Hello everyone,
The sixth workshop on the topic of "How to maintain bots" is coming up - it
will take place on Friday, July 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_mainta…>
[1].
This session will focus on best practices for maintaining bots and tools in
the Wikimedia ecosystem. It will cover a few practices that can help
developers run a bot or a tool with help from others, such as picking a
license, adding co-maintainers to the project, publishing source code,
writing docs, and much more.
To participate in this workshop, you would need basic familiarity with bots
or tools development. You can add your discussion ideas in the etherpad doc
linked from the workshops page.
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_mainta…
*Srishti Sethi*
Senior Developer Advocate
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Good evening all,
Please be aware that the deployment-prep beta cluster is currently offline
due to technical issues following the Cloud Services incident earlier today.
You can follow
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T315350 for updates on the issues.
A massive thank you to Brian King and TheresNoTime for working on the
issues so far.
Any assistance is appreciated on task or #wikimedia-releng on Libera. There
is no ETA at the moment for service restoration as the issue is unclear.
Thanks,
RhinosF1/Samuel
--
Thanks,
Samuel
Hi,
We just released 1.0.0 of commit-message-validator:
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Commit-message-validator>. If you
haven't heard of this project before, it's a tool that can be installed
as a git hook locally to ensure your commit message follows our
guidelines:
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gerrit/Commit_message_guidelines>. (It
has a GitHub mode too.)
You can also have CI run it on patches submitted to your project, please
file a bug in the Continuous-Integration-Config Phabricator project if
you want it turned on.
Coincidentally we just passed the 6 year anniversary of this tool. It
was originally written by Bryan Davis and then improved by contributions
from Fabian Neundorf, Rafid Aslam, dalba, Arturo Borrero Gonzalez,
Antoine Musso, Ahmon Dancy and myself. Here's to another 6 years!
-- Legoktm
Hi Wikimania Hackathon Attendees!
It has been such fun getting to know you all over the past 2 days. Thank
you to everyone who worked on projects and hosted sessions!
There is one more Hackathon Event- the Final Showcase! It will take place
at 15:55–16:45 UTC August 14. Please consider presenting what you worked
on! You can do so by adding information to this Etherpad: <
https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/wikimania2022-hackathon-showcase>
Finally, we would love your feedback on this event! If you have ideas,
things you liked, or things you’d like to see changed, this is your chance
to share that so we can improve in the future. <
https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/2022WikimaniaHackathon-FB>
If you have any other questions, please leave a comment on the talk page or
on Telegram/IRC.
Hope to see you there!
The Developer Advocacy Team
Hello all,
The Wikimania Hackathon is August 12-14, just over 2 weeks away! Details
are listed below.
Registration
Registration for the Wikimania Hackathon has now opened [1]! To
register, submit
your information to the Wikimania organizers, which will give you access to
the Wikimania platform [2]. You can also optionally add your name to
the participants
page on the Wikimania wiki [3].
Platform
The Hackathon will take place virtually on Pheedloop, the Wikimania
platform [4]. This platform complies with WCAG 2.1 AA, and will support
screen readers, font adjustments, and many other accessibility features.
Video sessions will be held in Jitsi through this platform.
Format of the event
The Hackathon consists of events spread over three days [5]:
-
On the first day, there will be a pre-Hacking showcase to share project
ideas and find collaborators. Anyone can present a project, and anyone can
come as an observer.
-
Throughout the next two days, there will be open hacking, social events,
and technical sessions. Anyone can offer a session; just claim a slot on
the schedule!
-
Finally, there will be a final showcase to share the projects worked on
during the Hackathon.
Preparing for the Hackathon
There are many ways to take part in the event. Think about what project you
might want to work on (see examples from past Hackathons [6]), add your
idea to Phabricator [7], and consider presenting at the pre-Hacking
showcase. Host a session by adding information to the schedule [5]. Check
out information for newcomers [8]. And don’t forget to register [2]!
Best wishes,
Haley and the Developer Advocacy Team
[1] https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon
[2] https://pheedloop.com/register/wikimania2022/attendee/
[3] https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon/Participants
[4]
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/07/20/the-platform-powering-wikimania-2022/
[5] https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon/Schedule
[6] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Hackathon_2022/Showcase
[7] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/6030/
[8] https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon/Newcomers
(If you don’t work with links tables such as templatelinks, pagelinks and
so on, feel free to ignore this message)
TLDR: The schema of links tables (starting with templatelinks) will change
to have numeric id pointing to linktarget table instead of repeating
namespace and title.
Hello,
The current schema and storage of most links tables are: page id (the
source), namespace id of the target link and title of the target. For
example, if a page with id of 1 uses Template:Foo, the row in the database
would be 1, 6, and Foo (Template namespace has id of 6)
Repeating the target’s title is not sustainable, for example more than half
of Wikimedia Commons database is just three links tables. The sheer size of
these tables makes a considerable portion of all queries slower, backups
and dumps taking longer and taking much more space than needed due to
unnecessary duplication. In Wikimedia Commons, on average a title is
duplicated around 100 times for templatelinks and around 20 times for
pagelinks. The numbers for other wikis depend on the usage patterns.
