Wikitech-l April 2015

98 participants
78 discussions

Please Review These Patches
by Tyler Romeo 21 Apr '15

21 Apr '15

I don’t usually email the list for this kind of stuff, but if you have some spare time to test an extension, please check out this patch chain. I’d like to get it merged before May (when they become a year old). In order of dependency: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/132783 https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/132784 https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/134050 https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/134789 https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/135597 As a description, these five patches severely refactor Extension:OATHAuth, in hopes that I can try and get it deployed on wiki so that enwiki users can use two factor authentication. Thanks, -- Tyler Romeo 0x405D34A7C86B42DF

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Nominations being accepted for 2015 Wikimedia Foundation elections
by Gregory Varnum 20 Apr '15

20 Apr '15

Greetings, I am pleased to announce that nominations are now being accepted for the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections. This year the Board and the FDC Staff are looking for a diverse set of candidates from regions and projects that are traditionally under-represented on the board and in the movement as well as candidates with experience in technology, product or finance. To this end they have published letters <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015/Call_fo…> describing what they think is needed and, recognizing that those who know the community the best are the community themselves, the election committee is accepting nominations <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015#Informa…> for community members you think should run and will reach out to those nominated to provide them with information about the job and the election process. This year, elections are being held for the following roles: *Board of Trustees* The Board of Trustees is the decision-making body that is ultimately responsible for the long term sustainability of the Foundation, so we value wide input into its selection. There are three positions being filled. More information about this role can be found at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015/Board_e…. *Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)* The Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) makes recommendations about how to allocate Wikimedia movement funds to eligible entities. There are five positions being filled. More information about this role can be found at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015/FDC_ele… . *Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) Ombud* The FDC Ombud receives complaints and feedback about the FDC process, investigates complaints at the request of the Board of Trustees, and summarizes the investigations and feedback for the Board of Trustees on an annual basis. One position is being filled. More information about this role can be found at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015/FDC_Omb… . The candidacy submission phase lasts from 00:00 UTC April 20 to 23:59 UTC May 5 for the Board and from 00:00 UTCApril 20 to 23:59 UTC April 30 for the FDC and FDC Ombudsperson. This year, we are accepting both self-nominations and nominations of others. More information on this election and the nomination process can be found at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015. Please feel free to post a note about the election on your project's village pump. Any questions related to the election can be posted on the talk page on Meta, or sent to the election committee's mailing list, board-elections(a)wikimedia.org On behalf of the Elections Committee, -Gregory Varnum (User:Varnent) Coordinator, 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee

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Reminder: Breaking change to API continuation planned for 1.26
by Brad Jorsch (Anomie) 20 Apr '15

20 Apr '15

Previous announcement: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-api-announce/2014-September… During the 1.25 development cycle, the API has been warning you if you're specifying neither the "continue" nor "rawcontinue" parameters to action=query. Recently this warning was targeted more specifically to queries that actually return continuation data. The time is coming soon for making this change, so please check your bots, bot frameworks, scripts, and so on to ensure that you won't be broken when this change is made. If you want to continue using your existing continuation code unchanged, all you need to do is add the "rawcontinue" parameter to your action=query queries. If you'd rather change to the easier-to-get-right new style, add an empty "continue" parameter to your initial action=query queries. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Query#Continuing_queries for details on the new mechanism. If you do nothing, sometime in the next few months your code will likely start thinking that no queries ever need continuation when the default is changed to return the new 'continue' node rather than the old 'query-continue'. I'll send an announcement when the specific date is decided, but I don't promise more than a week's notice. -- Brad Jorsch (Anomie) Software Engineer Wikimedia Foundation

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Welcome Madhu Viswanathan
by Toby Negrin 20 Apr '15

20 Apr '15

Hi Everyone, I'd like to welcome Madhu to the Analytics team. We are very excited about bringing her skills and experience to the team. She'll be based in San Francisco and sitting with the Analytics team on the third floor. In her own words: I grew up in India, for most part in Chennai, and finished my undergrad in IT 3 years back. I was always into computers and programming but had not had much "exposure". During college I met the legendary Yuvi Panda and other folks in the "Chennai Geek" community, who introduced me to linux, open source software, the Google Summer of Code program and got me started. I started by participating the GSoC program for Gnome, moved on to work for a company in the US, remote, for 2 years. I spent all my free time learning Python, doing hobby projects, organizing hackathons, meetups in the tech community in my city, etc. Last year, I quit to go to Hacker School in New York, which I did twice! Post Hacker School, I started looking for work, applied to the foundation, and 7 interviews and 3 months of visa wait later, here I am :) Super excited to be here! Welcome Madhu! -Toby

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Inviting developers from other communities to the Wikimedia Hackathon
by Quim Gil 20 Apr '15

