Wikitech-l June 2025

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

30 participants
26 discussions

(New blog post) Responsible Use of Infrastructure & Wikimedia APIs
by Birgit Müller 12 Jun '25

12 Jun '25

Hi All, Following up from the blog post about how crawlers impact the operations of the Wikimedia projects <https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/04/01/how-crawlers-impact-the-operations-of…> and the sessions we had in the Wikimedia Hackathon – Responsible Use of Infrastructure <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T392904> (slides <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Responsible_Use_of_Infrastructure.p…>) and the Future of MediaWiki APIs <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T392077> (slides <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Hackathon_2025_-_Future_o…>), I wanted to share a blog post that Halley Coplin (our product manager for the APIs) just published: https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2025/06/12/apis-as-a-product-investing-in-th… The blog post summarizes many of the points discussed at the Hackathon and touches on the conversations we’ve had with the API listening tour <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Artifacts/KR_5.5:…> earlier this year. Many thanks to Halley <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:HCoplin-WMF> for all her work on this, and to everyone who took the time to share their thoughts, ideas and pain point stories at the listening tour and at the Hackathon <3 If you have additional input on the APIs, feel welcome to use the talk page <https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:MediaWiki_Product_Insights…> of the listening tour summary to comment & get in touch! Birgit P.S. More links: Giuseppe presented <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pcdNweh8oA> about the impact of crawlers at the recent MediaWiki users and developers conference, including also a few tips for operators of smaller websites on how they could deal with the scraper problem on their own sites. -- Birgit Müller (she/her) Director of Product, MediaWiki and Developer Experiences Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>

1 0

Tech News 2025, week 24
by Nick Wilson (Quiddity) 10 Jun '25

10 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/2025/24> are available. *Weekly highlight* - The Trust and Safety Product team <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Trust_and_Safety_Product> is finalizing work needed to roll out temporary accounts <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Trust_and_Safety_Product/…> on large Wikipedias later this month. The team has worked with stewards and other users with extended rights to predict and address many use cases that may arise on larger wikis, so that community members can continue to effectively moderate and patrol temporary accounts. This will be the second of three phases of deployment – the last one will take place in September at the earliest. For more information about the recent developments on the project, see this update <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Trust_and_Safety_Product/…>. If you have any comments or questions, write on the talk page <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Trust_and_Safety_Product/Temporary_Acco…>, and join a CEE Catch Up <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Event:CEE_Catch_up_Nr._10_(June_2025)> this Tuesday. *Updates for editors* - [image: Wishlist item] The watchlist expiry <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:Watchlist_expiry> feature allows editors to watch pages for a limited period of time. After that period, the page is automatically removed from your watchlist. Starting this week, you can set a preference for the default period of time to watch pages. The preferences <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlis…> also allow you to set different default watch periods for editing existing pages, pages you create, and when using rollback. [1] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T265716> - The appearance of talk pages will change at almost all Wikipedias (some <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2024/19> have already received this design change, a few <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T379264> will get these changes later). You can read details about the changes on *Diff* <https://diff.wikimedia.org/2024/05/02/making-talk-pages-better-for-everyone/>. It is possible to opt out of these changes in user preferences <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-…> ("Show discussion activity"). [2] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T319146>[3] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T392121> - Users with specific extended rights (including administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, oversighters, and stewards) can now have IP addresses of all temporary accounts revealed automatically <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T358853> during time-limited periods where they need to combat high-speed account-hopping vandalism. This feature was requested by stewards. [4] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T386492> - This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout of a new filter to Recent Changes <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/2025_RecentChanges_Langua…>, releasing it to several more Wikipedias. This filter utilizes the Revert Risk model, which was created by the Research team, to highlight edits that are likely to be reverted and help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic contributions. The feature will be rolled out to the following Wikipedias: Afrikaans Wikipedia, Belarusian Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to include the rest of the Wikipedias in this project <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/2025_RecentChanges_Langua…>. [5] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T391964> - [image: Recurrent item] View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/Recently_resol…> . *Updates for technical contributors* - AbuseFilter editors active on Meta-Wiki and large Wikipedias are kindly asked to update AbuseFilter to make it compatible with temporary accounts. A link to the instructions and the private lists of filters needing verification are available on Phabricator <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T369611>. - Lua modules now have access to the name of a page's associated thumbnail image, and on some wikis <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/operations/mediawiki-config/+/2e4ab14aa15bb9…> to the WikiProject assessment information. This is possible using two new properties on mw.title objects <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Extension:Scribunto/Lua_r…>, named pageImage and pageAssessments. [6] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T131911>[7] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T380122> - [image: Recurrent item] Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.45/wmf.5> *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/2025/24> • 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…>.*

