Hello everyone,
The Committee has finished selecting its new members. The new committee
candidates are (in alphabetical order):
- Amir Sarabadani
- Egbe Eugene Agbor (Eugene233)
- Greg Grossmeier
- Jayprakash12345
- Kamila Součková
Auxiliary members will be (alphabetically):
- Effie Mouzeli
- Joris Darlington Quarshie
- Martin Urbanec
- MusikAnimal
- SD0001
You can read more information about the members at [1]. List of changes
from the last term:
- Greg and Kamila will be joining the main committee.
- Nuria is leaving the main committee
- MusikAnimal is moving to the aux committee
- Tony is leaving the aux committee
This is not the final structure. According to the CoC [2], the current
committee publishes the new members and calls for public feedback for *six
weeks* and after that, the current committee might apply changes to the
structure based on public feedback.
Please let the committee know (via techconduct(a)wikimedia.org) if you have
any concern regarding the members and its structure until *08 October 2024*
and after that, the new committee will be in effect and will serve for a
year.
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct/Committee/Members/Candidates
[2]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct/Committee#Selection_of_new_m…
--
Amir (he/him)
Hi All,
Welcome to the monthly MediaWiki Insights email!
First of all, many thanks and congratulations to the 5 new volunteer
contributors: Ivi104, Matrix, obamwonyi, Ahonc and Abhii5599. Each of them got
their first patch merged in MediaWiki core, extensions or services deployed
in Wikimedia production during the month of September!
Updates to Wikimedia’s authentication system: Single User Login phase 3
Single User Login, the system which allows users to fill out the login form
on one Wikimedia site and get logged in on all others at the same time, has
been under increasing strain in the last few years as browsers have
increasingly restricted the ways in which websites on different domains can
exchange information, to prevent large-scale user tracking.
The MediaWiki Platform team has been working on updating our authentication
system to be more compatible with these new browser requirements by moving
all login and signup forms to a dedicated domain. The project, dubbed SUL3
(phase 1 was centralizing the user database in 2008, phase 2 was
centralizing session cookies in 2013), is tracked in T348388
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T348388> and expected to finish later
this year.
Besides being more in line with how browser vendors expect cross-domain
authentication to work, these changes will also make Wikimedia sites more
friendly to password managers, make it harder to steal passwords via hacked
user scripts, and maybe pave the way before a wider rollout of WebAuthn, an
advanced security feature which allows the use of physical devices such as
USB tokens or fingerprint readers as second factors during login. The
changes should be mostly invisible to users, other than the browser showing
a different URL during login.
Internally, the way individual wikis interact with the central
authentication system will become more standard, using the remote identity
provider support built into MediaWiki’s authentication framework.
This work is part of our annual plan goal to improve the sustainability of
the MediaWiki platform (WE5.1
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2024-2025/…>).
The initiative also required us to enable more people to work on the
authentication stack (MediaWiki Core AuthManager, CentralAuth & Co) and
will come with beneficial side effects such as improved test coverage and
monitoring, which in return makes it easier to maintain the authentication
infrastructure on the way forward. We will share more about this work in
the coming weeks and months as we begin to prepare for the rollout to
production wikis.
Simplify feature development in MediaWiki platform: Two reports published
In the last Insights email
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Reports/August_20…>
we shared about our explorations to simplify feature development in the
MediaWiki platform (WE5.2
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Artifacts/KR_5.2:…>
). In the first quarter, we set out to better understand how developers are
interacting with the platform from two perspectives: 1) Examine how core
mechanisms support extensions and where those entry points can be improved
(hook survey), and 2) Identify existing platform feature(s) that would
benefit the most from directly redesigning the architecture to enable
simpler and more sustainable feature development (notifications
architecture).
