Hello all,
The Technical Decision-Making Forum Retrospective team
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_decision_making> invites you to
complete a survey about Wikimedia's technical decision-making processes.
While there will be more ways to participate, this is the first and most
important step in our data collection. It aims to gather information about
your experience, thoughts, and needs regarding the process of making
technical decisions across the Wikimedia technical spaces.
This survey will be used for gathering information about the process and
the needs around technical decision-making that touches our production
systems.
You can find the survey link here:
https://wikimediafoundation.limesurvey.net/885471?lang=en
Who should take this survey?
People who do technical work that relies on software maintained by the
Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) or affiliates. If you contribute code to
MediaWiki or extensions used by Wikimedia, or you maintain gadgets or tools
that rely on WMF infrastructure, this survey is for you.
What is the deadline?
*August 7th, 2023 *
What will the Retrospective team do with the information?
The retrospective team will synthesize the collected data and publish an
anonymized analysis that will help leadership make decisions about the
future of the process.
We will collect anonymized information that we will analyze in two main
ways:
-
Sentiments based on demographic information: these will tell us whether
there are different needs and desires from different groups of people.
-
General needs and perceptions about decision-making in our technical
spaces: This will help us understand what kind of decisions happen in
the spaces, who is involved, and how to adjust our processes accordingly.
Is the survey the only way to participate?
The survey is the most important way for us to gather information because
it helps us gather input in a structured manner. But it will not be the
only way you can share your thoughts with us - we will have more
information soon about upcoming listening sessions where you can talk with
us live. In the meantime, you are always welcome to leave feedback on the
talk page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Technical_decision_making/Technical_Dec…
Where can I see more information?
There are several places where you can find more information about the
Technical Decision-Making Process Retrospective:
-
The original announcement about the retrospective from Tajh Taylor:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org/…
-
The Technical Decision-Making Process general information page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_decision_making
-
The Technical Decision-Making Process Retrospective on MediaWiki:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_decision_making/Technical_Decision…
-
Phabricator ticket: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T333235
How to contact the retrospective core team:
-
Write to the core team mailing list: tdf-retro-2023(a)lists.wikimedia.org
-
The Technical Decision-Making Process Retrospective on MediaWiki talk
page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Technical_decision_making/Technical_Dec…
Thank you,
Moriel, on behalf of the TDMP Retro Core Group
Core group:
-
Moriel Schottlender (chair)
-
Daniel Kinzler
-
Chris Danis
-
Kosta Harlan
-
Temilola Adeleye
--
Moriel Schottlender (she/her <https://pronoun.is/she>)
Principal Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation https://wikimediafoundation.org/
(If you don’t work with pagelinks table, feel free to ignore this message)
Hello,
Here is an update and reminder on the previous announcement
<https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org/…>
regarding normalization of links tables that was sent around a year ago.
As part of that work, soon the pl_namespace and pl_title columns of
pagelinks table will be dropped and you will need to use pl_target_id
joining with the linktarget table instead. This is basically identical to
the templatelinks normalization that happened a year ago.
Currently, MediaWiki writes to both data schemes of pagelinks for new rows
in all wikis except English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons (we will start
writing to these two wikis next week). We have started to backfill the data
with the new schema but it will take weeks to finish in large wikis.
So if you query this table directly or your tools do, You will need to
update them accordingly. I will write a reminder before dropping the old
columns once the data has been fully backfilled.
You can keep track of the general long-term work in T300222
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T300222> and the specific work for
pagelinks in T299947 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T299947>. You can
also read more on the reasoning in T222224
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T222224> or the previous announcement
<https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org/…>
.
Thank you,
--
*Amir Sarabadani (he/him)*
Staff Database Architect
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hello everyone,
I'm Martin Urbanec from the Wikimedia Foundation's Growth team
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth>. During the 2023-24 fiscal year,
we're working on Community configuration 2.0
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_configuration_2.0>, an extension
that empowers administrators to modify a subset of MediaWiki configuration
on-wiki, so that they can customize features to their needs. The Growth
team implemented this for its own features and since it was a great help in
scaling, we decided to generalize what we created and offer it to all
Wikimedia developers.
The Growth team spent a couple of months on planning Community
configuration 2.0 as well as discussing the project with its potential
users. You can read more information in the project page at MediaWiki.org
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_configuration_2.0> and the Product
Requirements Document
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ai7ib6h1q9ly5xClowK2cn0CKIJp3Z1KpkvwzVM…>
.
The first aspect the Growth team is looking to define is configuration
validation, so that a malformed configuration file doesn’t cause the
MediaWiki instance to fail. We wrote our proposal regarding validation as a
Phabricator task at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T349757.
With this email, we would like to ask for your feedback, which you can
submit via Phabricator: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T349757. If you
feel so, we also invite you to read the Product Requirements Document and
submit any feedback as comments within that document. We would appreciate
it if you can submit any feedback before the end of *November 08, 2023*. In
case you have other questions about Community configuration, feel free to
ask them at the MediaWiki.org project talk page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Community_configuration_2.0>.
