Hi All,
Happy 2024 and welcome to the monthly MediaWiki Insights email!
We’re starting this year with celebrating contributors who got their first
patch merged in MW core, WMF deployed extensions or services in the months
of December and January:
A big thanks to Doğu Abaris, apasternak, Abador, Mehdi Zidani,
Oudedutchman, Cyn, Dominic mayers, and Houseblaster for their
contributions! Welcome :-)
Enable more people to know MediaWiki and contribute effectively
As shared in the previous MW insights email
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Reports/November_2023>,
we have been thinking about ways to improve first time MediaWiki (core)
contributors’ experience. One key part of that is knowing who is new to be
able to say hi (and thank you). Bartosz created a script
<https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/matmarex/gerrit-new-contributors/-/blob/master/gerrit-new-contributors.rb>
to find new MediaWiki contributors for a given month that got their first
patch merged (see above!). Another key part is code review for patches
submitted by (new) volunteer contributors. We’re currently thinking about
how we could organize code review for volunteer-submitted patches better
across MediaWiki Engineering and want to give a shared MW-Engineering
Gerrit dashboard a try, with primary focus on the components the group is
responsible for.
We ran a WMF-internal MediaWiki CodeJam event
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Code_Jam#Results> in December,
with 54 participants (16 from the MW team) and 21 Phabricator tickets
completed. Areas of improvement included MediaWiki itself and multiple
essential extensions. See the project page for details!
Two notable “side projects” of the CodeJam: To support new contributors,
Timo has created a series of tutorials
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Krinkle/MediaWiki_Introduction_2023>
going over core MediaWiki concepts. The videos are also available on
youtube (part I: MediaWiki core concepts
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JnIjpRvgNY>, part II: Wikipedia’s
extensions <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xYbqbabTwI>).
A "Quick" MW install
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Local_development_quickstart> was created
to make it possible to install MediaWiki in 3 steps and under 5 minutes.
See this ticket for the evaluation
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T348899> on how this worked out for
testers during code jam. Thanks to Alex Paskulin, Timo Tijhof and Kosta
Harlan for their work <3
The materials as well as lessons learned from this first MW code jam will
help us run a second edition for everyone who’s interested, possibly ahead
of, and at the Wikimedia Hackathon
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Hackathon_2024>.
Project snapshot: Virtual domains, great namespaceisation, and first MW
Engineering cross-sub-team quarterly planning
We finalized the Q3 plan (= Jan-March) for MediaWiki Engineering in early
January. This is the first time where we applied a “cross-sub-team”
planning approach across MediaWiki Engineering & engaged as a group on
gathering proposals and then prioritized these. A few examples for high
priority work:
- Evolve central login to meet requirements of a changing environment
(“SUL3”): T348388 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T348388>
- Support upgrade of WMF production from PHP 7.4 to 8.1: T319432
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T319432>
- Continue work to move off RESTBase
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/6289/>
- Continue work on exploring how essential workflows on the Wikimedia
projects are currently supported through the MediaWiki software ecosystem
(see below)
- Prepare MW-platform team owned components
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T355377> for compatibility with the
upcoming Temporary Accounts for Unregistered Editors
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Temporary_accounts> project.
We’ve already checked the box on preparing auth components
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T326925> (OATHAuth and WebAuthn) for
compatibility - many thanks to Piotr and Gergö for their work on this!
Other highlights:
- We’ve made progress towards supporting Less 3.13
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T288498> behavior: A series of bugs
were fixed in Less v2.5.3 to pave the way to enable new Less.js
capabilities to be used in the frontend.
- The Content Transform team has moved functionality out of Parsoid and
into Cite extension <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T354215>, which
allows both Parsoid and the default parser to use the same underlying
functionality and reduce maintenance burdens.
- To support SRE’s work, MediaWiki metrics were migrated from Graphite
to Prometheus. This is an ongoing effort with more upcoming work.
- Cleanup continued in dropping deprecated unused config variables
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T166010> (also known as the great
namespaceisation effort).
- Virtual domains are now working well in MediaWiki core
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T353948> and are supported in the
updater and installer.
- A minor task was to update the JavaScript syntax checker for gadgets
and user scripts for ES6 and ES7
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T75714>.
- Database: Amir Sarabadani presented
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Major_changes_to_MediaWiki%27s_rdbms_library.pdf>
about changes done to the RDBMS library at SMW Con (video available
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0mjNEJP5Fo>). DBAccessObjectUtils is being
redesigned <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T354194>, including major
deprecation of indirect calls to IDBAccessObject constants.
How essential workflows are served through the MediaWiki software ecosystem
As part of developing a product strategy for MediaWiki, one research
question is how the MediaWiki software ecosystem currently supports
essential workflows on the Wikimedia projects. We also wanted to understand
commonalities and differences in how these workflows and use cases are
supported on different wikis - for example, Wikipedia A vs Wikipedia B,
Wikipedia A vs Wikidata, or Wikipedia A vs
translatewiki.net - etc.
Moriel has been leading this work, in collaboration with many engineers
across different areas of expertise. A first outcome has now been
published: Unraveling Complexity: Mapping MediaWiki Software Components
into User-Driven Workflows
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Artifacts/Unraveling_Complexity:_Mapping_MediaWiki_Software_Components_into_User-Driven_Workflows>
The next outcome is already in the making, with focus on exploring how
specific use cases are supported (differently) on 3 different Wikimedia
projects. The goal is to identify where conceptual behaviors diverge and
converge between the wikis, pinpointing base and common behaviors versus
those unique to specific cases. This brings us in the interesting fields of
software behavior on use cases such as: “An unregistered (not yet
temporary) user edits existing wikitext content (fixing typo) on desktop.”
Read the write-up above to learn more about why, and stay tuned for the
next outcome of this exploration, which will talk through some of the
findings in this multi-wiki modeling approach.
Thanks all for reading!
Birgit
--
Birgit Müller (she/her)
Director of Product, MediaWiki and Developer Experiences
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>