Wikitech-l June 2025

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

30 participants
28 discussions

User style to reduce Gerritbot comments on Phabricator
by Bartosz Dziewoński 08 Jan '26

08 Jan '26

Do your eyes glaze over when trying to make sense of Phabricator tasks with a long and troubled history of patches? Do you struggle to find the real people in the sea of automated bot comments? I've made myself a user style to compact the Gerritbot comments on Phabricator. You might like it too: https://userstyles.world/style/13140/wikimedia-phabricator-reduce-gerritbot… (See screenshots and installation instructions there.) -- Bartosz Dziewoński

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Struggling with Online Classes? Here's a Reliable Help Option!
by course fpx 19 Nov '25

19 Nov '25

Hey everyone, I’ve noticed a lot of students (including myself) struggling with the pressure of online classes, deadlines, and quizzes — especially with platforms like Capella FlexPath, WGU, and others. If you're overwhelmed, there’s a service I recently came across called Online Classes Help. They assist with everything from discussion posts and assignments to full course completion. Super helpful for those juggling jobs or other responsibilities! Whether you need one-time help or ongoing support, this could really reduce your stress and help you maintain a good GPA. Just make sure to use it ethically — as a support tool, not a shortcut! Has anyone else tried such services? Would love to hear your experiences. Cheers! fpr more info :https://coursefpx.com/online-class-help/

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Forthcoming maintenance to irc.wikimedia.org - Moving to ircstream
by Moritz Mühlenhoff 30 Sep '25

30 Sep '25

Hi all, we're moving irc.wikimedia.org to a new infrastructure [1]. This service is unrelated to the IRC network (Libera) we use for real time discussions. Instead irc.wikimedia.org is an IRC service for broadcasting recent changes events from public Wikimedia wikis to be used by various bots connected to per-wiki IRC channels. irc.wikimedia.org should not be used for any new bots (which should rather use Eventstreams[2]), but we still have various important bots relying on the legacy IRC-based infrastructure. The current setup is full of technical debt and ultimately based on a patched version of a very old release of ircd-ratbox with a relay service written in Python 2. We are replacing it with a modern standalone implementation in Python, which broadcasts IRC notifications in a format compatible to what is currently in use by the legacy setup: https://github.com/paravoid/ircstream Last week during the SRE Infrastructure Foundations hackathon the ircstream production setup was created. All our tests have been successful, so on Thursday October 10 at 08:00 UTC we'll switch the irc.wikimedia.org DNS name to the new setup. No changes are needed to any bots, but if you run into any issues after the switch, please notify us in the #wikimedia-sre-foundations IRC channel or leave a note at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T376014. Cheers, Luca, Simon and Moritz Footnotes: [1] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Irc.wikimedia.org [2] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Event_Platform/EventStreams_HTTP_Service

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MediaWiki Extensions and Skins Security Release Supplement (1.39.11/1.41.5/1.42.4)
by Manfredi Martorana 21 Aug '25

21 Aug '25

Greetings- With the security/maintenance release of MediaWiki 1.39.11/1.41.5/1.42.4, we would also like to provide this supplementary announcement of MediaWiki extensions and skins with now-public Phabricator tasks, security patches and backports [1]: SocialProfile + (T373265 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T373265>, CVE-2025-23074) - Special:EditProfile exposes the contents of profile fields marked "hidden"/friends or "friends of friends" when the privileged user isn't a friend of the user whose profile they edit(ed) https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/I4b77ced314bc6cea0ef3657a82e7467d3661fe2a GlobalBlocking + (T377855 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T377855>, CVE-2025-23073) - API list=globalblocks can reveal IP of autoblock if username and IP are included in the bgtargets parameter https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/I2a2d32aedf6328be0a9f1b4e04a6567a25f19486 RefreshSpecial + (T378885 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T378885>, CVE-2025-23072) - XSS in Special:RefreshSpecial https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/Ic9547e80a8296d707ad8a157eb8ba7aa26fb08dc DataTransfer + (T379749 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T379749>, CVE-2025-23081) - Various security vulnerabilities in Extension:DataTransfer https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/I773c616db781d2f3f30893ad01ef503bf251a2b3 https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/I7c9de4c8dcdb3276ba923c6bc7c8eef3531324c7 https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/I9223c31f02f31f1e06e1a8cddf7d539cc8d3a3d9 https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/I5e1538a3bf66378810f905834c05626e1d2c82f0 https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/DataTransfer/+/1093931 https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/DataTransfer/+/1080451 OpenBadges + (T381220 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T381220>, CVE-2025-23080) - XSSes in Special:BadgeView https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/Ic9448312fa7f1cbc8feac3f852bc8720568522e2 ArticleFeedbackv5 + (T381753 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T381753>, CVE-2025-23079) - XSSes in Extension:ArticleFeedbackv5 https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/I6ee51c8b518bda41739fd666fa2891cc12e79ac3 BreadCrumbs2 + (T382043 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T382043>, CVE-2025-23078) - XSS in BreadCrumbs2 https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/I7878f8f7bc067080f80427b90f8d85337f172711 The Wikimedia Security Team recommends updating these extensions and/or skins to the current master branch or relevant, supported release branch [2] as soon as possible. Some of the referenced Phabricator tasks above _may_ still be private. Unfortunately, when security issues are reported, sometimes sensitive information is exposed and since Phabricator is historical, we cannot make these tasks public without exposing this sensitive information. If you have any additional questions or concerns regarding this update, please feel free to contact security(a)wikimedia.org or file a security task within Phabricator [3]. [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T375631 [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Version_lifecycle [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reporting_security_bugs

