Re: [Wikitech-l] [MediaWiki-l] The Second round of voting for mediawiki logo just started!

[bawolff]

Hi, thanks for the response.

However, i think i owe you a bit of an apology. I was sad the choice i
liked didn't make it final round, and there was a bit of lashing out in my
previous email, which was not cool. Anyways, the voting process wasn't
perfect, but such processes never are, and that is ok.

Cheers,
Brian

On Thursday, October 8, 2020, Amir Sarabadani  wrote:

> (Sorry for late response, this email fell into cracks of my messy inbox)
>
> On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 1:53 PM bawolff  wrote:
>
>> TBH, I was under the impression that the second round was going to be
>> narrowing down to top contenders (maybe the 3 or so top designs), not
>> choosing the top contender (I guess that's my fault though, it wasn't
>> stated anywhere that that was going to be the case or anything).
>>
>
> Actually the plan originally was to put anything that passed the basic
> wiki thresholds (70%) but nothing beside the first proposal did. I could
> add the proposal one and the other ones as runner ups but honestly it feels
> weird advancing a logo design that had an opposition for each support.
>
>
>> It was kind of hard to follow the first round with 20 something proposals
>>
>
> It was only 17, didn't even reach 20.
>
> with some of them benefiting from showing up earlier than others, and most
>> of the votes taking place during the time period where votes were allegedly
>> not going to count yet.
>>
>
> That's true, I accept the mess up on my side (I have been planning this
> and asking around for more than a year now but it's not like you coordinate
> such changes on a monthly basis, I'm definitely learning), I tried to
> compensate by giving a full month for the voting period which is pretty
> long plus giving periodic reminders.
>
>
>> I did notice that some of the people voting had never previously edited
>> mediawiki.org (Or made very few previous edits). It kind of feels a
>> little weird to treat this as a "vote" (and not a "consensus" building
>> exercise) if we don't have eligibility criteria.
>>
>
> This is the part that changing the mediawiki logo is different from the
> usual wikimedia decision making process. The reason is that in for example
> English Wikipedia, the biggest venue of contribution is en.wikipedia.org
> but the biggest venue for contributing to mediawiki is not mediawiki.org,
> you make patches, you report bugs, you help people in IRC, and so on. If
> you counted that, I assume a huge portion of the voters would be considered
> eligible if we count venues like phabricator and gerrit. Also for example
> for "picture of the year competition" in Commons, the eligibility is not
> the number of edits in commons. It's the number of edits in any wiki and if
> we want to count the number of edits in any wiki too, then I'm pretty sure
> virtually every voter would be considered eligible.
>
>>
>> I do kind of wish there was a none of the above option.
>>
>
> Proposal four was the status quo, it clearly didn't pass (with 39%)
>
>
>> Looking through the votes, I definitely see some people saying things
>> like "Least bad option", which is not exactly an inspiring show of support.
>>
>
> Well, for each neutral or weak support in the proposal six, there was one
> person who showed "strong support".  And this is the thing with logos, it's
> not like a voting on a policy change, supporting or not supporting a logo
> is a very subjective matter, for a similar situation look at elections,
> there are people who go crazy about a candidate and people who are just
> like "less horrible than the other candidate" and this is normal, people
> are different with different perspective, If I wanted to force my
> perspective, I would have advanced the first proposal too and even in the
> variants for the current proposal, my favorites are not getting anywhere
> but that's okay. Logos have lots of oobjective factors (like accessibility,
> proper abstraction, color consistency, simplicity, brand awareness, etc.)
> but the biggest one is the general look and feel and it differs from person
> to person. That's why companies do extensive A/B testing on design, it
> caused backlash too, for example a lead designer who left Google in protest
> that they were doing A/B testing on forty different shades of blue which
> basically destroyed the artistic freedom of designers (we are not going in
> that direction but we need to acknowledge the subjectivity of designs)
>
>
> HTH
>
>>
>> --
>> Brian
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 8:50 AM Amir Sarabadani 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hey,
>>> The first round was using the standard voting process in wikis (using
>>> support/oppose and the thresholds like 70%) and this is the way we elect
>>> admins, checkusers or other user rights, or change policies in Wikis. I
>>> don't recall that there has ever been anyone elected as admin with below
>>> 70% or we have ever changed any policies with below 70% (not to mention the
>>> runner up logos are 56% and 61%, basically for any support, they had an
>>> opposi

[Wikitech-l] RFC: Drop support for database upgrade of mediawiki older than two LTS releases

[Amir Sarabadani]

Hello,
If you're not maintaining a mediawiki instance or don't work with
mediawiki's installer/updater, feel free to ignore this email (sorry for
spam).

The aforementioned RFC has reached phase 3, which means we need to reach
out to stakeholders and since this RFC is going to impact third party
installations, hence this email.

Currently and in theory, mediawiki supports upgrading from 1.2 (released in
2004) to its current version but if this RFC is approved, you wouldn't be
able to upgrade from versions older than two LTS releases. So for example
for upgrading to 1.35, you can't upgrade to it from 1.26 or lower, 1.26 was
released in end of 2015 and EOL'd in end of 2016, if you want to upgrade
from 1.26, you have to first upgrade to 1.34 and then you would be able to
upgrade to 1.35 [Note that this is an example, 1.35 is already released and
thus not affected by this RFC, this is going to affect future releases].

Here's the RFC: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T259771 Feel free to
chime in and spread the word to other stakeholders.

Thanks
-- 
Amir (he/him)
___
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Re: [Wikitech-l] The Second round of voting for mediawiki logo just started!

