Basically, currently the process for creating a new wiki involves logging
in to a server, running a lot of commands, and changin. It takes at least
several days and can be done by only a handful of people who have the
permissions and the required knowledge. (I recently heard a brilliant talk
by WMF engineer Yuvi Panda about this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEyqVXzCJJc ; he calls this "command line
tax".)
Because it's so manual, it's pretty error-prone—despite the best
intentions, and the people's professionalism, I often find things to fix
after the wiki is already created. So even reducing the number of manual
steps that the tech operations people have to run would already an
improvement, because it will save time (often it's volunteers' time), and
reduce mistakes.
Making it so easy to do that it doesn't require any coding or running
commands, but just going to a page like
meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CreateWiki (don't click it, I just made it
up), typing in the language code and pushing a button would be better yet,
but it's totally OK if it doesn't happen next week. Who would have the
permission to actually run it? LangCom members, stewards, somebody else? I
don't care very much to be honest, as long as it's actually done with as
few bugs as possible, and no silly unnecessary projects are created. Miloš
is better at political thought than me :)
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2017-02-22 10:48 GMT+02:00 Oliver Stegen <oliver_stegen(a)sil.org>rg>:
To be honest, I don't know what you're talking
about. Deploy commits? Run
scripts? Pybal?
If you think that it's not a big deal for LangCom to "have that button"
... I don't know.
Fwiw,
Oliver
On 22-Feb-17 07:48, Milos Rancic wrote:
I was talking with Tim Starling about the automation of the wiki creation,
renaming (locking, removing). In theory, this should be the first and the
most important step.
I am in favor of giving the button to stewards, as LangCom should stay
clearly a non-executive body in relation to the Wikimedia web projects.
However, it shouldn't be a big deal if we have the button, as well.
I would like to know what do you think, as well as what do stewards think
(so, MF-Warburg, may you talk with stewards about that and give us their
opinion). After we articulate our own opinions, this should be put on Meta
for wider community discussion and decision.
At this moment we don't have ETA for the application, but I suppose
something between the next couple of months and the end of the year should
be reasonable to expect, as Tim has taken that to do.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: tstarling <no-reply(a)phabricator.wikimedia.org>
Date: Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 4:51 AM
Subject: [Maniphest] [Created] T158730: Automate WMF wiki creation
To: millosh(a)gmail.com
tstarling created this task.
tstarling added projects: Services, Release-Engineering-Team,
MediaWiki-Configuration.
Herald added a subscriber: Aklapper.
*TASK DESCRIPTION*
Wiki creation is quite an involved process, documented on wikitech
<https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Add_a_wiki>. I think, at least for
certain common cases, the task could be almost completely automated.
For uncomplicated creation of new language editions under existing
projects, with default configuration, the following tasks need to be done,
none of which require complex human decision-making:
- Reconfigure many services by pushing configuration changes to
Gerrit, and deploy those commits
- mediawiki-config: wikiversions, *.dblist
- WikimediaMessages
- DNS
- RESTBase
- Parsoid
- Analytics refinery
- cxserver
- Labs dnsrecursor
- Run addWiki.php. This script aims to automate all tasks which can be
executed with the privileges of a MW maintenance script.
- Run Wikidata's populateSitesTable.php. It should probably be
incorporated into addWiki.php.
- Run labsdb maintain-views
- Update wikistats labs
So at a minimum, you need to write and deploy commits to 8 different
projects, run three scripts, and manually insert some rows into a DB in a
labs instance.
Despite there being no human decision making in this process, the
documentation requires that you involve people from approximately four
different teams (services, ops, wikidata, analytics).
In my opinion, something is going wrong here in terms of development
policy. The problem is getting progressively worse. In July 2004, I fully
automated wiki creation and provided a web interface allowing people to
create wikis. Now, it is unthinkable.
Obviously services are the main culprits. Is it possible for in-house
services to follow pybal's example, by polling a central HTTP configuration
service for their wiki lists? As with pybal, the service could just be a
collection of static files on a webserver. Even MediaWiki could profitably
use such a central service for its dblists, with APC caching.
So let's suppose we could get the procedure down to:
1. Commit/review/deploy the DNS update
2. Commit/review/deploy a configuration change to the new central
config service.
3. Run addWiki.php
Labs instances needing to know about the change would either poll the
config service, or be notified by addWiki.php. WikimediaMessages could be
updated in advance via
translatewiki.net.
(Thanks to Milos Rancic for raising this issue with me.)
*TASK DETAIL*
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T158730
*EMAIL PREFERENCES*
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/
*To: *tstarling
*Cc: *mobrovac, Reedy, demon, millosh, tstarling, Aklapper, Liudvikas,
Luke081515, Eevans, Hardikj, zeljkofilipin, Jay8g, Krenair, Legoktm, greg
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