Wikitech-l August 2025

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13 participants
16 discussions

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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You can now annotate types of values inside a Status object
by Bartosz Dziewoński 31 Aug '25

31 Aug '25

I just re-applied change https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/1163470, which allows documenting the type of the value contained inside a Status or StatusValue object when it is returned from a function or accepted as a parameter. This allows IDEs like PhpStorm to provide better autocompletion, and allows Phan to better analyze the code using the value. For example: /** @return StatusValue<Foo> */ function doStuff(): StatusValue { ... } doStuff()->getValue()->bar(); Phan will now validate that the class 'Foo' has a method called 'bar', and PhpStorm will autocomplete its methods after `...->getValue()->`. This is achieved using '@template' annotations to document Status and StatusValue as generic classes. This is supported by most PHP static analyzers these days, but fairly new in MediaWiki core. You can find an introduction to this concept here: https://stitcher.io/blog/generics-in-php-1 It is still okay to use the Status or StatusValue classes without specifying the type of their value, although if you subclass one of them, you'll need to add some annotations for Phan to accept them. We've made the necessary updates to all extensions with known problems, but if you encounter any more issues, please ask here or on task https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T397781. Thanks to Daimona, Umherirrender and Lucas Werkmeister for their help with the changes to MediaWiki and extensions. Thanks also to Phan maintainers, including once again Daimona and Rasmus Lerdorf, who reviewed many of my patches for Phan, improving its generic support to the point that this change became possible. -- Bartosz Dziewoński

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Upcoming Language Community Meeting (August 29th, 15:00 UTC), Newsletter, and Newcomer-Friendly Technical Tasks
by Srishti Sethi 27 Aug '25

27 Aug '25

Hello everyone! We're excited to announce that the next Language Community Meeting is happening soon - on August 29th at 15:00 UTC! If you’d like to join, simply sign up on the wiki page <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_and_Product_Localization/…> . This is a participant-driven meeting where we share updates on language-related projects, discuss technical challenges in language wikis, and collaborate on solutions. For example, in our upcoming meeting, we plan to hear from the Avro keyboard developers from Wikimedia Bangladesh, who were recently awarded a national award for their contributions to this keyboard. Got a topic to share? Whether it’s a technical update from your project, a challenge you need help with, or a request for interpretation support, we’d love to hear from you! Feel free to reply to this message or add agenda items to the document here <https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/language-community-meeting-aug-2025>. Also, we’d like to highlight that the 8th edition of the Language & Internationalization Newsletter (July 2025) <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_and_Product_Localization/…> is now available. This newsletter provides updates from the April-June 2025 quarter on new feature development, improvements in various language-related technical projects and support efforts, details about community meetings, and ideas for contributing to projects. To stay updated, you can subscribe to the newsletter <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_and_Product_Localization/…> on its wiki page. Are you interested in contributing to the technical work around language development? There are a few newcomer-friendly technical tasks waiting for your contribution: T399682 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T399682>. Cheers, Srishti *Srishti Sethi* Senior Developer Advocate Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>

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Error building container on Toolforge
by Sebastian Berlin 26 Aug '25

26 Aug '25

I get an error when I try to build a container image according to Help:Toolforge/Building_container_images <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge/Building_container_image…>. I've manages to build the same repo before, last success was last Friday. I ran `toolforge build clean` in case there was an error with the quota. Here's what looks to be the error in the log (whole log attached): $ toolforge build start https://github.com/Wikimedia-Sverige/commonsdb-commons-supplier [...] [step-analyze] 2025-08-26T12:10:56.186954383Z ERROR: failed to initialize analyzer: validating registry write access: ensure registry read/write access to tools-harbor.wmcloud.org/tool-commonsdb-registry/tool-commonsdb-registry:la… [step-detect] 2025-08-26T12:10:57.196288474Z 2025/08/26 12:10:57 Skipping step because a previous step failed [step-restore] 2025-08-26T12:10:44.076071912Z 2025/08/26 12:10:44 warning: unsuccessful cred copy: ".docker" from "/tekton/creds" to "/tekton/home": unable to open destination: open /tekton/home/.docker/config.json: permission denied [step-restore] 2025-08-26T12:10:58.096080308Z 2025/08/26 12:10:58 Skipping step because a previous step failed [step-build] 2025-08-26T12:10:58.531131059Z 2025/08/26 12:10:58 Skipping step because a previous step failed [step-fix-nested-procfile-launcher] 2025-08-26T12:10:58.813159768Z 2025/08/26 12:10:58 Skipping step because a previous step failed [step-fix-imagemagick-config] 2025-08-26T12:10:59.208288977Z 2025/08/26 12:10:59 Skipping step because a previous step failed [step-fix-permissions] 2025-08-26T12:10:59.412184672Z 2025/08/26 12:10:59 Skipping step because a previous step failed [step-export] 2025-08-26T12:10:47.355473877Z 2025/08/26 12:10:47 warning: unsuccessful cred copy: ".docker" from "/tekton/creds" to "/tekton/home": unable to open destination: open /tekton/home/.docker/config.json: permission denied [step-export] 2025-08-26T12:11:00.373273265Z 2025/08/26 12:11:00 Skipping step because a previous step failed [step-results] 2025-08-26T12:11:00.575737964Z 2025/08/26 12:11:00 Skipping step because a previous step failed *Sebastian Berlin* Utvecklare/*Developer* Wikimedia Sverige (WMSE) E-post/*E-Mail*: sebastian.berlin(a)wikimedia.se Telefon/*Phone*: (+46) 0707 - 92 03 84

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Tech News 2025, week 35
by Nick Wilson (Quiddity) 26 Aug '25

