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, April 2, 2025
Time: 15:00-16:00 UTC / 08:00 PST / 11:00 EST / 17:00 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/>
*Registration for the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon is now open! *
*(with apologies for cross-posting)*
The annual Wikimedia Hackathon
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Hackathon_2025> is organized by
the Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/> in
collaboration with Wikimedia User Group Turkey (WMTR)
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_User_Group_Turkey> and
will be taking place in Istanbul, Turkey, from May 2nd through May 4th,
2025 at the Renaissance Polat Istanbul Hotel
<https://www.marriott.com/en-us/hotels/istrn-renaissance-polat-istanbul-hote…>
.
The Hackathon is an on-site, in-person event. Those people who cannot
attend the Hackathon in-person will be able to follow some of the program
content online, but should not register using the link provided below. More
information will be provided closer to the event on how to participate
remotely. Registration will be open until mid April 2025, or until we reach
event capacity.
The Hackathon event is free for all* to attend *and each person that
attends the Hackathon is required to register.
- Catering (lunch, dinner, snacks, and drinks) will be provided during the
event.
- Covid-related equipment will also be available upon request (e.g. self
test kits and masks).
- We’ll have discounted room codes for those that want to stay at the hotel
venue, to be announced in the coming weeks.
- Check if your passport is up to date and if you will need a visa (or an
e-visa) to travel to Turkey, citizens of most countries can apply for an e-visa
online <https://www.mfa.gov.tr/visa-information-for-foreigners.en.mfa>.
Participants are expected to book their own travel arrangements and
accommodation. However, the Wikimedia Foundation is offering to take care
of travel and accommodation for a limited number of scholars and you will
be able to apply for a scholarship during the registration process.
Scholarship applicants - please note:
-
*Scholarship application and Wikimedia Foundation staff sponsorship will
only be available to request until December 10th, 2024. *
-
Priority will be given to scholars who can mentor or support in areas
of high demand and staff with ambitious or impactful projects.
-
Those that have requested a scholarship or sponsorship will be notified
by mid to late December 2024 about the status of their application.
-
All scholarships provided will adhere to the WMF travel policy
<https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Scholarship_travel_policy>
guidelines.
*Scholarship to this event will cover:*
-
Roundtrip airfare between your city of residence and Istanbul, Turkey -
arriving on May 1, 2025 and departing on May 5, 2025.
-
Private accommodation at the conference hotel for up to 4 nights
-
Medical Insurance Coverage for any scholars traveling outside of their
home country. (Scholars local to Turkey will need to use their regular
insurance coverage.).
-
Airport transfers between the Istanbul Airport (IST) and the conference
hotel.
-
All meals will be provided for the duration of the event (lunch, drinks,
snacks, and dinner will be provided on event days; breakfast will be
provided by the hotel for guests staying there). In addition, dinner will
be provided on Thursday before the Hackathon officially kicks off.
-
Fees associated with obtaining a visa to travel to Turkey (visa
application fees, and travel to in-person travel visa appointment (if
needed)).
-
Citizens of most countries can apply for an e-visa online
<https://www.mfa.gov.tr/visa-information-for-foreigners.en.mfa>.
*Scholarship to this event will not cover:*
-
Per diem costs on travel days.
-
Ground transportation costs between your residence and home airport.
-
Insurance for your personal possessions.
The Hackathon registration form runs on Pretix (a free, open-sourced
third-party platform that helps organize and manage events) which may
subject your data to additional terms <https://pretix.eu/about/en/privacy>.
For more information on WMF’s privacy and data-handling for the Hackathon,
please read the privacy statement
<https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal:Wikimedia_Hackathon_Privacy_Sta…>
.
<https://pretix.eu/wikimedia/hackathon2025>
If you encounter any issues while registering, or have questions about the
registration process, feel free to contact the coordination team at
hackathon(a)wikimedia.org.
Cheers,
Deb
--
deb tankersley (she/her)
developer outreach program management
Wikimedia Foundation
What's the status of the project to create a grammar for Wikitext in EBNF?
There are two pages:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikitext_Metasyntaxhttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec
Nothing seems to have happened since January this year. Also the comments on
the latter page seem to indicate a lack of clear goal: is this just a fun
project, is it to improve the existing parser, or is it to facilititate a
new parser? It's obviously a lot of work, so it needs to be of clear
benefit.
Brion requested the grammar IIRC (and there's a comment to that effect at
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7
), so I'm wondering what became of it.
Is there still a goal of replacing the parser? Or is there some alternative
plan?
Steve
Hello, technical volunteer community!
