Wikitech-l May 2023

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

48 participants
39 discussions

How to make commits from mirrored Wikimedia repos show up on your GitHub profile
by Bartosz Dziewoński 27 Jun '24

27 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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Announcing: Path review board
by Brian Wolff 04 Oct '23

04 Oct '23

Yesterday there was a conversation about code review on irc and among other things, how sometimes patches can get "stuck". I had an idea for a way to improve things. I'm not sure if it is a good idea, but there's only one way to find out. So without further ado, announcing the Code Review Patch Board: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_review/patch_board In short - each person is allowed to list one of their patches on the board that they would really like to see reviewed. You can only list one patch at a time, and it should be a patch that you have been unable to get review for for at least a week through normal means. See the page for the full list of guidelines. I encourage people to give it a try. Add a patch you wrote that you cannot get a review for. Or if you have +2 rights, try giving some love to these underloved patches. I would also love to hear feedback on the general idea as well as the current guidelines. To repeat, the url is: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_review/patch_board Thanks, bawolff

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Service Decommission Notice: Mobile Content Service - July 2023
by Adam Baso 06 Jul '23

06 Jul '23

TL;DR: The legacy Mobile Content Service is going away in July 2023. Please switch to Parsoid or another API before then to ensure service continuity. Hello World, I'm writing about a service decommission we hope to complete mid-July 2023. The service to be decommissioned is the legacy Mobile Content Service ("MCS"), which is maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation's Content Transform Team. We will be marking this service as deprecated soon. We hope that with this notice, people will have ample time to update their systems for use of other endpoints such as Parsoid [1] (n.b., MCS uses Parsoid HTML). The MCS endpoints are the ones with the relative URL path pattern /page/mobile-sections* on the Wikipedias. For examples of the URLs see the "Mobile" section on the online Swagger (OpenAPI) specification documentation with matching URLs here: https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/#/Mobile == History == The Mobile Content Service ("MCS") is the historical aggregate service that originally provided support for the article reading experience on the Wikipedia for Android native app, as well as some other experiences. We have noticed that there are other users of the service. We are not able to determine all of the users, as it's hard to tell with confidence from the web logs. The Wikimedia Foundation had already transitioned the Wikipedia for Android and iOS apps to the newer Page Content Service ("PCS") several years ago. PCS has some similarities with MCS in terms of its mobility focus, but it also has different request-response signatures in practice. PCS, as with MCS, is intended to primarily satisfy Wikimedia Foundation-maintained user experiences only, and so this is classified with the "unstable" moniker. == Looking ahead == Generally, as noted in the lead, we recommend that folks who use MCS (or PCS, for that matter) switch over to Parsoid for accessing Wikipedia article content programmatically for the most predictable service. The HTML produced by Parsoid has a versioned specification [2] and because Parsoid is accessed regularly by a number of components across the globe tends to have fairly well cached responses. However, please note that Parsoid may be subject to stricter rate limits that can apply under certain traffic patterns. At this point, I do also want to note that in order to keep up with contemporary HTML standards, particularly those favoring accessibility and machine readability enhancements, Parsoid HTML will undergo change as we further converge parsing stacks [3]. Generally, you should expect iteration on the Parsoid HTML spec, and of course as you may have come to appreciate that the shape of HTML in practice can vary nontrivially wiki-by-wiki as practices across wikis vary. You may also want to consider Wikimedia Enterprise API options, which range from no cost to higher volume access paid options. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise#Access == Forking okay, but not recommended == Because MCS acts as a service aggregate and makes multiple backend API calls, caveats can apply for those subresources - possibility of API changes, deprecation, and the like. We do not recommend a plain fork of MCS code because of the subresource fetch behavior. This said, of course you are welcome to fork in a way compatible with MCS's license. == Help spread the word == Although we are aware of the top two remaining consumers of MCS, we also are not sure who else is accessing MCS and anticipate that some downstream tech may break when MCS is turned off. As we are cross-posting this message, we hope most people who have come to rely upon MCS will see this message. Please feel free to forward this message to contacts if you know they are using MCS. == Help == Although we intend to decommission MCS in July 2023, we would like to share resources if you need some help. We plan to hold office hours in case you would like to meet with us to discuss this or other Content Transform Team matters. We will host these events on Google Meet. We will provide notice of these office hours on the wikitech-l mailing list in the coming weeks and months. Additionally, if you would like to discuss your MCS transition plans, please visit the Content Transform Team talk page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Content_Transform_Team Finally, some Content Transform Team members will also be at the Wikimedia Hackathon [4] if you would like some in-person support. Thank you. Adam Baso (he/him/his/Adam), on behalf of the Content Transform Team Director of Engineering Wikimedia Foundation [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Specs/HTML [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/Parser_Unification/Updates [4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Hackathon_2023

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Proposal: namespace Archived for mediawiki.org
by Derk-Jan Hartman 02 Jun '23

02 Jun '23

I'm proposing we introduce a new namespace on mediawiki.org. The namespace name will be Archived (numerical id to be determined) and its purpose will be to hold pages like "Subversion" that have the template "historical" applied to it. These pages would move info that namespace and you would get Archived:Subversion, Archived:Manual:Small padlock icon, Archived:Help:Extension:WebFonts etc. This will give us a place outside of the main content namespaces to keep information about configurations, manuals, extensions and skins that we want to keep, but where it will no longer pollute our set of currently relevant information. The namespace will not be part of $wgContentNamespaces and $wgNamespacesToBeSearchedDefault namespaces. Hopefully this will allow for a more searchable and better functioning mediawiki.org when it comes to documentation for new users, while preserving history in the spirit of wikis. I've discussed this with various people at various points in time who all seemed to think this was a good idea, but we've never really had an open discussion about it that could result into action.

