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/October_2023>
we shared more about our approach to helping people contribute effectively
to MediaWiki
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Contributor_retention_and_growth>.
A few interesting data points:
The number of contributors to MediaWiki core who have more than > 5 patches
continued to grow: We just hit for the first time the goal of 20% since the
start of the Foundation’s fiscal year in July, compared to the
July-November time period last year. This is exciting to see - now it’s
about keeping the momentum and continuing on that path.
Many thanks to all the people who have contributed to MediaWiki core!
The average and median time to first review for patches in MediaWiki core
decreased significantly in the period July 1st to Nov 30 compared to the
same time period one year earlier.
- Average time to first review dropped from previously 16.5 days to 4.5
days
- Median time to first review dropped from previously 1.2 days to 0.6
days
Many thanks to all the code reviewers of MediaWiki core patches!
Keep in mind that this data is only one data point. There are many factors
that play into the experience of contributors; a helpful comment may be
more relevant than a fast +1/-1, etc.
Over the past weeks, we have been spending some time with planning
initiatives to further support people in onboarding and contributing to
MediaWiki:
- We are preparing for a WMF internal MediaWiki code jam in December to
try out a few things and focus specifically on the needs of teams.
- One thing we wanted to test in practice at the code jam is the “MediaWiki
Quick Install <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T347347>” guide. This
has been a collaboration between the Tech Docs team and the MediaWiki
Platform team - you can find the latest version of this experiment here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Local_development_quickstart
- We discussed a possible focus project in the next quarter on improving
first time MediaWiki (core) contributors’ experience. We’re exploring a few
simple, small ideas that we could implement/try out in the next quarter
(ticket follows!).
Project snapshot: Analysis of MediaWiki execution timings, fixing issues
with logging in on Mobile, progress on RESTBase deprecation and more!
Performance: Piotr and Timo conducted an analysis of MediaWiki execution
timings <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T350593> and identified areas
for improvement. One of the fixes promises a 50ms improvement
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T351807>! Timo and Derick worked on
bagOStuff improvements <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T336004> (cache
layer), shipped on MW-1.42. This work aims to lower the barriers for
contributors by making interfaces leaner and more intuitive and is reducing
storage access cost from 10ms to ~1 ms. Thank you for your work!
More highlights:
MediaWikiIntegrationTestCase now automatically tracks what database tables
get touched during the integration test, removing the need for developers
to keep track (T342301 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T342301>). Many
thanks to Daimona and others for their work on this!
Work towards PHP 8.2 support continues, with one helpful outcome being a
new DynamicPropertyTestHelper feature (T326466
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T326466>). Many thanks to TK-999 and all
reviewers!
Gergö worked on solving a variety of problems with logging in on mobile
(see
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T257852#9347008 and below). Many
thanks to Gergö and everyone who provided support!
RESTBase sunset: Wikifeeds now calls the Parsoid endpoint in MediaWiki core
rather than RESTBase. Many thanks to Yiannis and Daniel for their hard work
on making this happen! Cxserver is preparing a deployment to the same soon
<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/operations/deployment-charts/+/977983/>
(thank
you, Language team!).
Upcoming:
There is an OutputTransform
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/OutputTransform> pipeline that is
being introduced to replace ParserOutput::getText(). This pipeline
initially targets content that comes from the ParserCache before it is
rendered (as a 1:1 getText() equivalent ). The team is likely going to
introduce another layer of cacheability of this output so that we can store
richer canonical Parsoid content and use this pipeline to transform it for
final rendering. Many thanks to Isabelle, CScott and Daniel for this work
in progress (Gerrit:967449
<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/967449>)!
As one puzzle piece of our product research efforts and platform design
explorations, Moriel and others have been working on mapping high level
essential user workflows such as edit and patrol against platform
components to explore workflow patterns and potential architectural
opportunities in the platform. One outcome of this is going to be to
describe the key challenges when trying to model our system. Many thanks to
Moriel for leading on this work, and Daniel, Timo, Subbu, James, Cindy,
Emanuele and Amir S for their support, great questions and ideas!
Up next: Presentations at Semantic MediaWikiCon
Semantic MediaWikiCon
<https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Fall_2023#Program> is
coming up, virtual and in person from Dec 11-13. We shared about the
updates to the rdbms library in the last MW Insights email - if you want to
learn more about this work, check out Amir’s presentation at Semantic
MediaWikiCon
<https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Fall_2023/Major_changes_on_interfaces_of_MediaWiki_rdbms_library>!
Subbu and C.Scott are also going to give their yearly update on the parser
unification work
<https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Fall_2023/Updates_from_the_Wikitext_Parsing_world>,
Chris will be talking about Codex
<https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Fall_2023/Codex,_the_Design_System_for_Wikimedia>,
and Stef about automated testing for complex MediaWiki topologies
<https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Fall_2023/Automated_Testing_for_Complex_Mediawiki_Topologies>.
Since the theme of this edition is MediaWiki in the age of AI, Mike will be
presenting on the recent experiences with the experimental Wikipedia
ChatGPT plugin
<https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Fall_2023/The_Wikipedia_ChatGPT_plugin>.
Keynote speaker of this years’ Semantic MediaWikiCon is Markus Krötsch
<https://www.korrekt.org/page/Short_biography>.
That’s the last insights email for 2023. The deployment train pauses for
the end of the year break, and so does the monthly MW Insights email!
We’ll be following up with a double-edition in January.
Thanks all for reading,
Birgit
--
Birgit Müller (she/her)
Director of Product, MediaWiki and Developer Experiences
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>