Moving forward, these tables will be normalized, meaning a typical row will
hold mapping of page id to linktarget id instead. Linktarget is a new table
deployed in production and contains immutable records of namespace id and
string. The major differences between page and linktarget tables are: 1-
linktarget values won’t change (unlike page records that change with page
move) 2- linktarget values can point to non-existent pages (=red links).
The first table being done is templatelinks, then pagelinks, imagelinks and
categorylinks will follow. During the migration phase both values will be
accessible but we will turn off writing to the old columns once the values
are backfilled and switched to be read from the new schema. We will
announce any major changes beforehand but this is to let you know these
changes are coming.
While the normalization of all links tables will take several years to
finish, templatelinks will finish in the next few months and is the most
pressing one.
So if you:
-
… rely on the schema of these tables in cloud replicas, you will need to
change your tools.
-
… rely on dumps of these tables, you will need to change your scripts.
Currently, templatelinks writes to both data schemes for new rows in most
wikis. This week we will start backfilling the data with the new schema but
it will take months to finish in large wikis.
You can keep track of the general long-term work in
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T300222 and the specific work for
templatelinks in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T299417. You can also
read more on the reasoning in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T222224.
Thanks
--
*Amir Sarabadani (he/him)*
Staff Database Architect
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hello,
The externallinks table
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Externallinks_table> in MediaWiki is
among the largest in Wikimedia production. It's the second largest database
table in Wikimedia Commons (and will soon claim the first place, after
templatelinks
normalization <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T299417> completes).
There is a proposal to redesign this table. You can read more about it in
T312666 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T312666>. If you use this table
or have some feedback about this proposal, please comment on the ticket.
Also, this means its schema and data will change soon. Be prepared to
update your tools and reports if you depend on the externallinks table.
Providing technical support to Wikimedia Commons is one of the official
goals of Wikimedia Foundation for this fiscal year, [1] and this redesign
will help address long-standing storage and database capacity issues of
this important project.
[1]: From the annual plan
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2022-2023>:
"Deepen our commitment to Knowledge as a Service by strengthening how we
prioritize and allocate product and tech support to 740+ Wikimedia
projects, starting with Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata."
Best
--
*Amir Sarabadani (he/him)*
Staff Database Architect
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hello!
This is a friendly reminder for you to spare 5-10 minutes to leave
feedback[0] on the Toolhub taxonomy[1].
The period for providing feedback ends on August 21, 2022.
Toolhub[2] is a catalog of 1500+ tools used by a wide range of Wikimedia
contributors: editors, developers, patrollers, researchers, admins and more.
We want to make finding and categorizing these tools as easy as possible.
The taxonomy is at the heart of how tool search works, and your feedback
would help improve it.
Whether you are a current user of Toolhub or hearing about it for the first
time doesn't matter – your input is valuable and much appreciated either
way!
=== How To Provide Feedback ===
Use the discussion page[3] of the feedback page to provide your responses
to the questions.
You will find more details on the feedback page.
=== Implementation ===
At the end of the feedback round, the team will evaluate and work on the
necessary improvements.
This is expected to be completed by the end of September 2022.
[0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolhub/Data_model/Feedback
[1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolhub/Data_model#Taxonomy_v2
[2]: https://toolhub.wikimedia.org/
[3]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Toolhub/Data_model/Feedback
--
Seyram Komla Sapaty
Developer Advocate
Wikimedia Cloud Services
Hello all,
On behalf of Wikimedia Sweden, I am hosting a group discussion at Wikimania for volunteer developers. The session is about the topic: how can we make content partnership software (e.g. GLAM tools, tools for batch uploads, statistics...) more sustainable and stable? Can a formal Wikimedia organization (e.g. an affiliate or another kind of organization) help here? What are do's and don'ts? If you build such tools, and/or have opinions about this subject, please consider joining us!
The session is next Saturday, August 13, at 10.10 AM UTC, check here for your local time: https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1660385400
More info: https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2022:Submissions/Volunteer_developers_…
Etherpad with the questions for group discussion: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/wikimania2022-volunteer-developers
All the best!
Sandra (User:Sandra Fauconnier (WMSE))
Hi All
There will be no train next week (Mon, 08 Aug–Fri, 12 Aug)—there is a
global holiday[0] on Tuesday (the beginning of our normal deployment
window).
Our short-term deployment calendar is up-to-date[1]—backport and config
deployments will be normal (except for Tuesday, due to the holiday).
We keep a yearly calendar of deployment disruptions on the Wikitech wiki[2].
Thanks all!
Tyler Cipriani (he/him)
Engineering Manager, Release Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation
[0]: <
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Day_of_the_World's_Indigenous_Peoples
>
[1]: <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments>
[2]: <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments/Yearly_calendar>