26 Aug '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/2025/35> are available. *Updates for editors* - Template authors can now use additional CSS properties, since the CSS sanitizer used by TemplateStyles <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:TemplateStyles> was updated. For example: width: fit-content; ruby-align; relative units such as lh; and custom strings in list-style-type. These improvements are a Community Wishlist wish <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Community_Wishlist/Wishe…>. [1] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T271958>[2] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T277755>[3] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T293633>[4] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T295088>[5] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T326906>[6] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T340057>[7] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T360725>[8] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T371809>[9] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T375344>[10] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T394619> - On large wikis, the default time period to display edits from, within the Special:RecentChanges page, has been changed from 7 days to 1 day. This is part of a performance improvement project. This should have no user-facing impact due to the quantity of edits on these wikis. [11] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T399455> - Administrators can now access the Special:BlockedExternalDomains <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:BlockedExternalDomains> page from the Special:CommunityConfiguration <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CommunityConfiguration> list page. This makes it easier to find. [12] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T393240> - Wikimedia Commons videos were not shown in the Videos tab in Google Search. The problem was investigated and reported to Google who have now fixed the issue. [13] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T396168>[14] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist/Wishes/Do_something_abou…> - One new wiki has been created: a Wiktionary in Betawi <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q33014> (wikt:bew: <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bew:>) [15] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T402130> - View all 39 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/Recently_resol…> . *Updates for technical contributors* - Two fields of the recentchanges database table <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Manual:Recentchanges_table> are being removed. rc_new and rc_type are being removed in favor of rc_source. Queries to these older fields will start to fail starting this week and developers should use rc_source instead. These older fields were deprecated over 10 years ago and should not be in use. This is part of work to improve the performance and stability of queries to the recentchanges table. [16] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T400696> - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.45/wmf.16> *In depth* - The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization Newsletter <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Language_and_Pr…> is now available. This edition includes: support for new languages in MediaWiki and translatewiki; the start of the Language Onboarding and Development project to help support the growth of new and small wikis; updates on research projects; and more. *Meetings and events* - The next Language Community Meeting <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Language_and_Pr…> is happening soon, August 29th at 15:00 UTC <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1756479600>. This week's meeting will cover: the Avro keyboard developers from Wikimedia Bangladesh, who were recently awarded a national award for their contributions to this keyboard; and other topics. *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/2025/35> • 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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Queuing jobs on Toolforge
by Sebastian Berlin 25 Aug '25

25 Aug '25

Is there a way to queue jobs on Toolforge <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge/Running_jobs>? I want to run a number of one-off jobs (job1, job2, job3) in sequence. Job2 should start when job1 is done etc. They shouldn't run in parallell because they make requests to a service which can only take one request per second. Making a YAML file with `wait: true` will make them run in sequence, but then I have a blocking process. Even if I could put it in the background I'm worried it'll stop at some point which means no more jobs would get started. *Sebastian Berlin* Utvecklare/*Developer* Wikimedia Sverige (WMSE) E-post/*E-Mail*: sebastian.berlin(a)wikimedia.se Telefon/*Phone*: (+46) 0707 - 92 03 84

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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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Tech News 2025, week 34
by Nick Wilson (Quiddity) 19 Aug '25

19 Aug '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/2025/34> are available. *Updates for editors* - Later this week, people who are logged-in and have the "Discussion tools <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Talk_pages_project/Featur…>" Beta Feature <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeat…> enabled will gain the ability to "Thank" individual comments directly from talk pages, rather than needing to navigate to page history. Learn more about this feature <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Talk_pages_project/Featur…>. [1] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T400849> - An A/B test comparing two versions of the desktop donate link launched on testwiki on 12 August and on English Wikipedia 14 August for 0.1% of logged out users on the desktop site. The experiment will run for three weeks, ending on 12 September. [2] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T395716> - An A/A test to measure the baseline for reader retention was launched 12 August using Experimentation Lab <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Experimentation_Lab>. This measures the percentage of users who revisit a wiki after their initial visit over a 14-day period. No visual changes are expected. The experiment will run through 31 August. [3] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T399227> - Five new wikis have been created: - a Wikisource in Tagalog <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q34057> ( s:tl: <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/tl:>) [4] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T388639> - a Wikisource in Madurese <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q36213> ( s:mad: <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/mad:>) [5] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T391747> - a Wikipedia in Rakhine <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3450749> ( w:rki: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/rki:>) [6] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T392490> - a Wikibooks in Minangkabau <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q13324> ( b:min: <https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/min:>) [7] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T395452> - a Wiktionary in Standard Moroccan Amazigh <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7598268> (wikt:zgh: <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zgh:>) [8] <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T399684> - View all 46 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/Recently_resol…> . *Updates for technical contributors* - Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.45/wmf.15> *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/2025/34> • 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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Breaking change: Removal of rc_type and rc_new fields from recentchanges table
by Amir Sarabadani 18 Aug '25

18 Aug '25

Hello, As part of improving performance and stability of the recentchanges table, we are addressing some tech debt. rc_new field was deprecated 13 years ago and rc_type similarly was deprecated 11 years ago. We are moving forward with dropping these columns in favour of rc_source field. If you're querying rc_new or rc_type, please switch to using rc_source instead. They will be removed from wikireplicas in a week. This would allow us to consolidate several different indexes on this table and improve performance of Special:Recentchanges and Watchlist plus simplifying MediaWiki code. To follow the work, you can check https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T400696 and related subtickets. Thank you and apologies for the inconvenience Best -- *Amir Sarabadani (he/him)* Staff Database Architect Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>

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Wikitech-l August 2025