20 Apr '15

In relation to Engage with established technical communities at the Wikimedia Hackathon 2015 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T76325 Are there any specific developers of any related communities that you would like to invite to Lyon? We can talk about travel sponsorship if it's reasonable. I have asked directly to the owners of the main areas of the event [1] in the related tasks. If you have good proposals in relation to other projects planned, please share them as well at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T76325 The sooner the better, since there is not much time left. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Hackathon_2015#Main_areas -- Quim Gil Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil

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new extension
by Ricordisamoa 18 Apr '15

18 Apr '15

I've written a simple MediaWiki extension that uses an instance of the W3C Validator service (via the Services_W3C_HTMLValidator <http://pear.php.net/package/Services_W3C_HTMLValidator> PEAR package) to validate SVG images hosted on a wiki. It is meant to replace the current system on Commons, that relies on individual contributors adding templates (e.g. InvalidSVG <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:InvalidSVG>) by hand to file description pages. It exposes a simple API (and a Scribunto module as well) to get the validation status of existing SVG files, can emit warnings when trying to upload invalid ones, and is well integrated with MediaWiki's native ObjectCache mechanism. I'm in the process of publishing the code, but have some questions I think the community could help me answer. * Given that the W3C Validator can also parse HTML files, would it be useful to validate wiki pages as well? Even if sometimes the validation errors appear to be caused by MediaWiki itself, they can also depend on malformed templates. * Does storing the validation status of old revisions of images (and/or articles) make sense? * Do you think the extension should use the extmetadata property of ApiQueryImageInfo instead of a its own module? * Is it advisable to store validation data permanently in the database?

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User manipulation of change tags, coming soon to a wiki near you
by Brad Jorsch (Anomie) 18 Apr '15

18 Apr '15

Thanks to some hard and awesome work by This, that and the other (a.k.a TTO), the long-requested feature of allowing users to add and remove change tags (see T20670 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T20670>) has been merged and should be rolled out with 1.26wmf3.[1] Tags defined by MediaWiki or extensions, such as "HHVM", "visualeditor", or "mobile edit", cannot be added or removed by this feature. Only tags specifically activated for the purpose may be added, and only those tags or tags that are unknown to MediaWiki beyond being on some existing revisions may be removed. Management of such tags is already available to users with the 'managechangetags' right (admins by default) via Special:Tags. Tagging and untagging of individual revisions and log entries will come with 1.26wmf3. Tags may be applied by users with the 'applychangetags' right when making an edit,[2] and existing revisions and log entries may be tagged and untagged by users with the 'changetags' right via an interface much like that for revision deletion. Both of these rights are granted to all logged-in users by default. If the default assignment of these rights is a concern for the community of any WMF-hosted wiki, please follow the procedure at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requesting_wiki_configuration_changes to request the necessary configuration change. For API users, the relevant modules include action=managetags, action=tag, and action=query&list=tags.[3] [1]: See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.26/Roadmap for the schedule [2]: By default there is no UI provided on the edit screen, but gadgets may add a 'wpChangeTags' field with a comma-separated list of tags. API users may use the new 'tags' parameter to action=edit. [3]: See http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=manageta… for help, and post questions to mediawiki-api <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api>. -- Brad Jorsch (Anomie) Software Engineer Wikimedia Foundation

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API log entry parameter output is handled by LogFormatter (coming in 1.26wmf3)
by Brad Jorsch (Anomie) 17 Apr '15

17 Apr '15

T35235 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T35235> has been around since 2011, and it's now fixed with the merge of Gerrit change 183315 <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/183315/>. For the effects this will have for bots and other API clients, see the announcement on mediawiki-api-announce <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-api-announce/2015-April/000…> . For developers, this means that it's much easier to provide formatting for your log entry parameters: it's now *possible* for extensions, and no longer hard-coded in ApiQueryLogEvents for core. If anyone is looking at updating existing log entries or creating new ones for improved parameter formatting, you should be able to get the general idea from the core formatters I did in that Gerrit change. But don't hesitate to ask me for help if necessary, and please do add me as a reviewer on relevant changesets. Thanks! -- Brad Jorsch (Anomie) Software Engineer Wikimedia Foundation

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Lists as first class citizens
by Jon Robson 17 Apr '15

