Does it allow us to (a) know when a wiki has upgraded / changed something (mediawiki, php, db, os, etc.)?
The pingback is sent on the first page load after maintenance/update.php is run if a pingback has not yet been sent for the current MediaWiki version. So, the pingback will only be sent once per MediaWiki version, even if other values, such as the PHP version, have changed.
(b) know when a wiki has been decommissioned, i.e. does the wiki install send pingbacks regularly that lets us track a wiki as being alive vs.
being
decommissioned?
A pingback is not sent when a wiki is decommissioned, and there is no regular heartbeat pingback to let us know if a given wiki is still being used.
Both of these facts do definitely limit the fidelity of the data. There will always be some underreporting of the data, since the choice not to enable pingback will remain. But it would be good to ensure that the data is as accurate as possible for those sites that do opt in while still preserving anonymity.
I would be interested in gathering feedback on how to improve the fidelity of pingback data. Should we increase the frequency of pingbacks to be able to determine if a wiki is no longer active? Is there any other interesting data that can and should be gathered without impinging upon the privacy of the sites?
Another tool used to gather data is wikiapiary [0], which is an opt-in site that uses bots to regularly scan registered wikis. It is limited by the fact that it only operates on wikis that have been registered, but it can determine if a site is no longer active. It also gathers a good deal more data than pingback, including installed extensions and their versions. Wikiapiary currently tracks over 20,000 sites.
One additional note on the default for the pingback functionality. As described in [1], pingback is controlled by the value of the configuration variable $wgPingback. The default value of $wgPingback in MediaWiki core is set in includes/DefaultSettings.php to false: pingback is disabled. In order to enable pingback, that value needs to be overridden in the MediaWiki configuration to set it to true - usually in LocalSettings.php. The command line installer does not currently offer an option to enable pingback. LocalSettings.php would have to be manually edited to do so. The web installer does provide a checkbox to select whether or not pingback will be enabled. This checkbox is initially checked and would need to be unchecked to prevent pingback from being enabled.
[0] https://wikiapiary.com [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgPingback
Cindy
______________________________ Cindy Cicalese Product Manager, MediaWiki Platform Wikimedia Foundation
On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 12:24 PM, Subramanya Sastry ssastry@wikimedia.org wrote:
This is pretty nifty! Thanks for putting together this dashboard for the data.
I had a question about the pingback mechanism itself. Does it allow us to (a) know when a wiki has upgraded / changed something (mediawiki, php, db, os, etc.)? (b) know when a wiki has been decommissioned, i.e. does the wiki install send pingbacks regularly that lets us track a wiki as being alive vs. being decommissioned?
I couldn't tell with a quick scan of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki /Manual:$wgPingback or Ori's original announcement, hence the question.
Thanks,
Subbu.