Wikitech-l October 2023

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

28 participants
31 discussions

Phabricator upstream shutdown
by Brian Wolff 21 Mar '25

21 Mar '25

It sounds like phabricator upstream is going away: https://admin.phacility.com/phame/post/view/11/phacility_is_winding_down_op… Just curious, are we planning to continue using it long term or move to something else? -- Brian

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Missing Section Headings
by Marc Riddell 13 Sep '24

13 Sep '24

Hello, I have been a WP editor since 2006. I hope you can help me. For some reason I no longer have Section Heading titles showing in the Articles. This is true of all Headings including the one that carries the Article subject's name. When there is a Table of Contents, it appears fine and, when I click on a particular Section, it goes to that Section, but all that is there is a straight line separating the Sections. There is also no button to edit a Section. If I edit the page and remove the "== ==" markers from the Section Titles, the Title then shows up, but not as a Section Heading. Also, I don't have any Date separators on my Want List. This started 2 days ago. Any thoughts? Thanks, Marc Riddell [[User:Michael David]]

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How to make commits from mirrored Wikimedia repos show up on your GitHub profile
by Bartosz Dziewoński 28 Jun '24

28 Jun '24

I know it has been annoying a couple of people other than me, so now that I've learned how to make it work I'll share the knowledge here. tl;dr: Star the repositories. No, seriously. (And yes, you need to star each extension repo separately.) (Is there a place on mw.org to put this tidbit on?) ------- Forwarded message ------- From: "Brian Levine" <support(a)github.com> (GitHub Staff) To: matma.rex(a)gmail.com Cc: Subject: Re: Commits in mirrored repositories not showing up on my profile Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 06:47:19 +0200 Hi Bartosz In order to link your commits to your GitHub account, you need to have some association with the repository other than authoring the commit. Usually, having push access gives you that connection. In this case, you don't have push permission, so we don't link you to the commit. The easy solution here is for you to star the repository. If you star it - along with the other repositories that are giving you this problem - we'll see that you're connected to the repository and you'll get contribution credit for those commits. Cheers Brian -- Matma Rex

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Research FAQ gets a facelift
by Dario Taraborelli 25 Jun '24

25 Jun '24

We just released a new version of Research:FAQ on Meta [1], significantly expanded and updated, to make our processes at WMF more transparent and to meet an explicit FDC request to clarify the role and responsibilities of individual teams involved in research across the organization. The previous version – written from the perspective of the (now inactive) Research:Committee, and mostly obsolete since the release of WMF's open access policy [2] – can still be found here [3]. Comments and bold edits to the new version of the document are welcome. For any question or concern, you can drop me a line or ping my username on-wiki. Thanks, Dario [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:FAQ [2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Open_access_policy [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Research:FAQ&oldid=15176953 *Dario Taraborelli *Head of Research, Wikimedia Foundation wikimediafoundation.org • nitens.org • @readermeter <http://twitter.com/readermeter>

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[action requested] Technical Decision-Making Retrospective Survey
by Moriel Schottlender 24 Apr '24

24 Apr '24

Hello all, The Technical Decision-Making Forum Retrospective team <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_decision_making> invites you to complete a survey about Wikimedia's technical decision-making processes. While there will be more ways to participate, this is the first and most important step in our data collection. It aims to gather information about your experience, thoughts, and needs regarding the process of making technical decisions across the Wikimedia technical spaces. This survey will be used for gathering information about the process and the needs around technical decision-making that touches our production systems. You can find the survey link here: https://wikimediafoundation.limesurvey.net/885471?lang=en Who should take this survey? People who do technical work that relies on software maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) or affiliates. If you contribute code to MediaWiki or extensions used by Wikimedia, or you maintain gadgets or tools that rely on WMF infrastructure, this survey is for you. What is the deadline? *August 7th, 2023 * What will the Retrospective team do with the information? The retrospective team will synthesize the collected data and publish an anonymized analysis that will help leadership make decisions about the future of the process. We will collect anonymized information that we will analyze in two main ways: - Sentiments based on demographic information: these will tell us whether there are different needs and desires from different groups of people. - General needs and perceptions about decision-making in our technical spaces: This will help us understand what kind of decisions happen in the spaces, who is involved, and how to adjust our processes accordingly. Is the survey the only way to participate? The survey is the most important way for us to gather information because it helps us gather input in a structured manner. But it will not be the only way you can share your thoughts with us - we will have more information soon about upcoming listening sessions where you can talk with us live. In the meantime, you are always welcome to leave feedback on the talk page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Technical_decision_making/Technical_Dec… Where can I see more information? There are several places where you can find more information about the Technical Decision-Making Process Retrospective: - The original announcement about the retrospective from Tajh Taylor: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org/… - The Technical Decision-Making Process general information page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_decision_making - The Technical Decision-Making Process Retrospective on MediaWiki: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_decision_making/Technical_Decision… - Phabricator ticket: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T333235 How to contact the retrospective core team: - Write to the core team mailing list: tdf-retro-2023(a)lists.wikimedia.org - The Technical Decision-Making Process Retrospective on MediaWiki talk page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Technical_decision_making/Technical_Dec… Thank you, Moriel, on behalf of the TDMP Retro Core Group Core group: - Moriel Schottlender (chair) - Daniel Kinzler - Chris Danis - Kosta Harlan - Temilola Adeleye -- Moriel Schottlender (she/her <https://pronoun.is/she>) Principal Software Engineer Wikimedia Foundation https://wikimediafoundation.org/

