, clients normally routed to Ulsfo were unable to reach our projects. This includes New Zealand, parts of Canada, and the United States west coast.
2022-03-04 esams availability banner sampling <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incidents/2022-03-04_esams_availability…>
Impact: For 1.5 hours, all wikis were largely unreachable from Europe (via Esams), with more limited impact across the globe via other data centers as well.
2022-03-06 wdqs-categories <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incidents/2022-03-06_wdqs-categories>
Impact: For 1.5 hours, some requests to the public Wikidata Query Service API were sporadically blocked.
2022-03-10 site availability <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incidents/2022-03-10_MediaWiki_availabi…>
Impact: For 12 min, all wikis were unreachable to logged-in users, and to unregistered users trying to access uncached content.
2022-03-27 api <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incidents/2022-03-27_api>
Impact: For ~4 hours, in three segments of 1-2 hours each over two days, there were higher levels of failed or slow MediaWiki API requests.
2022-03-27 wdqs outage <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incidents/2022-03-27_wdqs_outage>
Impact: For 30 minutes, all WDQS queries failed due to an internal deadlock.
2022-03-29 network <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incidents/2022-03-29_network>
Impact: For approximately 5 minutes, Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites were slow or inaccessible for many users, mostly in Europe/Africa/Asia. (Details not public at this time.)
2022-03-31 api errors <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incidents/2022-03-31_api_errors>
Impact: For 22 minutes, API server and app server availability were slightly decreased (~0.1% errors, all for s7-hosted wikis such as Spanish Wikipedia), and the latency of API servers was elevated as well.
Incident follow-up
Remember to review and schedule Incident Follow-up (Sustainability) <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/4758/> in Phabricator, which are preventive measures and tech debt mitigations written down after an incident is concluded. Read more about past incidents at Incident status <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_status> on Wikitech. Some recently completed sustainability work:
Add linecard diversity to router-to-router interconnect at Codfw <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T248506>
Filed by Chris (SRE Infra) in 2020 after an incident where all hosts in the Codfw data center lost connectivity at once. Completed by Arzhel and Cathal (SRE Infra), and Papaul (DC Ops); including in Esams where the same issue existed.
Expand parser tests to cover language conversation variants in table-of-contents output <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T295187>
Suggested and carried out by CScott (Parsoid) after reviewing an incident in November. The TOC on wikis that rely on the LanguageConverter service (such as Chinese Wikipedia) were no longer localized
Fix unquoted URL parameters in Icgina health checks <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T304323>
Suggested by Riccardo (SRE Infra) in response to an early warning signal for TLS certificate expiry. He realized that automated checks for a related cluster were still claiming to be in good health, when they in fact should have been firing a similar warning. Carried out by Filippo and Dzahn.
Provide automation to quickly show replication status when primary is down <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T281249>
Filed in April by Jaime (SRE Data Persistence), carried out by John and Ladsgroup.
Trends
Since the last edition, we resolved 24 of the 301 unresolved errors that carried over from previous months.
In March, we created 54 new production errors <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/ryOkF_JP6cV1/#R>. That's quite high compared to the twenty-odd reports we find most months. Of these, 17 remain open today a month later.
In the month of April, so far, we reported 20 new errors <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/1LEA6jQzf7iU/#R> of which also 17 remain open today.
The production error workboard once again adds up to exactly 298 open tasks (spreadsheet <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTrUCAI10hIroYDU-i5_8s7pony…>).
Take a look at the workboard and look for tasks that could use your help.
→ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikimedia-production-error/
Thanks!
Thank you to everyone who helped by reporting, investigating, or resolving problems in Wikimedia production. Thanks!
Until next time,
– Timo Tijhof
🔗 Share or read later via https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/283/
*tl;dr: *What We Learned from Trainsperiment Week
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/281/what_we_learned_from_…>
Release Engineering took the feedback from the Trainsperiment survey and
posted it on our blog
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/281/what_we_learned_from_…>—there
are a lot of cool charts to see!
Trainsperiment week happened the week of March 21st when we deployed
MediaWiki versions 1.39.0-wmf.1–1.39.0-wmf.4 in a single week.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to give us feedback, and worked
with us while we tried something new.
<3
Tyler Cipriani (he/him)
Engineering Manager, Release Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation