Amazing work and reports! It's a breath of fresh air to see so many good things happening with MediaWiki, in contrast with the rather bleak tech situation being discussed in wikimedia-l. Thanks for all the quality work!
On Thu, Feb 1, 2024 at 7:07 PM Birgit Müller <bmuel...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > 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/> > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-le...@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
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