Wikitech-l May 2023

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

48 participants
45 discussions

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 31 May '23

31 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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Outdated codesearch results since 2023-05-16
by Kunal Mehta 24 May '23

24 May '23

Hi, For about a week MediaWiki Codesearch was serving outdated and incomplete results (and later partially down outright) because of a full disk. This has been fixed now, you may wish to re-run searches as necessary. The full disk was accidentally caused by switching between gerrit and gerrit-replica (as previously discussed on this list)[1][2], so I deleted all the old gerrit-replica repository copies and also added ~20G more disk space to the instance. Monitoring did correctly pick up that there was some issue once the disk was full, it just wasn't properly examined because of hackathon travel / activities. [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T336710#8877525 [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T337263 -- Kunal / Legoktm

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svg translation on Commons
by Igal Khitron 24 May '23

24 May '23

Hello. I tried to start an svg translation. Added just a couple of switch statements, just to see how it works before the rest job. But it doesn't. Could you tell me, please, what am I doing wrong? Thank you. Igal (User:IKhitron) https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AMoscow_metro_map_mul…

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Gerrit replica downtime (up to 2 hours) on Thu, 25 May
by Daniel Zahn 23 May '23

23 May '23

Hello The read-only Gerrit replica[0] will be down for up to 2 hours in 2 days (Thu, 25 May 2023) between 15:00–17:00 UTC[1] due to a scheduled OS upgrade [2]. During this window, git reads from the replica will not work. To my knowledge, this affects bots which rely on the replica for git read operations. Codesearch is currently using gerrit.wikimedia.org and not gerrit-replica.wikimedia.org so should not be affected. If this affects you yoy may consider switching to gerrit.wikimedia.org instead of the replica. Apologies for any inconvenience. Daniel [0]: <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gerrit/Replica> [1]: <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1685026803> [2]: <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T334521> -- Daniel Zahn <dzahn(a)wikimedia.org> Site Reliability Engineer

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Change to default value of install.php --scriptpath
by Gergő Tisza 21 May '23

21 May '23

Hi! The default value of the installer's script path parameter was changed in gerrit 133222 <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/133222> to make the installation process more intuitive. If you use the installer in your scripts, you might want to make sure that script path is set explicitly. (To keep the old behavior, add "--scriptpath wiki".)

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Wikitech-l May 2023