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
Hello all.
Yesterday between roughly 1pm - 2:30pm UTC `git fetch` on core was failing
with the exact error being 1.43.0-rc.0 -> 1.43.0-rc.0 (would clobber
existing tag) for both 1.43.0-rc.0 and 1.43.0 tags.
This error was because I recreated the 2 tags i.e. the original tags
deleted and new ones with the exact names pointing to the exact commits
created. The reason for the update was to add missing GPG signature. Tags
are never meant to update (hence why fetching updated tags will by default
reject the tags unless you fetch with --force or do a local git tag -d)
The prompt for doing it now, was creation of a tarball diff for
1.43.0-rc.0, and that process led to a "tag not signed error", thus
realizing it hasn't been signed.
We fixed this error <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T400729>by restoring
the original tags.
Some ideas we have discussed going forward to prevent this is in addition
to having the documented requirement in the Release Checklist
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Release_checklist> for signed artefacts,
enforce the same from the artefacts scripts creation level.
Cheers.
Hi,
As part of our work to ensure a fair use of our infrastructure[1], we are
going to progressively enforce our long-standing user-agent policy[2] more
systematically than we used to.
This will mean that, unless you set a user-agent that complies with the
policy, your requests will be rate-limited and eventually blocked over the
coming month. As usual, this excludes requests coming directly from
toolforge/wikimedia cloud services.
For details on the schedule and further discussion please refer to the
phabricator task[3]
Cheers,
Giuseppe
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2025-2026/…
[2]
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Wikimedia_Foundation_User-Agen…
[3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T400119
--
Giuseppe Lavagetto
Principal Site Reliability Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation
Hello
GitLab will be down this coming Wednesday, 30 July, from 06:00–08:00 UTC
for a datacenter switchover[1].
Much of this switchover window will be downtime, during which you will be
unable to access GitLab through ssh or the web interface.
The process will involve a full backup of the GitLab server in the codfw
datacenter, which will then be restored on the GitLab server in the eqiad
datacenter. This work is required to perform maintenance on the currently
active GitLab server.[3]
You can follow along on IRC in the libera.chat #wikimedia-gitlab channel[2].
[1]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T399306
[2]: <ircs://irc.libera.chat:6697/wikimedia-gitlab>
[3]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T399306
TLDR: Extensions can now listen to events emitted by MediaWiki
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Domain_events>.
Over the course of the fiscal year the MediaWiki Interfaces team has
introduced a system of Domain Events into MediaWiki. Domain Events provide
a new way for extensions and core components to be notified about changes
in other parts of the system, offering a more expressive and sustainable
alternative to hooks that were previously used for this purpose. The need
for this new capability was identified by a survey of hook usage we
conducted in the first quarter.
The work on the domain events system was conducted in close collaboration
with Data Platform Engineering with substantial support from the Growth
team and the Language team. These collaborations have proven immensely
valuable by allowing us to iterate on the design early on and fostered
knowledge sharing across the teams.
Our efforts have resulted in a simple yet powerful system that has already
proven effective in avoiding coupling between core components and reducing
the need for boiler plate code in extensions. The domain events framework
itself is part of the MediaWiki 1.44 release, but the event classes
themselves are still experimental. A set of events representing changes to
pages is scheduled to become part of MediaWiki’s stable interface in 1.45.
In the future, domain events will hopefully help to integrate MediaWiki
into an event-based architecture that enables data-backed features:
generalizing the mechanism for broadcasting events via Kafka that is
currently implemented in EventBus would make it much easier to inform other
processes about state changes in MediaWiki. But there is even more
potential in providing a simple mechanism for MediaWiki to receive events
from other services.
If you want to know more about the architecture of the event dispatcher,
the modeling of page changes as events, or about what we hope to do with
domain events in the future, have a look at the report published on
mediawiki.org
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Domain_events/Report_FY24-25>. If
you want to dive right in, best follow the examples on the manual page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Domain_events>.
I'm very happy and proud of what we have achieved. I hope you like it too!
Hello everyone,
I've been looking at cirrussearch dumps [1] and they stopped being updated at the start of this month. I can't find any reference to this change
other than the switch from Elasticsearch to Opensearch. There was much value in having this json data dump with preprocessed, indexing-ready
content.
Could anybody point me at a relevant discussion for this change (or an alternative source of equivalent data)? Thank you,
Dawid
[1] https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/cirrussearch/
[Apologies for cross-posting]
Hello everyone,
The Fall 2025 MediaWiki Users & Developers Conference will be held on October 28-30th, and hosted by the TIB Leibniz Centre in Hanover, Germany. The conference location will be the Leibnizhaus Guest house<https://www.uni-hannover.de/en/universitaet/organisation/dezernate/technik/…>.
https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Users_and_Developers_Conf…
Everyone is encouraged to attend, to meet and discuss MediaWiki-related topics relating to both the Wikimedia world and uses within companies, organizations, etc.
As the Program Chair, I would like to specifically encourage you all to consider giving a talk, on any topic related to MediaWiki usage, deployment or development, including the MediaWiki extension ecosystem (Wikibase, Semantic MediaWiki, etc). Talks can be given remotely, although priority will be given to in-person attendees if there's an overflow. To propose a talk for this conference, just fill out this form<https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:FormEdit/Talk?Talk%5BConfer…>.
Please submit your contributions until September 5, so we can start to announce an interesting program early!
Thank you, and I hope to see many of you in Hanover!
Lozana Rossenova,
on behalf of the whole conference organization team
--
Dr. Lozana Rossenova
Postdoc Researcher
Open Science Lab
TIB - Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library
Welfengarten 1 B // 30167 Hannover
lozana.rossenova(a)tib.eu<mailto:xxx.xxx@tib.eu>
www.tib.eu<http://www.tib.eu/>
ORCID: 0000-0002-5190-1867
TIB is a public-law foundation of the Federal State of Lower Saxony. In accordance with Section 1(1) of the "Gesetz über die Stiftung Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB)" (TIBstiftG ND), its name is "Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB)". TIB uses the terms "Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology" and "University Library" as additional designations.