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Changes in schema of pagelinks tables
by Amir Sarabadani 15 Apr '24

15 Apr '24

(If you don’t work with pagelinks table, feel free to ignore this message) Hello, Here is an update and reminder on the previous announcement <https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org/…> regarding normalization of links tables that was sent around a year ago. As part of that work, soon the pl_namespace and pl_title columns of pagelinks table will be dropped and you will need to use pl_target_id joining with the linktarget table instead. This is basically identical to the templatelinks normalization that happened a year ago. Currently, MediaWiki writes to both data schemes of pagelinks for new rows in all wikis except English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons (we will start writing to these two wikis next week). We have started to backfill the data with the new schema but it will take weeks to finish in large wikis. So if you query this table directly or your tools do, You will need to update them accordingly. I will write a reminder before dropping the old columns once the data has been fully backfilled. You can keep track of the general long-term work in T300222 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T300222> and the specific work for pagelinks in T299947 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T299947>. You can also read more on the reasoning in T222224 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T222224> or the previous announcement <https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org/…> . Thank you, -- *Amir Sarabadani (he/him)* Staff Database Architect Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>

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[request for feedback] Community configuration 2.0: Letting admins to change MediaWiki configuration, on-wiki: validation
by Martin Urbanec 06 Nov '23

06 Nov '23

Hello everyone, I'm Martin Urbanec from the Wikimedia Foundation's Growth team <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth>. During the 2023-24 fiscal year, we're working on Community configuration 2.0 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_configuration_2.0>, an extension that empowers administrators to modify a subset of MediaWiki configuration on-wiki, so that they can customize features to their needs. The Growth team implemented this for its own features and since it was a great help in scaling, we decided to generalize what we created and offer it to all Wikimedia developers. The Growth team spent a couple of months on planning Community configuration 2.0 as well as discussing the project with its potential users. You can read more information in the project page at MediaWiki.org <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_configuration_2.0> and the Product Requirements Document <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ai7ib6h1q9ly5xClowK2cn0CKIJp3Z1KpkvwzVM…> . The first aspect the Growth team is looking to define is configuration validation, so that a malformed configuration file doesn’t cause the MediaWiki instance to fail. We wrote our proposal regarding validation as a Phabricator task at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T349757. With this email, we would like to ask for your feedback, which you can submit via Phabricator: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T349757. If you feel so, we also invite you to read the Product Requirements Document and submit any feedback as comments within that document. We would appreciate it if you can submit any feedback before the end of *November 08, 2023*. In case you have other questions about Community configuration, feel free to ask them at the MediaWiki.org project talk page <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Community_configuration_2.0>. Looking forward to reading your feedback! For the Growth team, *Martin Urbanec* (he/him) Senior Software Engineer (Growth) Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>

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partial translation after update
by Peter Radisson 05 Nov '23

05 Nov '23

After updates, I set the language to "de" but i have the strange effect that not everything is translated. e.g. i see "contributions" but the rest is in German. no idea, i checked the code the translation are complett. CU

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Talk to the Search Platform / Query Service Team—November 1, 2023
by Guillaume Lederrey 01 Nov '23

01 Nov '23

Hello all! The Search Platform Team usually holds an open meeting on the first Wednesday of each month. Come talk to us about anything related to Wikimedia search, Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), Wikimedia Commons Query Service (WCQS), etc.! Feel free to add your items to the Etherpad Agenda for the next meeting. Details for our next meeting: Date: Wednesday, November 1, 2023 Time: 15:00-16:00 UTC / 08:00 PT / 11:00 EDT / 16:00 CET Etherpad: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Search_Platform_Office_Hours Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/vgj-bbeb-uyi Join by phone: https://tel.meet/vgj-bbeb-uyi?pin=8118110806927 Have fun and see you soon! Guillaume -- *Guillaume Lederrey* (he/him) Engineering Manager Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>

