Hi all,
two days ago we switched the DNS record so that the redirects from
toolserver.org to wmflabs.org are now handled by WMF. This means: You
can no longer contact me/WMDE or Marlen for updating any redirects.
Please check if everything's working correctly.
Coren, am I right in assuming that people contact you directly if there
are any changes needed?
Best, Silke
--
Silke Meyer
Internes IT-Management und Projektmanagement Toolserver
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 260
http://wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt
für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
Hello,
tomorrow is the day I will start to completely throw away all data on the Toolserver.
After this nothing can be copied anymore.
If you feel you still need anything please let me know asap.
Cheers
nosy
Hello,
the server that runs Jira, Wiki and replications is to vanish since the data center will be canceled after Friday.
This means: if you want to keep some pages of the wiki or jira tickets please start your final backup now.
It will be offline after Friday morning UTC.
I personally kept some pages of the wiki to make the shutdown of TS itself easier for me. I printed them to PDF from the print view.
Got me a good layout and all external links.
Toolserver will still serve what it served before - redirects and one or 2 tools, that are still in migration process.
Mail, DNS and Web will work but the database content will not be renewed after Friday morning.
Cheers
nosy
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Hi all!
As you might know, Merl's bot framework Merlbot is one of the last few
projects left on the Toolserver. Merl put a lot of work into
modifications and rewriting code to be able to run it in Tool Labs. He
is running out of time as database replication will stop on Oct 5th.
Any volunteers to support him in finishing before that deadline?
What you could do is work on a part of Merlbot called Death Anomalies
Table [1]. It generates daily "probably dead" reports in 15 Wikipedias
to point to articles about people marked dead in a different language.
The code of the death anomalies table [1] consists of nine bash
scripts in which SQL queries have to be adapted for Tool Labs.
If you are prepared to dive into SQL, please contact Merl [2] as soon
as possible.
Cheers, Silke
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Death_anomalies_table
[2] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Merl
- --
Silke Meyer
Internes IT-Management und Projektmanagement Toolserver
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 260
http://wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das
Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
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Hi all!
I had announced that August 31st would be the deadline for retrieving
backups from the toolserver. As you were right in telling me, hey,
that's in the middle of everybody's vacation, the stuff is still
there. But:
Come and get your backups before the end of September!
Once the toolserver is physically decommissioned, the data will be
deleted! Gone. Forever.
And as stated before:
If you are interested in migrating, maintaining, resurrecting someone
else's tools, please contact that person and ask first!
If you are contacted by others for you own code, I strongly encourage
you to *free the knowledge* and let them work on it.
(Yes, sometimes old work looks embarrassing nowadays, but it can
always help others to figure things out, to get ideas, to improve
tools. So for the "greater good"[TM] please free it.)
Thanks and cheers,
Silke
- --
Silke Meyer
Internes IT-Management und Projektmanagement Toolserver
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 260
http://wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das
Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
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Hey everyone,
for those who attended Wikimania, i hope you all had a wonderful time!
One of the things that i've talked about at Mania with a few people is
the current way of 'tool discovery', or rather, the lack thereof.
We've seen really cool things done by the community, but i have a
feeling many of the tools go by unnoticed, simply because nobody knows
that they exist. Maybe they've been send around here or posted on IRC,
but after the initial interest many of them are forgotten and lead a
lonely life on our virtual servers.
I think this is especially problematic for non-community members for
whom the tools might be very useful. For example, as a Wikipedian in
Residence and GLAM advocate i have sent numerous mails with links to
the various GLAM tools made by Magnus, stats.grok.se, etcetera.
But, you might say, we run all these knowledge sites called wikis
right? And there are some pages there that list tools, don't they?
You're right, the community has put some efforts in a few pages (1).
However, IMHO, a wiki doesn't lend itself to easy tool discovery:
* The format on how to describe a tool is unclear, thereby leading to
both very long and very short descriptions.
* It's not possible to easily search for tools in a certain category
(e.g. 'GLAM' or 'editcount').
* The categorization of tools leads to much clicking around,
distracting and confusing users.
* There's no way to sort results, for example by the number of people
using the tool.
The biggest problem of all is the disconnection between the actual
code of the tool itself (hosted in a Git repo), and the description
advertising it. People update their tool to do something different (or
deprecate it), but they forget the documentation on the wiki, don't
remove it when the tool doesn't work anymore, etcetera.
I believe we can, and should do better.
THE PROPOSAL
My proposal is to use the same mechanisms that already exist for
package managers such as NPM (2) or 'app stores', such as the Chrome
store (3). Basically this involes adding a small JSON file to your
project, including a few key properties such as 'title' and
'description'. These files get indexed, and an easy to use frontend to
search to all the tools is provided to end users. You could imagine a
'toolinfo.json' file to look something like this:
{
"name" : "WikiDataQuery",
"description" : "An API for Wikidata items and properties.",
"url" : "http://wdq.wmflabs.org/",
"keywords" : "wikidata, api, query",
"author" : "Magnus Manske"
}
If you have a web-hosted tool, simply stick it in the root of your
tools directory so that it's reachable by the crawler. Whenever your
tool data changes, just update the file and the directory will
automatically update the directory site.
The link to your toolinfo.json could be added to a Wiki page so that
it's easy to remove your tool from the directory or change the URL to
the JSON file.
I'm a firm believer in putting code where your mouth is, so i've
hacked up a working tool directory here:
http://tools.wmflabs.org/hay/directory
Try searching for stuff, clicking on the labels. To add your own tool,
scroll the page down for instructions.
Current this only lists my tools, but i hope that this directory will
soon grow with everything the Wikimedia community has to offer.
I'm interested in your opinion in this proposal and, if you like it,
add a toolinfo.json to your project!
Kind regards,
-- Hay / [[User:Husky]]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools
2: https://www.npmjs.org/
3: https://developer.chrome.com/apps/manifest
Hello,
today adenia finally died - OS not found.
Fortunatelly all relevant data was already on the SAN so I could move the DBs completely to cassia. The host alias sql also points there.
user-store had to move as well and is now active on cassia, too.
It was an interruption of about 2,5h all together.
This regards very few users only but you should know since OSM and Merls tools were not accessible and are probably still broken if they dont use the hostname "sql" for the queries.
Cheers
nosy