17 Apr '15

I am writing to invite you to preview and hopefully contribute to Gather [1], a new MediaWiki extension that allows users to create, share, and discover lists of articles. Gather is currently available for all users of the mobile site who have opted in to beta. This launch was primarily for the community to test it and to pardon the pun... gather... some data. We would love for you to try it out and share your feedback with us. The best way to explain what Gather lists are is to contrast them with existing facilities for grouping articles: categories and list articles. Categories and list articles exist in subject namespaces, and their goal is to provide navigational links for articles whose subjects share some common, defining property. Gather lists have a similar goal of facilitating content discovery but differ in that they allow users the ability to group articles on the basis of any criterion, whether this be overtly subjective and irreverent ("articles I enjoy"); curated on the basis of cultivated tastes and informed opinions ("the most groundbreaking discoveries in chemistry"); educational at a more localised level ("Pages that Mr Robson's A-level chemistry students should read") or simply a personal todo list ("articles i want to edit/read today"). The Gather lists you create are currently your own [A] and you decide whether or not they are visible to others [B]. To see some example lists check out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Gather/by/Jdlrobson/23 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Gather/by/Jdlrobson/35 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Gather/by/Sonasonic/71 If you want to have a go at making your own lists you have two options (both require a mediawiki account): 1) Opt in to mobile site beta: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:MobileOptions&returnto… and then interact with the watchstar 2) Try it out on Vector [C]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jdlrobson/vector.js To build this we have looked at the existing watchlist code, the Collections extension, the multiple lists in core RFC and the many feature requests around watchlist that span the lifetime of this project. Apologies in advance for lack of documentation, sometimes talking and back and forth over IRC/coffee is more productive then writing extensive documentation, but I promise you the team has been listening to all sorts of use cases. As a result I think now we have the first essential building block - the ability for a user to store and access a structured public or private list. We have APIs that will allow you to: * create new lists that are private or public * edit lists * add and remove pages to those lists * query lists * moderators to hide troublesome lists * manipulate the watchlist which has special handling to turn it into a collection Next up on the immediate roadmap for those that are interested: * Fixing up API bugs, missing documentation * Pagination was sorely missing from the first release. Code for that has merged so that's coming soon. * Polishing the existing user experience and working out how to port that to desktop * Improving on moderation tools * The ability for multiple users to share and manage a list * Combining the data inside a list with other data e.g. recent changes to make multiple watchlists. I have a first version of this patch ready for review [3] and working towards the goal of public/private watchlists [4]. We have a long way to go and I guess this is the main reason I'm writing this mail - I'm hoping to collect more help from across our community. If you are interested in helping feel free to reach out to me off list on irc (user jdlrobson) or poke around Phabricator [5]. Thanks for the read! Jon [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Gather [2] http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=editlist… [3] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/200181/ [4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T9467 [5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/gather/ [A] In the future we would love to support collaborative editing of collections. Any one interested in helping? [B] ... Although currently the UI only supports public lists... API supports both. Help us build that out. [C] Highly experimental - this is still a WIP and may have lots of kinks. I would love a volunteer full time to help me with the desktop experience. It should be noted that the Gather extension works on desktop, but we've de-scoped the work there whilst UX standardisation is ongoing and to limit the workload so we can actually get things done quickly. There is currently a dependency on MobileFrontend for convenience but we hope to drop that very soon (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T94100). [D] (albeit badly documented - patches welcomed!

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Welcome Editing product analyst Neil P. Quinn
by James Forrester 16 Apr '15

16 Apr '15

I am very pleased to welcome Neil P. Quinn as the latest member of the Editing team <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editing>, as our product analyst working alongside me. I n his own words: I was born and raised in North Carolina—specifically the lovely, humid, famous-for-NASCAR city of Concord <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concord,_North_Carolina> (pronounced *kon-KORD*, not *KON-kerd* like the place in New Hampshire, thank you very much)—although my dad is originally from Cleveland and my mom from Gujarat <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gujarat> by way of Chicago. I have one older brother <http://davenquinn.com/>, who's putting me to shame by doing a PhD in geology at Caltech, and two younger sisters who were adopted from India. I went to college at Georgetown University <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgetown_University> in Washington, DC. I originally studied Middle Eastern history, which took me to Jordan for an eight-month study abroad program, but about halfway through, after I decided that life in a think tank wasn't for me, I switched my major to international economics. I spent some internships trying out marketing, including one in a "boutique thought leadership consultancy" located half a block from K Street <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Street_%28Washington,_D.C.%29>, where I did things like help the United States Travel Association <https://www.ustravel.org/> scheme to get people to travel more. I eventually found my way to software product stuff, including an internship at Appcelerator <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appcelerator>, which I have to say I liked a lot better. I graduated this past December. I'm a longtime Wikipedian <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Neil_P._Quinn>, so when I happened to notice that the foundation was hiring, I made that the very first application I sent out. The process did take 9 interviews and 70 days, but it was worth the wait! I'm very excited to meet you all, and to hang out in a place where I can talk about Wikimedia arcana without sounding like a dork. Obligatory listing of hobbies: biking, cooking, tennis, social science, and foreign languages (I speak Spanish and Arabic; Gujarati <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gujarati_language> is next up). Please join me in welcoming Neil, who started on Monday. Yours, -- James D. Forrester Product Manager, Editing Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester

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Wikitech-l April 2015