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Maintenance scripts are moving to Kubernetes
by Reuven Lazarus 23 Jul '25

23 Jul '25

Hi all, With MediaWiki at the WMF moving to Kubernetes, it's now time to start running manual maintenance scripts there. Any time you would previously SSH to a mwmaint host and run mwscript, follow these steps instead. The old way will continue working for a little while, but it will be going away. What's familiar: Starting a maintenance script looks like this: rzl@deploy2002:~$ mwscript-k8s --comment="T341553" -- Version.php --wiki=enwiki Any options for the mwscript-k8s tool, as described below, go before the --. After the --, the first argument is the script name; everything else is passed to the script. This is the same as you're used to passing to mwscript. What's different: - Run mwscript-k8s on a deployment host, not the maintenance host. Either deployment host will work; your job will automatically run in whichever data center is active, so you no longer need to change hosts when there’s a switchover. - You don't need a tmux. By default the tool launches your maintenance script and exits immediately, without waiting for your job to finish. If you log out of the deployment host, your job keeps running on the Kubernetes cluster. - Kubernetes saves the maintenance script's output for seven days after completion. By default, mwscript-k8s prints a kubectl command that you (or anyone else) can paste and run to monitor the output or save it to a file. - As a convenience, you can pass -f (--follow) to mwscript-k8s to immediately begin tailing the script output. If you like, you can do this inside a tmux and keep the same workflow as before. Either way, you can safely disconnect and your script will continue running on Kubernetes. rzl@deploy2002:~$ mwscript-k8s -f -- Version.php --wiki=testwiki [...] MediaWiki version: 1.43.0-wmf.24 LTS (built: 22:35, 23 September 2024) - For scripts that take input on stdin, you can pass --attach to mwscript-k8s, either interactively or in a pipeline. rzl@deploy2002:~$ mwscript-k8s --attach -- shell.php --wiki=testwiki [...] Psy Shell v0.12.3 (PHP 7.4.33 — cli) by Justin Hileman > $wmgRealm = "production" > rzl@deploy2002:~$ cat example_url.txt | mwscript-k8s --attach -- purgeList.php [...] Purging 1 urls Done! - Your maintenance script runs in a Docker container which will not outlive it, so it can't save persistent files to disk. Ensure your script logs its important output to stdout, or persists it in a database or other remote storage. - The --comment flag sets an optional (but encouraged) descriptive label, such as a task number. - Using standard kubectl commands[1][2], you can check the status, and view the output, of your running jobs or anyone else's. (Example: `kube_env mw-script codfw; kubectl get pod -l username=rzl`) [1]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kubernetes/Kubectl [2]: https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/kubectl/quick-reference/ What's not supported yet: - Maintenance scripts launched automatically on a timer. We're working on migrating them -- for now, this is for one-off scripts launched by hand. - If your job is interrupted (e.g. by hardware problems), Kubernetes can automatically move it to another machine and restart it, babysitting it until it completes. But we only want to do that if your job is safe to restart. So by default, if your job is interrupted, it will stay stopped until you restart it yourself. Soon, we'll add an option to declare "this is idempotent, please restart it as needed" and that design is recommended for new scripts. - No support yet for mwscriptwikiset, foreachwiki, foreachwikiindblist, etc, but we'll add similar functionality as flags to mwscript_k8s. Your feedback: Let me know by email or IRC, or on Phab (T341553 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T341553>). If mwscript-k8s doesn't work for you, for now you can fall back to using the mwmaint hosts as before -- but they will be going away. Please report any problems sooner rather than later, so that we can ensure the new system meets your needs before that happens. Thanks, Reuven, for Service Ops SRE

9 23

Technical issue
by Leonid G 09 Jul '25

09 Jul '25

Dear Wikitechs, my username is Martinitolove, since 12 years Im contributing in several languages and am very glad to feel myself a part of a greater team to provide knowledge to the world! All these years Im using a Windows XP laptop with Firefox 52.9.0 (32-bit) on it, and am quite happy with it (wont change the system). But since two weeks most pictures and map links are not showing up properly. Here are the screenshots as an example of one page in three languages and an example of a picture file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fYqWSfaJ18Zperk4-9XtwWqPBPZWv4ZL/view?usp=s haring https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fcd9RMvy0dAP8fQT8wQbowOKBJ1XQcUk/view?usp=s haring https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OLszK9GZRb0U_DGI0NFhCqg3H9YmjUrD/view?usp=s haring https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Co47IT2LbCFiX0K84wns7WlrsCGucEvQ/view?usp=s haring Was a coding algorithm at Wikipedia changed or support for older browsers disabled? According to this (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template:Compatibility_browser) my browser is still supported. If it has been caused by mistake, then could you please turn it back on? Thanks and kind regards! Martini

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Tech News 2025, week 27
by Nick Wilson (Quiddity) 30 Jun '25

30 Jun '25

Latest *tech news <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News>* from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2025/27> are available. *Weekly highlight* - The CampaignEvents extension <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:Extension:CampaignEv…> has been enabled on all Wikipedias. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. The extension has three features: Event Registration <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Event_Center/Registration>, Collaboration List <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/CampaignEvents/Collabora…>, and Invitation List <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Campaigns/Foundation_Product_Team/Invitatio…>. To request the extension for your wiki, visit the Deployment information page <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/CampaignEvents/Deploymen…> . *Updates for editors* - AbuseFilter maintainers can now match against IP reputation data <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Extension:IPReputation/Ab…> in AbuseFilters <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Extension:AbuseFilter>. IP reputation data is information about the proxies and VPNs associated with the user's IP address. This data is not shown publicly and is not generated for actions performed by registered accounts. [1] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T354599> - Hidden content that is within collapsible parts of wikipages <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Manual:Collapsible_elemen…> will now be revealed when someone searches the page using the web browser's "Find in page" function (Ctrl+F or ⌘F) in supporting browsers. [2] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T327893>[3] <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Global_attribut…> - A new feature, called Favourite Templates <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:TemplateData/Templat…>, will be deployed later this week on all projects (except English Wikipedia, which will receive the feature next week), following a piloting phase on Polish and Arabic Wikipedia, and Italian and English Wikisource. The feature will provide a better way for new and experienced contributors to recall and discover templates via the template dialog, by allowing users to put templates on a special "favourite list". The feature works with both the visual editor and the wikitext editor. The feature is a community wishlist focus area <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Community_Wishlist/Focus…> . - View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/Recently_resol…>. For example, a bug was fixed that had caused some Notifications to be sent multiple times. [4] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T397103> *Updates for technical contributors* - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.45/wmf.8> *Tech news <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News> prepared by Tech News writers <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/Writers> and posted by bot <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/User:MediaWiki_message_d…> • Contribute <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News#contribute> • Translate <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2025/27> • Get help <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech> • Give feedback <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Tech/News> • Subscribe or unsubscribe <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_message_delivery/Targets/Tech_ambass…>.*

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MediaWiki 1.42 is End of Life
by Sam Reed 30 Jun '25

30 Jun '25

As per the MediaWiki version lifecycle[1], I would like to announce the formal end of life (EOL) of MediaWiki 1.42 as of Monday June 30, 2025. 1.42.7 is expected to be the last release for this branch. This means that MediaWiki 1.42 will no longer receive maintenance or security backports. It is therefore strongly discouraged that you continue to use it. It is recommended to upgrade either to the next LTS, 1.43, which will be supported until December 2027, or to the soon to be released MediaWiki 1.44, which will be supported until at least June 2026. Thanks! [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Version_lifecycle

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Security and maintenance release: 1.39.13 / 1.42.7 / 1.43.2
by Sam Reed 30 Jun '25

30 Jun '25

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Requesting reinstatement of gerrit privileges on mediawiki/core for cicalese
by Mark A. Hershberger 28 Jun '25

28 Jun '25

I've filed T398122[1] to request the reinstatement of Cindy Cicalese +2 privileges on mediawiki/core after they were removed as is policy[2] for WMF staffers that leave the Foundation. Cindy has been a great collaborator on core and extensions and I hope you'll agree that we should reinstate her privileges. Thanks! Mark. Footnotes: [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T398122 [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gerrit/Privilege_policy#Revocation

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Wikitech-l June 2025