Looking forward to reading your feedback!
For the Growth team,
*Martin Urbanec* (he/him)
Senior Software Engineer (Growth)
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
After updates,
I set the language to "de" but i have the strange effect that not
everything is translated. e.g. i see "contributions" but the rest is in
German.
no idea, i checked the code the translation are complett.
CU
Hello all!
The Search Platform Team usually holds an open meeting on the first
Wednesday of each month. Come talk to us about anything related to
Wikimedia search, Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), Wikimedia Commons Query
Service (WCQS), etc.!
Feel free to add your items to the Etherpad Agenda for the next meeting.
Details for our next meeting:
Date: Wednesday, November 1, 2023
Time: 15:00-16:00 UTC / 08:00 PT / 11:00 EDT / 16:00 CET
Etherpad: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Search_Platform_Office_Hours
Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/vgj-bbeb-uyi
Join by phone: https://tel.meet/vgj-bbeb-uyi?pin=8118110806927
Have fun and see you soon!
Guillaume
--
*Guillaume Lederrey* (he/him)
Engineering Manager
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hi All,
Welcome to the monthly MediaWiki Insights email!
Enable more people to know MediaWiki and contribute effectively
In the last MW insights email
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Reports/September…>
we gave a preview into the work that is underway to help people feel more
comfortable touching MediaWiki, enable teams and volunteers to contribute
effectively, and retain and grow the number of contributors to MediaWiki in
Wikimedia production (WMF Annual Plan, WE3.2
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024/…>).
We’ve used the first quarter to invest in code improvements, consultancy
and code review, explore and test approaches and defined three main focus
areas:
1. Design low-entry-level initiatives for contributions to MediaWiki
core and a set of extensions, enriched by workshops, improved
documentation, code review and support to enable more people to feel
confident contributing to MediaWiki.
2. Provide consultancy for Wikimedia’s teams in projects that touch
MediaWiki core domains to help sustain current contributors and to enable
more people to contribute to MediaWiki effectively.
3. Invest in code improvements, logging, monitoring and test coverage in
specific areas to make it easier to debug issues and ease onboarding in
MediaWiki.
Target audiences are Wikimedia staff and volunteers. For example, as part
of the work above and as a practice from early on, the MediaWiki Platform
team provided code review for around 200 patches submitted by volunteers in
the first quarter (https://w.wiki/7qa3).
The goal is both retention, and growth (a 20% increase in the number of
authors who have submitted >5 patches to a selected set of MediaWiki
repositories in Wikimedia production).
Currently the numbers are trending positive: We can observe a 17% increase
in the number of people who have submitted >5 patches to MediaWiki core
from July 1st - October 30th, 2023 compared to the same time period last
year. However, we’re still at the start of this and it’s too early to cheer
:).
A draft overview on approach, baselines and work underway can now be found
on this page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Contributor_reten…>
.
Project snapshot: New database features, new security feature, and Source
Maps now live on all Wikimedia wikis + default in MediaWiki
The Data Persistence team (lead: Amir Sarabadani) is currently
undertaking several
improvements <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T343098> to the MediaWiki
Rdbms <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Rdbms> library’s interface to make it
easier for developers to get database connections and perform common
queries. One improvement is a new database feature that allows extension
developers to specify more cleanly when they need special external
databases (T330590 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T330590>). As part of
phasing out accepting and passing around raw SQL in the MediaWiki rdbms
library (T210206 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T210206>), there is now
also a new basic expression builder for use in conditions. This work is
done to improve security, readability and to ease onboarding in MediaWiki.
The team will soon create tickets for extensions that build raw SQL to ask
to migrate to expression builders (see this change
<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/967554> for an example).
If you have questions or already want to get started, T350075
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T350075> is the ticket to coordinate the
work and get in touch. Amir Sarabadani, Timo Tijhof and Bartosz Dziewonski
can help with questions.
More on security: There is a new security feature that allows developers to
set the language as x-xss to help find potential cross-site scripting
vulnerabilities. See T340201 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T340201>for
more information. Many thanks to Lukas Werkmeister for the idea and work on
this! <3
Finally, Source Maps <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T47514> (already
highlighted in the last MW Insights email) is now live on all Wikimedia
wikis and shipped by default in MediaWiki.
Part of the initial work done by the new MW group is about setting the
teams up to be effective stewards. One upcoming focus of the MW Platform
team is on improving logging, monitoring and test coverage for the
authentication-related components to make it easier to debug issues,
respond to incidents and enable periodic health checks and alerts. See
T348206 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T348206> for an initial
assessment of the situation and possible improvements.