Earlier today we kicked off a limited release of a new SwaggerUI-based
sandbox experience for MediaWiki REST APIs! In addition to offering
funcitonally
validated, interactive documentation, the sandbox will support translation
(powered by translatewiki <https://translatewiki.net/>) for all endpoint
and parameter descriptions, so that developers may read the documentation
and download OpenAPI specs in their preferred language. The combination of
interactive sandbox docs and OpenAPI specs were among the top requested
items in the latest developer satisfaction survey
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_Satisfaction_Survey/2025/APIs#api-…>,
so we are eager to hear what you all think about the new experience!
The initial launch is available in the following Wikipedia language
communities (selected based on the availability of translation coverage):
- Arabic
<https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%AE%D8%A7%D8%B5:%D9%85%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%A8_%…>
(ar)
- German <https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spezial:RestSandbox> (de)
- French <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sp%C3%A9cial%3ARestSandbox> (fr)
- Hebrew
<https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%95%D7%97%D7%93:RestSandbox>
(he)
- Interlingua <https://ia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special%3ARestSandbox> (ia)
- Dutch <https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciaal:RestSandbox> (nl)
- Chinese <https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:REST%E6%B2%99%E7%9B%92>
(zh-hans, zh-hant)
- English (testwiki <https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RestSandbox>,
Wiktionary <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Special%3ARestSandbox>)
If you are a member of any of these communities (or want to check it out in
the testwiki), we would love your feedback
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Interfaces_Team/Feature_Feedback/R…>.
On the linked feedback page, you can see additional information about this
project, as well as track progress on issues that we are already aware of.
In addition to verifying that everything is translated and working
correctly, we would like to get general feedback on the experience. Please
review and respond to the open ended prompts either here or on the REST
Sandbox feedback
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Interfaces_Team/Feature_Feedback/R…>
discussion page:
1. Do you believe that providing the documentation in your wiki
community's preferred language will help developers better understand the
content?
2. Are the translations accurate and appropriate in your language?
3. How disruptive or confusing are the mixed English headers and
navigation items?
4. How do you intend to use the OpenAPI specs that are now available
through the sandbox?
5. How will the sandbox change how you interact with the MediaWiki REST
API?
6. Would you like to see similar experiences for other APIs offered by
Wikimedia?
7. As an extension author, would you leverage this experience to provide
interactive documentation for your extension's API?
Following the initial limited release, we will collect feedback for
approximately two weeks. Assuming we get enough feedback and do not have
any major issues, we plan to make the same REST Sandbox available across
all wiki projects before the end of April.
Please let me know if you have any initial questions, comments, or
concerns.
Thanks,
Halley
*Halley Coplin* (she/her)
Sr. Product Manager, MediaWiki Interfaces
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hello,
Please be aware that a maintenance operation on Gerrit is scheduled for
Wednesday, April 2nd, from 15:00 to 16:00 UTC.
During this window, a brief downtime of approximately 10 minutes is
expected while we perform a switchover between the active and passive
Gerrit hosts. This aims to become a routine procedure to ensure high
availability and service resilience.
- Details of the switchover process that we will be testing are
available here:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gerrit/Operations#Switch_over
- Phabricator task: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T387833
- This maintenance is also listed on the deployment calendar:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments#deploycal-item-20250402T1500
Thank you for your understanding!
--
*Arnaud Bran* (he/him)
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hi everyone,
Summary
After a long series of consultations with various teams in the Wikimedia
Foundation, I find myself happy to inform you of the sunset of an API from
the current Wikimedia offerings.
That would be *recommendation-api*, the one powering
*https://<project_domain>/api/rest_v1/#/Recommendation* family of
endpoints, e.g. https://commons.wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/#/ or
https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/#/Recommendation.
The codebase of that API resides in
*https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/mediawiki/services/recommendation-api
<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/mediawiki/services/recommendation-api>*.
The removal date will be 2025-03-31.
There is some more information below as to why, what and how as well as an
estimation of the impact this is expected to have (minimal to zero). It is
also my intention to proceed with a diff <https://diff.wikimedia.org/> post
explaining our process in more detail.
Intro
Recommendation-api was being used solely by the Wikipedia official Android
application. Given that recently <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T373611>,
the Android Wikipedia Official application has moved away from using this
API, the SRE team wanted to remove this service from production to focus on
more impactful services. The problem was ensuring that we turn off this API
responsibly so that we do not have a significant impact on users who have
not yet upgraded their apps and do not waste SRE effort on supporting a
service we are moving away from, for more than we need to. A complication
was that the service wasn't anymore owned by anyone, meaning maintenance
(Node.js and Operating System upgrades) had to be carried out by people
that were not acquainted at all with the code base.
