Hi All, welcome to the monthly MediaWiki Insights email!
First of all, congratulations to Ederporto, SD hehua and Labster who got
their first patch in MW core or Wikimedia deployed extensions and services
merged during the month of April! Many thanks also to the reviewers for
your support and thoughtfulness! It's the collaborative effort that makes
MediaWiki scale for what it's built for.
10 months ago
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Reports/August_2023>
we started the journey of ramping up MediaWiki as a product and thinking
about ways to systemically tackle the challenges around the MediaWiki
software platform. The initial announcement
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T336990> and first conversations already
happened before we officially kicked things off: At the Wikimedia Hackathon
2023 in Athens. Many interviews, conversations, explorations, investments
and decisions later we’re coming back to the Wikimedia Hackathon
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Hackathon_2024> this year to
connect the dots.
MediaWiki, the software platform and interfaces that allow Wikipedia and
other projects to function, needs ongoing support for the next decade in
order to provide creation, moderation, storage, discovery, and consumption
of open, multilingual content at scale.
What decisions and platform improvements can we make to ensure that
MediaWiki is sustainable? - This has been a key guiding question over the
past months. Platform improvements have been the subject of many
initiatives mentioned in the monthly MediaWiki Insights emails
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Reports>, and
the focus on sustainability is also reflected in the draft for the
Wikimedia Foundation’s annual plan
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2024-2025/Product_%26_Technology_OKRs#Draft_Key_Results>
for the upcoming fiscal year (July 2024 – June 2025).
We plan to present an overview on the state of things at the Hackathon, and
hope to use the “hallway track” to discuss questions, plans and ideas with
some of you! A related presentation has already been given at the recent
MediaWiki users and developers conference.
We will follow up with links to presentations, a summary and reflections in
the next MediaWiki insights email. Stay tuned!
MediaWiki track at the Wikimedia Hackathon in Tallinn
The Wikimedia Hackathon starts this week! Beyond wanting to talk about
MediaWiki, we’ve also put a MediaWiki track
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Hackathon_2024/MediaWiki_Track>
together to help people get started - or continue - with working on
MediaWiki (core), discuss and collaborate with each other (workboard
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/7117/>). Whether you want
to get started, join as a mentor, or talk about MediaWiki - if you’re
attending the Hackathon, please come find us at the MediaWiki track table!
Project snapshots: ObjectCacheFactory introduced to MediaWiki core, SUL3
and more work on REST API
Caching: We introduced ObjectCacheFactory to MediaWiki core (T358346
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T358346>). ObjectCache is responsible
for creating and fetching various cache instances for MediaWiki making use
of BagOStuff, which is the mechanism for caching in the software's
ecosystem. The introduction of the Cache Factory aims to reduce
inconsistencies in our codebase and improve stability. Many thanks to
Derick for leading on this work and to Timo, Piotr and Gergö for their
support!
Help with replacing the deprecated static factory methods is much
appreciated! Please see this tracking ticket for more information on which
repositories need updates: T363770
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T363770>.
MediaWiki REST API: We completed T359652
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T359652>, which disallows optional path
parameters <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/1016820> in
the MediaWiki REST API <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:REST_API> (aka
rest.php) at the PathMatcher
<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/mediawiki/core/+/eab7628c59be589c8bba2b29dabd073683778434/includes/Rest/PathTemplateMatcher/PathMatcher.php#16>
level. This is important for compatibility with API modules that we are
moving from RESTBase <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/RESTBase> into MW Core
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Core> as part of RESTBase sunset
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T262315> (such as Reading Lists
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T336693>), and avoids issues with our
generated OpenAPI/swagger specs
<https://meta.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/w/rest.php/> (swagger does not
allow optional path parameters
<https://swagger.io/docs/specification/describing-parameters/#path-parameters>).
A big thanks to Bill for his work on this, and to all the people who
provided support!
Database: SelectQueryBuilder and Expression Builder: We shared about the
work that the Data Persistence team has been doing on the MediaWiki Rdbms
library’s interface to improve consistency, security and ease for getting
database connections and performing common queries in an earlier email
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Reports/October_2023#Project_snapshot:_New_database_features,_new_security_feature,_and_Source_Maps_now_live_on_all_Wikimedia_wikis_+_default_in_MediaWiki>.
A big thanks to Amir for all his work on this to date! Since then, a lot of
progress has been made on updating MediaWiki repositories in Wikimedia
production to use the new SelectQuery and Expression Builders: Many thanks
to all the people who helped with this! A special thanks to Umherirrender
for migrating an impressive number of extensions to use SelectQuery
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T311866> and Expression
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T350075> builders over the past month,
and to DannyS712 for many reviews!
Another highlight is the work done by Taavi over the past year: Allowing
multiple different 2FA devices (T242031
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T242031>) is about to wrap up, which
should be a nice improvement to make 2FA easier to use! Many thanks to
Taavi and everyone involved for this work!
SUL3: Browsers increasingly roll out anti-tracking measures and limitations
on third-party cookie use. A side effect of this is that it also impacts
CentralAuth autologin. We aim to transition to a single sign-on domain
to minimize
the number of times users need to enter their credentials when changing
wikis as well as for other benefits; and are about to move from the
research to the coding phase. The implementation plan (with some question
marks) is in T348388 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T348388> and its
subtasks - feedback is very welcome!
The Language team just released MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle 2024.04
(announcement
<https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/5B6XFPFYBETRBRWKQP4AKBFFJENGQLRR/>).
They are also looking into changing how and when we release MLEB. Please
see T356847 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T356847> for more
information and feedback.
MediaWiki Release: The 1.42.0-rc.0 announcement will be out soon. MW
1.42-alpha has been branched since April 9th and added to the on-wiki
documentation as the development snapshot. If you have changes that need to
go to 1.42, they should be backported. New tasks with commits since April
16th have been targeted to the 1.43 unstable branch
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/7083/>.
See some of you in Tallinn!
Thanks all for reading,
Birgit
--
Birgit Müller (she/her)
Director of Product, MediaWiki and Developer Experiences
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>