Wikitech-l February 2023

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

42 participants
41 discussions

Missing Section Headings
by Marc Riddell 13 Sep '24

13 Sep '24

Hello, I have been a WP editor since 2006. I hope you can help me. For some reason I no longer have Section Heading titles showing in the Articles. This is true of all Headings including the one that carries the Article subject's name. When there is a Table of Contents, it appears fine and, when I click on a particular Section, it goes to that Section, but all that is there is a straight line separating the Sections. There is also no button to edit a Section. If I edit the page and remove the "== ==" markers from the Section Titles, the Title then shows up, but not as a Section Heading. Also, I don't have any Date separators on my Want List. This started 2 days ago. Any thoughts? Thanks, Marc Riddell [[User:Michael David]]

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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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Announcing: Path review board
by Brian Wolff 04 Oct '23

04 Oct '23

Yesterday there was a conversation about code review on irc and among other things, how sometimes patches can get "stuck". I had an idea for a way to improve things. I'm not sure if it is a good idea, but there's only one way to find out. So without further ado, announcing the Code Review Patch Board: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_review/patch_board In short - each person is allowed to list one of their patches on the board that they would really like to see reviewed. You can only list one patch at a time, and it should be a patch that you have been unable to get review for for at least a week through normal means. See the page for the full list of guidelines. I encourage people to give it a try. Add a patch you wrote that you cannot get a review for. Or if you have +2 rights, try giving some love to these underloved patches. I would also love to hear feedback on the general idea as well as the current guidelines. To repeat, the url is: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_review/patch_board Thanks, bawolff

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Wikimedia developer satisfaction survey 2023 🧑‍💻📊
by Tyler Cipriani 01 Jun '23

01 Jun '23

Hello! Please take our annual* *Developer Satisfaction Survey*! Link: https://wikimediafoundation.limesurvey.net/484133 The survey is open until Fri, 17 Feb 2023—two weeks from today. ____ This survey is for members of the *Wikimedia Developer Community* and covers the following topics: - Code review tooling and process - Code quality - Phabricator - Continuous Integration - MediaWiki development environments - Beta cluster / Staging Please take the survey if you’ve used the above tools as part of your role developing software for the Wikimedia community. We’re soliciting your feedback to: - Measure developer satisfaction, and - determine where to invest resources in the future We will anonymize, explore, and report the data we gather on mediawiki.org. View previous years' survey results: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_Satisfaction_Survey Privacy statement: This survey will be conducted via a third-party service, which may subject it to additional terms. For more information on privacy and data-handling, see the survey privacy statement <https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal:2023_Developer_Satisfaction_Sur…> . Thank you! Tyler Cipriani (he/him) Engineering Manager, Release Engineering Wikimedia Foundation ____ *: “annual,” except we missed 2022 🙁

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March 2023 Datacenter Switchover
by Clément Goubert 21 Apr '23

21 Apr '23

Dear Wikitechians, On *Wednesday March 1st*, the SRE team will run a planned data center switchover, moving all wikis from our primary data center in Virginia to the secondary data center in Texas. This is an important periodic test of our tools and procedures, to ensure the wikis will continue to be available even in the event of major technical issues in our primary home. It also gives all our SRE and ops teams a chance to do maintenance and upgrades on systems in Virginia that normally run 24 hours a day. The switchover process requires a *brief read-only period for all Foundation-hosted wikis*, which will start at *14:00 UTC on Wednesday March 1st*, and will last for a few minutes while we execute the migration as efficiently as possible. All our public and private wikis will be continuously available for reading as usual, but no one will be able to save edits during the process. Users will see a notification of the upcoming maintenance, and anyone still editing will be asked to try again in a few minutes. CommRel has already begun notifying communities of the read-only window. A similar event will follow a few weeks later, when we move back to Virginia. This is currently scheduled for *Wednesday, April 26th*. If you like, you can follow along on the day in the public #wikimedia-operations channel on IRC (instructions for joining here <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Instructions>). To report any issues, you can reach us in #wikimedia-sre on IRC, or file a Phabricator ticket with the *datacenter-switchover* tag (pre-filled form here <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/edit/form/1/?projects=Data…>); we'll be monitoring closely for reports of trouble during and after the switchover. (If you're new to Phab, there's more information at Phabricator/Help.) The switchover and its preparation are tracked tracked in Phabricator Task T327920 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T327920> On behalf of the SRE team, please excuse the disruption, and our thanks to everyone in a number of departments who've been involved in planning this work for the past weeks. Feel free to reply directly to me with any questions. Thank you, -- Clément Goubert (they/them) Senior SRE Wikimedia Foundation

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FYI - WMF Product & Technology annual planning 2023/24 - snapshot of work in progress
by Birgit Müller 12 Apr '23

12 Apr '23

Hi All, The Wikimedia Foundation’s Tech & Product departments have published a first overview on current annual planning work for the fiscal year 2023/2024 (July 1st-June 30th). Comments and questions are welcome on the talk page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024/… This is an almost real time “snapshot” of the work that is currently underway to develop the Technology & Product annual plan in a cross-departmental effort. The plan is still at the very high level and work in progress - main areas of work (“buckets”), possible annual objectives <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR>, initiatives that could help achieve these, first versions of annual key results that could roll into these objectives. Content on the page will change as things evolve, and new thoughts and feedback are incorporated. If you have thoughts or questions at this early stage, please comment on the talk page so that we can keep discussions in one place. If you prefer to wait until things become clearer - this is perfectly fine too! A call for feedback on the specifics of the annual plan is planned for later in the process - this is just a start. Thanks, Birgit -- Birgit Müller (she/her) Director of Technical Engagement Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>

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MediaWiki Extensions and Skins Security Release Supplement (1.35.9/1.38.4/1.39.1)
by Manfredi Martorana 05 Apr '23

05 Apr '23

Greetings- With the security/maintenance release of MediaWiki 1.35.9/1.38.4/1.39.1, we would also like to provide this supplementary announcement of MediaWiki extensions and skins with now-public Phabricator tasks, security patches and backports [1]: CheckUser + (T311337 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T311337>, CVE-2022-39193) - Edits with the performer suppressed still show the performer in results from the CheckUser extension https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/CheckUser/+/879167/ CheckUser + (T316414 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T316414>, CVE-2022-39193) - Special:Investigate can expose supressed information in check results https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/CheckUser/+/879166/ CheckUser + (T318166 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T318166>, CVE-2022-39193) - CheckUser API can expose the suppressed performer https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/CheckUser/+/879073/ GrowthExperiments + (T321733 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T321733>, CVE-2023-22945) - Action=growthmanagementorlist makes it possible for blocked users to enroll as mentors https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments/+/8… CheckUser + (T315123 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T315123>, CVE-2023-22912) - CheckUser TokenManager insecurely uses AES-CTR encryption with repeated nonce, allowing an adversary to decrypt https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/CheckUser/+/879074/ MobileFrontend + (T320987 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T320987>, CVE-2023-22909) - Mobile frontend's history makes really slow db queries https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/MobileFrontend/+/8577… Widgets + (T149488 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T149488>, CVE-2023-22911) - Widgets does widget replacement in html attributes potentially leading to XSS https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/Widgets/+/856035/ Wikibase + (T323592 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T323592>, CVE-2023-22910) - XSS in Wikibase date formatting https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase/+/879171/ The Wikimedia Security Team recommends updating these extensions and/or skins to the current master branch or relevant, supported release branch [2] as soon as possible. Some of the referenced Phabricator tasks above _may_ still be private. Unfortunately, when security issues are reported, sometimes sensitive information is exposed and since Phabricator is historical, we cannot make these tasks public without exposing this sensitive information. If you have any additional questions or concerns regarding this update, please feel free to contact security(a)wikimedia.org or file a security task within Phabricator [3]. [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T318974 [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Version_lifecycle [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reporting_security_bugs

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[Proposal] Disable setting the "Lowest" Priority value in Phabricator
by Andre Klapper 18 Mar '23

18 Mar '23

Wikimedia Phabricator tasks have a "Priority" dropdown field (which is not consistently used) with several discrete values, among them "Lowest". See [1] for the full list of Priority field values. Since [2], "Low" and "Lowest" priority share the same definition. I propose to disable setting the "Lowest" Priority value in Phab tasks. "Lowest priority" can sound demotivating / disrespectful ("there is nothing that could be even less important"). However, bikeshedding about changing the name of the value would ignore further observations: * About half of the people who are most active in setting initial Priority values do not ever set Priority to "Lowest"[3]. * There is no significant difference between median age of open tasks with Low and with Lowest priority[4], thus nothing seems to get realistically differentiated here. * Personally I also assume Lowest priority is sometimes used instead of honestly declining a task (means: "this is not a good idea"[5]). But of course that is rather hard to prove. If you have opinions and/or ideas how to interpret data differently, please add them to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T228759 to keep them in a single place - either as a text comment, or via "Award Token" to express support or disagreement without adding words. Thanks, andre [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Project_management#Priority_leve… [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T317533 [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T228759#6988320 [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org/… [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Bug_report_life_cycle -- Andre Klapper (he/him) | Bugwrangler / Developer Advocate https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/

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MediaWiki 1.40-alpha will be branched as a beta on 13 March 2023
by Tyler Cipriani 14 Mar '23

14 Mar '23

Hey all, This is a quick note to highlight that in six weeks' time, the REL1_40 branch will be created for MediaWiki core and each of the extensions and skins in Wikimedia git, with some (the 'tarball') included as sub-modules of MediaWiki itself[0]. This is the first step in the release process for MediaWiki 1.40, which should be out in May 2023, approximately six months after MediaWiki 1.39. The branches will reflect the code as of the last 'alpha' branch for the release, 1.40.0-wmf.27, which will be deployed to Wikimedia wikis in the week beginning 13 March 2023 for MediaWiki itself and those extensions and skins available there. After that point, patches that land in the main development branch of MediaWiki and its bundled extensions and skins will be slated for the MediaWiki 1.41 release unless specifically backported[1]. If you are working on a new feature that you wish to land for the release, you now have a few days to finish your work and land it in the development branch; feature changes should not be backported except in an urgent case. If your work might not be complete in time, and yet should block release for everyone else, please file a task against the `mw-1.40-release` project on Phabricator.[2] If you have tickets that are already tagged for `mw-1.40-release`, please finish them, untag them, or reach out to get them resolved in the next few weeks. We hope to issue the first release candidate, 1.40.0-rc.0, two weeks after the branch point, and if all goes well, to release MediaWiki 1.40.0 a few weeks after that. Tyler Cipriani (he/him) Engineering Manager, Release Engineering Wikimedia Foundation [0]: <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bundled_extensions_and_skins> [1]: <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Backporting_fixes> [2]: <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/mw-1.40-release/>

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Wikitech-l February 2023