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Wikimedia developer satisfaction survey 2023 🧑‍💻📊
by Tyler Cipriani 01 Jun '23

01 Jun '23

Hello! Please take our annual* *Developer Satisfaction Survey*! Link: https://wikimediafoundation.limesurvey.net/484133 The survey is open until Fri, 17 Feb 2023—two weeks from today. ____ This survey is for members of the *Wikimedia Developer Community* and covers the following topics: - Code review tooling and process - Code quality - Phabricator - Continuous Integration - MediaWiki development environments - Beta cluster / Staging Please take the survey if you’ve used the above tools as part of your role developing software for the Wikimedia community. We’re soliciting your feedback to: - Measure developer satisfaction, and - determine where to invest resources in the future We will anonymize, explore, and report the data we gather on mediawiki.org. View previous years' survey results: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_Satisfaction_Survey Privacy statement: This survey will be conducted via a third-party service, which may subject it to additional terms. For more information on privacy and data-handling, see the survey privacy statement <https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal:2023_Developer_Satisfaction_Sur…> . Thank you! Tyler Cipriani (he/him) Engineering Manager, Release Engineering Wikimedia Foundation ____ *: “annual,” except we missed 2022 🙁

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Replag
by Martin Domdey 01 Jun '23

01 Jun '23

Hi, it looks like there is a very big replication lag in dewiki. Is a debugging already in progress? Kind regards, Martin ...

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[Breaking Change] Two changes regarding searching for proto-relative URLs in external links
by Amir Sarabadani 30 May '23

30 May '23

Hello, As part of work to make storage of external links in MediaWiki continue to scale without risking site stability (T312666 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T312666>), we are deprecating most of the special functionalities around proto-relative URLs (URLs that start with // instead of https:// or http://). Proto-relative URLs were beneficial a decade ago, when Wikimedia projects were being served in both encrypted and unencrypted traffic (http and https). However, since 2015, all of our traffic has been served encrypted only, and this functionality doesn’t provide much user benefit any more for Wikimedia wikis. With HTTP/2, a similar circumstance applies to all MediaWiki users. As well as being low-value, our external links storage (the externallinks table) has grown to be one of the biggest tables for each production wiki. This is due to many duplications of URL information, added to serve different use cases. With the changes, we are removing these duplications, and some of the functionality. You can read more about the work in T312666 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T312666>. Storage of proto-relative URLs has changed to only store HTTPS URLs Previously, if a proto-relative was added in an edit, MediaWiki internally treated it as two links one with http:// and one with https://. From this week forward, for all Wikimedia wikis, the storage will change to store only https:// URLs. Once those wikis are switched to read the new database schema, the links will be presented as https only in Special:LinkSearch and their API counter-parts. This means effectively a proto-relative external link will be treated like a HTTPS one. This change will also apply to non-Wikimedia wikis using MediaWiki 1.41+. expandurl option is deprecated and ignored in the exturlusage and extlinks MediaWiki action API modules This means “expandurl” argument in exturlusage and extlinks <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Extlinks> API modules will be ignored and proto-relative URLs will be always expanded to HTTPS. This will happen any time a wiki is switched to read from the new externallinks fields. (You can track the progress in T335343 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T335343>) This change will also apply to non-Wikimedia wikis using MediaWiki 1.41+. If your wiki heavily uses proto-relative URLs in articles' wikitext, we recommend changing them to https instead which also improves storage as every proto-relative URLs takes up two rows. Thank you, -- Amir Sarabadani, Staff Database Architect James Forrester, Staff Software Engineer Timo Tijhof, Principal Performance Engineer

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big spaces at Commons File pages
by Martin Domdey 30 May '23

30 May '23

Hi, there's a big space on Commons file pages. Have only I this big space? See link and attachment. Thank you, Martin ... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/6/6a/20230530165927%…

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Maps as article image?
by Strainu 26 May '23

26 May '23

Hey folks, The maps and aticle image have been good additions to the multimedia capabilities in Wikipedia in the last decade, widely used on my home wiki. For now, in Wikipedia the maps are also rendered as images and become interactive only when clicked on. This makes them potential candidates for being displayed as article images in article without a photo. I would like to find out how complicated it would technically be to make the article image extension also capable of using map images? I know this is probably nowhere on the roadmap, I'm only interested in the technical part of the idea. Thanks, Strainu

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Wikitech-l May 2023