1 0

Please update your bot is if is using (non-bot-)password-based login
by Gergo Tisza 04 Jun '25

04 Jun '25

Hi! Since the introduction of AuthManager in 2016 <https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org/…>, there are two officially supported authentication methods for bots: - obtaining a session cookie using the action=login API <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Login#Method_1._action=login> with a bot password <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Bot_passwords>; - loginless authentication using OAuth 1.0 or 2.0 with an owner-only consumer <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/OAuth/Owner-only_consumers>. action=login with a normal password has been deprecated for a decade, and action=clientlogin API <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Login#Method_2._action=clientlogin> was never supported for non-interactive login. Still, in the past, these methods worked most of the time - often enough that many bots kept using them. This is going to change very soon as we are introducing more interactive challenges during login to improve account security. If your bot still uses one of the non-supported methods, please change it now. Usually this only requires generating a bot password via Special:BotPasswords <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:BotPasswords> and giving the bot that instead of your normal password. For the change that prompted this email, see T395205 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T395205>. There will probably be more such changes in the future, and they won't be announced separately. Thanks for your understanding, and for your help in evolving the Wikimedia developer ecosystem.

1 0

Talk to the Search Platform / Query Service Team—June 4, 2025
by Guillaume Lederrey 04 Jun '25

04 Jun '25

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, June 4, 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/>

1 1

Tech News 2025, week 23
by Nick Wilson (Quiddity) 03 Jun '25

03 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/2025/23> are available. *Weekly highlight* - The Chart extension <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Extension:Chart> is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Editors can use this new extension to create interactive data visualizations like bar, line, area, and pie charts. Charts are designed to replace many of the uses of the legacy Graph extension <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Extension:Graph>. *Updates for editors* - It is now easier to configure automatic citations for your wiki within the visual editor's citation generator <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Citoid/Enabling_Citoid_on…>. Administrators can now set a default template by using the _default key in the local MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json> page (example diff <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Diff/6969653/7646386>). Setting this default will also help to future-proof your existing configurations when new item types <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T347823> are added in the future. You can still set templates for individual item types as they will be preferred to the default template. [1] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T384709> - [image: Recurrent item] View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/Recently_resol…> . *Updates for technical contributors* - Starting the week of June 2, bots logging in using action=login or action=clientlogin will fail more often. This is because of stronger protections against suspicious logins. Bots using bot passwords <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Manual:Bot_passwords> or using a loginless authentication method such as OAuth <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/OAuth/Owner-only_consumers> are not affected. If your bot is not using one of those, you should update it; using action=login without a bot password was deprecated in 2016 <https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org/…>. For most bots, this only requires changing what password the bot uses. [2] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T395205> - From this week, Wikimedia wikis will allow ES2017 features in JavaScript code for official code, gadgets, and user scripts. The most visible feature of ES2017 is async/await syntax, allowing for easier-to-read code. Until this week, the platform only allowed up to ES2016, and a few months before that, up to ES2015. [3] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T381537> - [image: Recurrent item] Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.45/wmf.4> *Meetings and events* - Scholarship applications to participate in the GLAM Wiki Conference 2025 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/GLAM_Wiki_2025> are now open. The conference will take place from 30 October to 1 November, in Lisbon, Portugal. GLAM contributors who lack the means to support their participation can apply here <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/GLAM_Wiki_2025/Scholarsh…>. Scholarship applications close on June 7th. *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/2025/23> • 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…>.*

1 0

Phabricator monthly statistics - 2025-05
by aklapper＠wikimedia.org 01 Jun '25

01 Jun '25

Hi Community Metrics team, This is your automatic monthly Phabricator statistics mail. Accounts created in (2025-05): 293 Active Maniphest users (any activity) in (2025-05): 1132 Task authors in (2025-05): 621 Users who have closed tasks in (2025-05): 366 Projects which had at least one task moved from one column to another on their workboard in (2025-05): 333 Tasks created in (2025-05): 2671 Tasks closed in (2025-05): 2653 Open and stalled tasks in total: 55226 * Only open tasks in total: 54100 * Only stalled tasks in total: 1126 Median age in days of open tasks by priority: Unbreak now: 113 Needs Triage: 1124 High: 1411 Normal: 2221 Low: 2697 Lowest: 3469 (How long tasks have been open, not how long they have had that priority) To see the names of the most active task authors: * Go to https://wikimedia.biterg.io/ * Choose "Phabricator > Overview" from the top bar * Adjust the time frame in the upper right corner to your needs * See the author names in the "Submitters" panel TODO: Numbers which refer to closed tasks might not be correct, as described in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T1003 . Yours sincerely, Fab Rick Aytor (via community_metrics.sh on phab1004 at Sun 01 Jun 2025 12:00:48 AM UTC)

1 0

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

Wikitech-l June 2025