[Amir Sarabadani]

(Sorry for late response, this email fell into cracks of my messy inbox)

On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 1:53 PM bawolff  wrote:

> TBH, I was under the impression that the second round was going to be
> narrowing down to top contenders (maybe the 3 or so top designs), not
> choosing the top contender (I guess that's my fault though, it wasn't
> stated anywhere that that was going to be the case or anything).
>

Actually the plan originally was to put anything that passed the basic wiki
thresholds (70%) but nothing beside the first proposal did. I could add the
proposal one and the other ones as runner ups but honestly it feels weird
advancing a logo design that had an opposition for each support.


> It was kind of hard to follow the first round with 20 something proposals
>

It was only 17, didn't even reach 20.

with some of them benefiting from showing up earlier than others, and most
> of the votes taking place during the time period where votes were allegedly
> not going to count yet.
>

That's true, I accept the mess up on my side (I have been planning this and
asking around for more than a year now but it's not like you coordinate
such changes on a monthly basis, I'm definitely learning), I tried to
compensate by giving a full month for the voting period which is pretty
long plus giving periodic reminders.


> I did notice that some of the people voting had never previously edited
> mediawiki.org (Or made very few previous edits). It kind of feels a
> little weird to treat this as a "vote" (and not a "consensus" building
> exercise) if we don't have eligibility criteria.
>

This is the part that changing the mediawiki logo is different from the
usual wikimedia decision making process. The reason is that in for example
English Wikipedia, the biggest venue of contribution is en.wikipedia.org
but the biggest venue for contributing to mediawiki is not mediawiki.org,
you make patches, you report bugs, you help people in IRC, and so on. If
you counted that, I assume a huge portion of the voters would be considered
eligible if we count venues like phabricator and gerrit. Also for example
for "picture of the year competition" in Commons, the eligibility is not
the number of edits in commons. It's the number of edits in any wiki and if
we want to count the number of edits in any wiki too, then I'm pretty sure
virtually every voter would be considered eligible.

>
> I do kind of wish there was a none of the above option.
>

Proposal four was the status quo, it clearly didn't pass (with 39%)


> Looking through the votes, I definitely see some people saying things like
> "Least bad option", which is not exactly an inspiring show of support.
>

Well, for each neutral or weak support in the proposal six, there was one
person who showed "strong support".  And this is the thing with logos, it's
not like a voting on a policy change, supporting or not supporting a logo
is a very subjective matter, for a similar situation look at elections,
there are people who go crazy about a candidate and people who are just
like "less horrible than the other candidate" and this is normal, people
are different with different perspective, If I wanted to force my
perspective, I would have advanced the first proposal too and even in the
variants for the current proposal, my favorites are not getting anywhere
but that's okay. Logos have lots of oobjective factors (like accessibility,
proper abstraction, color consistency, simplicity, brand awareness, etc.)
but the biggest one is the general look and feel and it differs from person
to person. That's why companies do extensive A/B testing on design, it
caused backlash too, for example a lead designer who left Google in protest
that they were doing A/B testing on forty different shades of blue which
basically destroyed the artistic freedom of designers (we are not going in
that direction but we need to acknowledge the subjectivity of designs)


HTH

>
> --
> Brian
>
> On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 8:50 AM Amir Sarabadani 
> wrote:
>
>> Hey,
>> The first round was using the standard voting process in wikis (using
>> support/oppose and the thresholds like 70%) and this is the way we elect
>> admins, checkusers or other user rights, or change policies in Wikis. I
>> don't recall that there has ever been anyone elected as admin with below
>> 70% or we have ever changed any policies with below 70% (not to mention the
>> runner up logos are 56% and 61%, basically for any support, they had an
>> opposition). Our logo is similar, no logo except proposal six could reach
>> seventy percent and while there were good designs that almost made it but
>> clearly none of them has enough support (and percentage of support) to
>> reach the next round. That's a pity (one of the runner ups was actually by
>> me) but if that's what the community wants, I happily accept it.
>>
>> The second round has always been
>> 

[Wikitech-l] 1.36.0-wmf.12 cancelled and next week plan

[Antoine Musso]

Hello,

The wikis are still on 1.36.0-wmf.10 as we are still working on a user 
authentication issue from last week that prevented us from rolling 
1.36.0-wmf.11 [T264370].


We are effectively cancelling this week deployment of 1.36.0-wmf.12. We 
start rolling 1.36.0-wmf.11 on Tuesday and reasses from there.


The change scheduled for 1.36.0-wmf.12 would thus be deployed as part of 
the next train: 1.36.0-wmf.13.


Recap:

1.36.0-wmf.10, fully deployed Thursday, Sep 24th
1.36.0-wmf.11, rolled back Thursday, Oct 1st
1.36.0-wmf.12, scheduled this week and canceled hereby

We aim at deploying wmf.11 on Tuesday October 13rd and wmf.13 in the 
days that follow.



[T264370] User authentication security issue (Oct 1)
  https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T264370

--
Antoine "hashar" Musso & cie
Release Engineering

___
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

[Wikitech-l] October 2020 Technical Community Newsletter

[Sarah R]

Hi Everyone,

We’re happy to announce the October 2020 edition of the Technical Community
Newsletter

is now available. The newsletter is compiled by the Wikimedia Developer
Advocacy Team. It aims to share highlights, news, and information of
interest from and about the Wikimedia technical community.

Check it out, and learn about what technical contributors have been up to
this past quarter, upcoming conferences & calls for papers, and how to get
involved.

The Wikimedia Technical Community is large and diverse, and we know we
can't capture everything perfectly. We welcome your ideas for future
newsletters. Let us know what you would like to see or highlights you would
like us to include.

Subscribe to the Technical Community Newsletter
,
if you'd like to keep up with essential updates and information

Kindly,
Sarah R. Rodlund
Senior Technical Writer, Developer Advocacy

srodl...@wikimedia.org
___
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l