Wikitech-l September 2018

63 participants
73 discussions

How to make commits from mirrored Wikimedia repos show up on your GitHub profile
by Bartosz Dziewoński 28 Jun '24

28 Jun '24

I know it has been annoying a couple of people other than me, so now that I've learned how to make it work I'll share the knowledge here. tl;dr: Star the repositories. No, seriously. (And yes, you need to star each extension repo separately.) (Is there a place on mw.org to put this tidbit on?) ------- Forwarded message ------- From: "Brian Levine" <support(a)github.com> (GitHub Staff) To: matma.rex(a)gmail.com Cc: Subject: Re: Commits in mirrored repositories not showing up on my profile Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 06:47:19 +0200 Hi Bartosz In order to link your commits to your GitHub account, you need to have some association with the repository other than authoring the commit. Usually, having push access gives you that connection. In this case, you don't have push permission, so we don't link you to the commit. The easy solution here is for you to star the repository. If you star it - along with the other repositories that are giving you this problem - we'll see that you're connected to the repository and you'll get contribution credit for those commits. Cheers Brian -- Matma Rex

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Research FAQ gets a facelift
by Dario Taraborelli 25 Jun '24

25 Jun '24

We just released a new version of Research:FAQ on Meta [1], significantly expanded and updated, to make our processes at WMF more transparent and to meet an explicit FDC request to clarify the role and responsibilities of individual teams involved in research across the organization. The previous version – written from the perspective of the (now inactive) Research:Committee, and mostly obsolete since the release of WMF's open access policy [2] – can still be found here [3]. Comments and bold edits to the new version of the document are welcome. For any question or concern, you can drop me a line or ping my username on-wiki. Thanks, Dario [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:FAQ [2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Open_access_policy [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Research:FAQ&oldid=15176953 *Dario Taraborelli *Head of Research, Wikimedia Foundation wikimediafoundation.org • nitens.org • @readermeter <http://twitter.com/readermeter>

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bluejeans
by Jeremy Baron 23 Feb '23

23 Feb '23

Hi, On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 3:36 PM, David Strine <dstrine(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > We will be holding this brownbag in 25 minutes. The Bluejeans link has > changed: > > https://bluejeans.com/396234560 I'm not familiar with bluejeans and maybe have missed a transition because I wasn't paying enough attention. is this some kind of experiment? have all meetings transitioned to this service? anyway, my immediate question at the moment is how do you join without sharing your microphone and camera? am I correct thinking that this is an entirely proprietary stack that's neither gratis nor libre and has no on-premise (not cloud) hosting option? are we paying for this? -Jeremy

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New DB_REPLICA constant; DB_SLAVE deprecated
by Aaron Schulz 04 Jul '20

04 Jul '20

As of 950cf6016c, the mediawiki/core repo was updated to use DB_REPLICA instead of DB_SLAVE, with the old constant left as an alias. This is part of a string of commits that cleaned up the mixed use of "replica" and "slave" by sticking to the former. Extensions have not been mass converted. Please use the new constant in any new code. The word "replica" is a bit more indicative of a broader range of DB setups*, is used by a range of large companies**, and is more neutral in connotations. Drupal and Django made similar updates (even replacing the word "master"): * https://www.drupal.org/node/2275877 * https://github.com/django/django/pull/2692/files & https://github.com/django/django/commit/beec05686ccc3bee8461f9a5a02c607a023… I don't plan on doing anything to DB_MASTER, since it seems fine by itself, like "master copy", "master tape" or "master key". This is analogous to a master RDBMs database. Even multi-master RDBMs systems tend to have a stronger consistency than classic RDBMs slave servers, and present themselves as one logical "master" or "authoritative" copy. Even in it's personified form, a "master" database can readily be thought of as analogous to "controller", "governer", "ruler", lead "officer", or such.** * clusters using two-phase commit, galera using certification-based replication, multi-master circular replication, ect... ** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master/slave_(technology)#Appropriateness_of_… *** http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/master?utm_campaign=sd&utm_medium… -- -Aaron