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MediaWiki Insights - third monthly email
by Birgit Müller 01 Nov '23

01 Nov '23

Hi All, Welcome to the monthly MediaWiki Insights email! Enable more people to know MediaWiki and contribute effectively In the last MW insights email <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Reports/September…> we gave a preview into the work that is underway to help people feel more comfortable touching MediaWiki, enable teams and volunteers to contribute effectively, and retain and grow the number of contributors to MediaWiki in Wikimedia production (WMF Annual Plan, WE3.2 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024/…>). We’ve used the first quarter to invest in code improvements, consultancy and code review, explore and test approaches and defined three main focus areas: 1. Design low-entry-level initiatives for contributions to MediaWiki core and a set of extensions, enriched by workshops, improved documentation, code review and support to enable more people to feel confident contributing to MediaWiki. 2. Provide consultancy for Wikimedia’s teams in projects that touch MediaWiki core domains to help sustain current contributors and to enable more people to contribute to MediaWiki effectively. 3. Invest in code improvements, logging, monitoring and test coverage in specific areas to make it easier to debug issues and ease onboarding in MediaWiki. Target audiences are Wikimedia staff and volunteers. For example, as part of the work above and as a practice from early on, the MediaWiki Platform team provided code review for around 200 patches submitted by volunteers in the first quarter (https://w.wiki/7qa3). The goal is both retention, and growth (a 20% increase in the number of authors who have submitted >5 patches to a selected set of MediaWiki repositories in Wikimedia production). Currently the numbers are trending positive: We can observe a 17% increase in the number of people who have submitted >5 patches to MediaWiki core from July 1st - October 30th, 2023 compared to the same time period last year. However, we’re still at the start of this and it’s too early to cheer :). A draft overview on approach, baselines and work underway can now be found on this page <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Contributor_reten…> . Project snapshot: New database features, new security feature, and Source Maps now live on all Wikimedia wikis + default in MediaWiki The Data Persistence team (lead: Amir Sarabadani) is currently undertaking several improvements <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T343098> to the MediaWiki Rdbms <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Rdbms> library’s interface to make it easier for developers to get database connections and perform common queries. One improvement is a new database feature that allows extension developers to specify more cleanly when they need special external databases (T330590 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T330590>). As part of phasing out accepting and passing around raw SQL in the MediaWiki rdbms library (T210206 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T210206>), there is now also a new basic expression builder for use in conditions. This work is done to improve security, readability and to ease onboarding in MediaWiki. The team will soon create tickets for extensions that build raw SQL to ask to migrate to expression builders (see this change <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/967554> for an example). If you have questions or already want to get started, T350075 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T350075> is the ticket to coordinate the work and get in touch. Amir Sarabadani, Timo Tijhof and Bartosz Dziewonski can help with questions. More on security: There is a new security feature that allows developers to set the language as x-xss to help find potential cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. See T340201 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T340201>for more information. Many thanks to Lukas Werkmeister for the idea and work on this! <3 Finally, Source Maps <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T47514> (already highlighted in the last MW Insights email) is now live on all Wikimedia wikis and shipped by default in MediaWiki. Part of the initial work done by the new MW group is about setting the teams up to be effective stewards. One upcoming focus of the MW Platform team is on improving logging, monitoring and test coverage for the authentication-related components to make it easier to debug issues, respond to incidents and enable periodic health checks and alerts. See T348206 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T348206> for an initial assessment of the situation and possible improvements. MediaWiki within Wikimedia’s ecosystem. Next: WikiCon NorthAmerica Conversations with staff and volunteers on their experiences with contributing to MediaWiki, challenges and opportunities around MediaWiki within Wikimedia’s ecosystem are still ongoing. Next “stop” is at WikiCon North-America from Nov 9-12 <https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2023>: We’re hoping for many hallway-track conversations and possibly an unconference session on topics like: “What does core functionality mean to you?” - which is one of the questions we’re exploring on the way to develop a strategy for MediaWiki. Hope to see some of you there - reach out to me if you want to connect! We expect to wrap up the first round of interviews and explorations by mid of November and publish the outcome (first “Product Insights report”) around the beginning of December (which is a small delay from the original plan to have this ready to share in November). Thanks for reading! Birgit -- Birgit Müller (she/her) Director of Product, MediaWiki and Developer Experiences Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>

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Wikitech-l October 2023