Process
To achieve the above goals, a process was jump started by a group of
Principal Engineers in the Foundation (Jon Robson, Moriel Schottlender and
yours truly) collecting data and feedback regarding the remaining usage of
the API as well as the estimated amount of effort that would be needed to
continue maintaining the service vs sunsetting it. Since October, we spoke
to various stakeholders in the Foundation to figure out the best possible
plan, going through a variety of possible paths. We ended up recommending
that the service be sunset at 2025-03-31, a recommendation that was
accepted.
Impact
The service is only accessed by users of the Wikipedia Android application.
Recent versions of it no longer rely on it and there will be zero (0)
impact on users of these. But users with application versions older than 6
months by the time of removal (2025-03-31), will see reduced functionality
in the form of the *Suggested Edits* part of the application no longer
functioning. The rest of the application will continue to function as
usual. We encourage users of versions older than *r/2.7.50504-r-2024-10-01
<https://github.com/wikimedia/apps-android-wikipedia/releases/tag/r%2F2.7.50…>*
to
update.
We wanted to make sure we don't break 3rd party users without giving them a
heads up. Going through access logs and metrics, we identified no valid 3rd
party users. Furthermore, we intend to review traffic/errors to that API 1
month past the cutoff date and evaluate the effectiveness of our solution.
Note
This API should not be confused with another one, also named
recommendation-api
<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/plugins/gitiles/research/recommendation-api/>,
and exposed by LiftWing, under the
https://api.wikimedia.org/wiki/Lift_Wing_API/Reference/Get_content_translat…
endpoint.
The latter is powered by a different codebase and, conflicting naming
aside, has no other relation to the former or this sunsetting.
Regards,
--
Alexandros Kosiaris
Principal Site Reliability Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation
Hello,
I have enabled a feature in Gerrit <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/>
that would make it emit a desktop notification when a change requires
your attention (the attention set system). In order to receive them, you
must accept desktop notifications in your browser. The first time you
browse it, it will notify about it and ask you to continue before
requesting the permission.
When Gerrit is open, it will poll the server every 5 minutes to find any
change that might now require your attention. There is no other
notification sent to the desktop.
The feature can be disabled in your user preferences.
See online doc:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/Documentation/user-attention-set.html#_brows…
Task: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T389327
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T389327>
Happy code reviewing!
Antoine "hashar" Musso
Wikimedia Release Engineering
Hi all,
If you use the mwscript-k8s tool to launch MediaWiki maintenance scripts on
Kubernetes at WMF, this message is relevant to you.
*What is changing?*
On Wednesday, 2nd of April, the mwscript-k8s tool will default to launching
scripts on PHP 8.1 instead of 7.4.
This follows the recent migration of MediaWiki traffic-serving workloads at
WMF to PHP 8.1 (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T383845).
*If I encounter issues, is it possible to temporarily use PHP 7.4?*
Yes, if you encounter compatibility issues on 8.1, you can provide
the --php_version=7.4 flag to the mwscript-k8s tool select 7.4 instead.
This fallback will be removed at a later date (to be announced). Thus,
please open a sub-task of https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T379874 to
report the issue, so that it can be fixed.
*Is it possible to try using PHP 8.1 earlier than the default changes?*
Great idea! Yes, you can provide the --php_version=8.1 flag to the mwscript-k8s
tool to explicitly opt-in to using 8.1.
*What about periodic maintenance jobs launched automatically on a timer?*
This announcement pertains only to manually launching maintenance scripts
using the mwscript-k8s tool.
There is a parallel effort to migrate periodic maintenance jobs from the
maintenance servers to Kubernetes (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T341555),
where they will use PHP 8.1 from the start.
Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or concerns, either
to me directly or on the task tracking this effort:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T387917.
Many thanks,
Scott French
Service Ops SRE
Hi all!
📊 Results: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_Satisfaction_Survey/2025
____
This year, 206 respondents from the Wikimedia developer community
answered questions about:
- MediaWiki code quality
- Wikimedia API use
- Documentation
- Research
- Wikimedia Toolforge and Cloud VPS
- Developer tools and processes
The Wikimedia Developer Satisfaction survey was open from December
2024 through January 2025[0].
The developer survey helps us decide what to work on next and review
what we worked on last.
____
Thanks to everyone who took the time to fill out our survey.
And a huge thanks to the Wikimedia Research Team for helping build the
survey and process the data.
And thank you, in particular, to:
- Caroline Myrick—a legend in her own time—for all her work on survey
design, data exploration, and making sense of all the data we
collected.
- Brennen Bearnes who is now a LimeSurvey expert.
<3
Tyler Cipriani (he/him)
Engineering Manager, Release Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation
[0]: <https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org/…>