MediaWiki within Wikimedia’s ecosystem. Next: WikiCon NorthAmerica
Conversations with staff and volunteers on their experiences with
contributing to MediaWiki, challenges and opportunities around MediaWiki
within Wikimedia’s ecosystem are still ongoing. Next “stop” is at WikiCon
North-America from Nov 9-12 <https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2023>: We’re
hoping for many hallway-track conversations and possibly an unconference
session on topics like: “What does core functionality mean to you?” - which
is one of the questions we’re exploring on the way to develop a strategy
for MediaWiki. Hope to see some of you there - reach out to me if you want
to connect!
We expect to wrap up the first round of interviews and explorations by mid
of November and publish the outcome (first “Product Insights report”)
around the beginning of December (which is a small delay from the original
plan to have this ready to share in November).
Thanks for reading!
Birgit
--
Birgit Müller (she/her)
Director of Product, MediaWiki and Developer Experiences
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hello all,
The first language community meeting is coming up in a few weeks - November
17th, 16:00 UTC.
If you're interested, you can sign up on this wiki page: <
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Language_engineering/…>
[1].
We would like to invite all of you who are involved in creating content or
managing technical aspects across different language communities. This will
be a participant-driven meeting, where we collectively discuss specific
technical issues related to our language wikis and work together to find
possible solutions. This could involve anything from fixing a broken
template on the Kurdish wiki to brainstorming ideas for growing content on
the Tulu Wiktionary, currently in the Wikimedia Incubator, or celebrating
the creation of Fon Wikipedia, to using MinT for content translation.
You can view the meeting structure and add ideas for discussion to the
notes document here: <
https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/language-community-meeting-november-2023>
[2]
If you need interpretation support from English to another language, please
let us know by sending an email to ssethi(a)wikimedia.org.
Looking forward to your participation!
Cheers,
Srishti & Jon
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Language_engineering/…
[2]
https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/language-community-meeting-november-2023
*Srishti Sethi*
Senior Developer Advocate
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hello List,
i have updated an old wiki to the current 1.40 version but now
i have some strange effects that i do not understand.
Is that the right list to ask for help ?
CU
We would like to announce the release of MediaWiki Language Extension
Bundle 2023.10. This bundle is compatible with '''MediaWiki >=
1.39.0''' and requires '''PHP >= 7.4.0'''.
The next MLEB is expected to be released in 3 months. If there are
very important bug fixes, we will do an intermediate release. Please
give us your feedback at
[[Talk:MLEB|https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:MLEB]].
* Download: https://translatewiki.net/mleb/MediaWikiLanguageExtensionBundle-2023.10.tar…
* sha256sum: 8b3f356014f1bfdf8c08ec8778c200f1e25567c210d1ee93ba7b7e3f894947ab
* Signature: https://translatewiki.net/mleb/MediaWikiLanguageExtensionBundle-2023.10.tar…
Quick links:
* Installation instructions are at: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MLEB
* Announcements of new releases will be posted to a mailing list:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/mediawiki-i18n.lists.wikimedia.…
* Report bugs to: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/1464
Release notes for each extension are below.
== Highlights ==
* Translate extension: Removed <code>mirrors</code> option when
providing configuration for translation memory.
== Babel ==
* Localisation and maintenance updates.
== CleanChanges ==
* Localisation and maintenance updates.
== cldr ==
* Localisation and maintenance updates.
== Translate ==
* Removed <code>mirrors</code> option when providing configuration for
translation memory. See
[[Help:Extension:Translate/Translation_memories#Configuration|related
documentation]].
* Translate extension no longer uses jQuery.ui ({{phab|T323332}}).
* Added an option to leave a redirect when moving a translatable page
({{phab|T62920}}).
* Improve compatibility between syntaxhighlight and translate when
using Parsoid ({{phab|T341009}}, {{gerrit|957761}}).
* Special:PagePreparation: Improve error handling, and message
displayed to the user. ({{phab|T342628}}).
* Special:AggregateGroups: Replace previous group selector with a more
user-friendly group selection tool.
* Made UI tweaks to search translations page to break long words to
avoid breaking the layout ({{gerrit|968673}}).
* Localisation and maintenance updates.
== UniversalLanguageSelector ==
* Added AwamiNastaliqBold font ({{gerrit|957266}}).
* Removed all TTF font files ({{gerrit|957273}}).
* Added Tiro Bangla font for Bengali Language ({{phab|T343658}}).
* Updated Junicode font to 2.100 ({{phab|T253006}}).
* Save preferred languages for named users only ({{phab|T337780}}).
* Fixed an error that would cause ULS to not open when clicked if the
wiki is configured to allow anonymous users to change their language
({{gerrit|969342}}).
* Localisation and maintenance updates.
--
Kartik Mistry | કાર્તિક મિસ્ત્રી
kartikm.wordpress.com
Hello folks!
does anybody know if this extension is still maintained? The latest
commit is from May 16, 2020.
There are older tickets about SCI being not compatible with SWM 4.0.0
(and therefore not compatible with MW1.39 which will become EOL end of
2023).
Sorin