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Invitation to a "Wikimedia Café" casual online meetup
by Pine W 21 Feb '19

21 Feb '19

Hi folks, Based on comments that I received on Wikimedia-l, I would like to invite people to a casual online meetup one hour before the monthly WMF Metrics and Activities Meeting. There will be no set agenda. You can come with questions or ideas that you would like to discuss. Please be willing to listen to questions and ideas from other Wikimedians. I will host the meeting with the Zoom software. You can join with software or by using your phone. If you join by phone then your phone number will be visible to other participants. The primary language of the meeting will be English, but if people would like to communicate in diverse languages then that is okay too. We can facilitate translation by text chat. Many Wikimedians, myself included, are multilingual in varying degrees, so we might try to have live interpretation also. Here is information about how to connect: Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://zoom.us/j/136978210 Or iPhone one-tap : Argentina: +543415122188,,136978210# Or Telephone: Dial (for higher quality, dial a number based on your current location): Argentina: +54 341 512 2188 Australia: +61 (0) 2 8015 2088 or +61 (0) 8 7150 1149 Canada: +1 647 558 0588 Hong Kong, China: +852 5808 6088 France: +33 (0) 1 8288 0188 or +33 (0) 7 5678 4048 Germany: +49 (0) 30 3080 6188 or +49 (0) 30 5679 5800 Israel: +972 (0) 3 978 6688 Italy: +39 069 480 6488 Japan: +81 (0) 3 4578 1488 or +81 524 564 439 Mexico: +52 229 910 0061 or +52 554 161 4288 Spain: +34 84 368 5025 or +34 91 198 0188 Sweden: +46 (0) 7 6692 0434 or +46 (0) 8 4468 2488 Russia: +7 495 283 9788 United Kingdom: +44 (0) 20 3051 2874 or +44 (0) 20 3695 0088 US: +1 408 638 0986 or +1 646 558 8665 Meeting ID: 136 978 210 International numbers available: https://zoom.us/u/ekaPibJIy The first "Wikimedia Café" meetup will be on 30 August 2018, at 17:00 UTC / 10:00 Pacific. Let me emphasize that the environment won't be like this <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:West_Hartford,_Connecticut_health_care_r…>, so please don't feel intimated if you are nervous about public speaking. (If a conversation feels to me like it is becoming uncivil or intimidating, then I will ask the debaters to quiet themselves or to move to somewhere else.) The meeting will generally have an environment that is more like this <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Caf%C3%A9_M%C3%A9lange,_Wien.jpg> or this <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Takamatsu-Castle-Building-Interior-M3488…>. I anticipate that few people will come, which is okay. I hope that if you come then you will enjoy the environment and conversation. Until next time, Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )

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Life hack: Working with production content in your local wiki
by Jon Robson 13 Dec '18

13 Dec '18

I've been meaning to document this for a while. If you're finding yourself visiting Special:Export/Import often for the purpose of MediaWiki development there is a much better way to get content into your local wiki for testing purposes. This short video explains how MobileFrontend extension provides tooling to help you debug live on-wiki content via $wgMFContentProviderClass [1] https://youtu.be/uRQzjN0hBlY Hope it saves someone lots of time! [1] https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-MobileFrontend/blob/maste… -- Jon Robson Senior Software Engineer

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Re: [Wikitech-l] [Wikidata-tech] Normalization of change tag schema
by Amir Sarabadani 30 Nov '18

