[Labs-l] Labs newb

[Golden Ring]

On 6 April 2015 at 14:03, Ricordisamoa <ricordisamoa at openmailbox.org> wrote:

>  Il 06/04/2015 02:18, Golden Ring ha scritto:
>
> I've been thinking recently about how to do recent changes patrol
> better.  I've prototyped a tool, which you can see athttp://recent-changes.appspot.com/.
>
>
> Nice. It reminds me of rech <https://tools.wmflabs.org/pltools/rech/>...
>
>
Yes, very similar concept.   Is there a reason that rech is wikidata only?

>  This is currently implemented on Google AppEngine, basically
> becausethat's what I had to hand when I set out and already knew
> something about using.  It uses the MediaWiki API to retrieve diffs.
> This is not ideal for a few reasons, not least because it wouldn't
> take very heavy use of the tool before I'd have to start paying for
> it, which would probably mean putting ads on it.  I can't be dealing
> with all that.
>
>
> I suppose the cost is related to Google charging for bandwidth use beyond
> a threshold?
> Since the app needs JavaScript anyway, you could simply retrieve recent
> changes on the client, thus avoiding much of the server-side traffic.
>
>
Yes, Google charges for both CPU time and bandwidth use beyond the free
quota (1GB bandwidth either way + 28 instance-hours per day).

Retrieving changes from the client side was what I attempted first, but of
course it has to be hosted somewhere, and unless that's on the wiki
concerned, then you have to deal with the cross-site nature of the API
requests.  My impression is that this requires the wiki to be configured to
explicitly allow requests from the domain serving the page.

[snip]

> Labs is precisely for external tools, and I'd say Tool Labs best fits your
> needs.
> To enhance MediaWiki's built-in patrolling functionality, you should read
> this <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker>
> instead.
> Use your judgement and common sense
> <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-October/075137.html>
> to decide whether it's better to develop your tool on Tool Labs or as part
> of MediaWiki (either core or an extension).
>
>
I'm not absolutely clear on the best choice here.   On one hand, I'd like
the tool to end up something like Special:NewPagesFeed
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewPagesFeed>.  I guess this points
towards developing it as built-in mediawiki functionality, rather than an
external tool.  On the other hand, I've developed it because I actually
want to use it; my impression is that getting changes into mediawiki, and
then deployed onto en wikipedia, is not easy.  Probably for pretty good
reasons, but still not easy.

If I go down the external tool route, then I guess the tool gets hosted at
eg. tools.wmflabs.org; is that right?  On the other hand, an external tool
hosted there doesn't have access to the production wikipedia databases and
would have to continue getting data through the mediawiki API; is that
right?

TBH I'm not sure I've got a lot of clue about the architecture of
MediaWiki; is it described anywhere, beyond, "It uses PHP, MySQL and
jQuery"?

Sorry for having so many questions!

Regards,
GoldenRing

>
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