30 Nov '18

Hello, One update regarding this. We enabled using the new table for Special:Tags in several large wikis which caused a massive improvement in the performance of the page. For example loading Special:Tags on Wikidata used to take around a minute and now it takes less than a second. English Wikipedia is down from ten seconds to less than one and so on. There is a lot of work needs to be done and maintenance scripts is being ran to backpopulate the ct_tag_id column in change_tag table (If you want to follow the progress, see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193873) and then we need start reading from the new table in mediawiki and finally we can drop ct_tag column entirely. If you want to help in review, writing code or anything, just let me know. Best On Wed, 27 Jun 2018 at 15:15, Léa Lacroix <lea.lacroix(a)wikimedia.de> wrote: > Hello all, > > Our team is refactoring some code around the change tags on Recent > Changes. This can impact people using the database on ToolForge. > > Currently, the tags are stored in the table change_tag in the column > ct_tag. > > In the next days, we will add a column ct_tag_id with a unique identifier > for these tags. A new table change_tag_def that will store the tag id, > the message, and more information like how many times this tag is used on > the local wiki. > > On the long term, we plan to drop the column ct_tag since the tag will be > identified with ct_tag_id. > > This change will happen on: > - French Wikipedia: Monday July 2nd > - All other wikis: from July 9th > > If there is any problem (trouble with saving edits, slow down of recent > changes…) please create a subtask of T185355 > <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T185355> or contact Ladsgroup > <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Ladsgroup>. > > Cheers, > -- > Léa Lacroix > Project Manager Community Communication for Wikidata > > Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. > Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 > 10963 Berlin > www.wikimedia.de > > Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. > > Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg > unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt > für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207. > _______________________________________________ > Wikidata-tech mailing list > Wikidata-tech(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-tech > -- Amir Sarabadani Software Engineer Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin Tel. (030) 219 158 26-0 http://wikimedia.de Stellen Sie sich eine Welt vor, in der jeder Mensch an der Menge allen Wissens frei teilhaben kann. Helfen Sie uns dabei! http://spenden.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 27/029/42207.

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Comment/summary storage changes
by Brad Jorsch (Anomie) 17 Oct '18

17 Oct '18

As you may have been aware, we've been working on changing how MediaWiki stores comments: instead of having them as fields in each revision (rev_comment), log entry (log_comment), and so on, we're storing the text in a central "comment" table and referring to them by ID from other tables (log_comment_id and so on). We've been writing to the new fields and tables since the end of February 2018, and have back-populated them for old revisions, log entries, and so on. Now we're starting to look at stopping the writes to the old fields, starting soon with testing wikis such as test.wikipedia.org and also with mediawiki.org. Other wikis will follow, likely in October after the DC switch-back. For the most part wiki users shouldn't notice any changes, however if you notice something not displaying a comment or edit summary for new entries, on these wikis let me know. For users of the Data Services replicas, such as Toolforge, the views currently simulate the old columns for you. However this may change in the future. See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T181650#4581384 for details. MediaWiki developers should make sure code accessing comment fields makes use of the CommentStore class that was introduced in MediaWiki 1.30. You can watch https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T166733 (and any subtasks) for more information on the deployment process. -- Brad Jorsch (Anomie) Senior Software Engineer Wikimedia Foundation

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Video output changing to WebM VP9/Opus soon
by Brion Vibber 13 Oct '18

13 Oct '18

In the next couple weeks I'm planning to start switching our video transcode output from WebM VP8/Vorbis to the newer WebM VP9/Opus profile, which saves us about 38% on file size and bandwidth while retaining the same quality. This will not affect what kinds of files you upload; only the scaled transcoded output files used for playback will change. All modern browsers that support VP8 support VP9 as well, and our player shim for Safari and IE will continue to work. All the details: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TimedMediaHandler/VP9_transition Comments and questions welcome! -- brion

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Translations on hold until further notice
by Greg Grossmeier 11 Oct '18

11 Oct '18

tl;dr: Please refrain from adding new strings that require translations to MediaWiki and deployed extensions until further notice. Due to changes we are making in the way our translation systems process data we will be temporarily disabling the auto deployment of newly translated content until further notice. The goal of these changes will be to improve the evaluation of content submitted to our translation services. This means developers should not merge new translatable strings into MediaWiki Core nor Wikimedia deployed extensions until we re-enable the system. This is to prevent longer term issues where local wiki admins overwrite a string and thus prevent updates from new and improved translations. We apologize for any inconvenience this delay in service may cause and will alert you as soon as this maintenance is completed. Greg Grossmeier -- | Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E | | Release Team Manager A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |

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Wikitech-l September 2018