- Hook survey (report
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Artifacts/KR_5.2:…>
): We analyzed 76 (out of 464) hook definitions and 165 (of 1408) hook
handler implementations used by MediaWiki extensions deployed on Wikimedia
sites. Based on the survey data we identified several opportunities for
exploration and evolution. Our first experiment in this space will focus on
introducing a new Domain Event and Listener pattern into the platform, to
enable a simplified visibility into system state changes. We also believe
this pattern will enable better flexibility for extension interfaces, as
well as better boundaries between core components by removing the
complexity of needing to know what other areas of code need to be informed
about changes. More information can be found in the survey results
summary
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Artifacts/KR_5.2:…>
.
- Notifications architecture (report
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Artifacts/KR_5.2:…>
): We identified the Notifications feature set as an opportunity to
focus and scope the work to simplify feature development in the MediaWiki
platform, because it contains several antipatterns and pain points that we
believe can be addressed through improved modularity and defining
simplified, use-case centric interfaces. The exploration contained a
combination of high-level design work intended to define a unified
notification system, paired with deep diving existing capabilities spread
across the Echo extension and ENotif component in MediaWiki core. This
resulted in a design proposal which we will continue to explore through
experimentation and proof of concept work as a next step. Please see the
report
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Artifacts/KR_5.2:…>
for more information!
Project snapshots: Parsoid Read Views deployed to Wikivoyages, MathML
rollout and Wikitech wiki major milestones met
The Parser Unification project has achieved a major milestone this past
quarter: we have rolled out Parsoid Read Views
<https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/…>
to 22 of 26 Wikivoyages, including Mobile Frontend, which accounts for
roughly 77% of monthly page views. The remainder of the wikis have
documented challenges that we plan to tackle soon. You can learn more about
our rollout strategy and how deployment readiness is determined on this page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/Parser_Unification/Confidence_Framew…>
.
MathML rollout (part of Mathoid deprecation, which is a dependency for
RESTBase sunsetting): The Math extension provides support for math formula
in page content, and deployed on all Wikipedias and bundled with MediaWiki
core by default. The new MathML mode embraces the native MathML support in
web browsers today, and removes dependency on an unmaintained Node.js
service. It also resolves a longstanding problem whereby Math rendering in
MediaWiki involved a live dependency on the production wikimedia.org
RESTBase service, which made it awkward to support MediaWiki LTS. Once
MathML is stable and enabled on more Wikipedias, we plan to backport the
new MathML mode to MediaWiki 1.39, which in turn removes the third-party
RESTBase dependency. This work is tracked under
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T271001 and carried out by volunteers
Moritz (Physikerwelt), Johannes (Stegmujo), and AndreG-P, supported with
review and guidance by Timo (Krinkle). In September we completed two items:
1. Enable the new MathML mode on group0 wikis.
2. Disable Mathoid by default in the Math extension (for MediaWiki 1.43)
so that new third-party installs don't start with a dependency on a
deprecated service.
Wikitech updates: Until recently, Wikitech wiki
<https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page> offered unique
functionalities, posing interesting challenges during maintenance or
upgrades. On October 1st, we successfully migrated it to Kubernetes,
simplifying maintenance and administration. This achievement wouldn’t have
been possible without the collaborating work of various teams and
individuals to decouple developer account management
<https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/IDM> from Wikitech, and moving
authentication to Wikimedia Unified Login (aka SUL), which means: Wikitech
now supports SUL authentication. We are currently in the process of linking
existing Wikitech accounts
<https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikitech/SUL-migration> to their
respective SUL accounts to eventually (end of November 2024) offer a
unified user experience. This marks the end of a long road separating
developer accounts from Wikitech, and deprecating the LDAP backend in the
process. Originally, we aimed to complete the migration by mid-September.
However, October 1st proved to be a more feasible target, allowing us
enough time to align the efforts across teams. Kudos to: Alexandros, Amir,
Effie, Joanna, Moritz, Simon, and Taavi!
OpenTelemetry: Jaeger can store and visualize distributed tracing
<https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Distributed_tracing> information for a
high-level overview of calls between different services (T320549
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T320549>). This complements the detailed
and low-level function profiling we already have for MediaWiki, such as Excimer
flame graphs
<https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2023/06/08/flame-graphs-arrive-in-wikimediad…>,
and XHGui
<https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikimediaDebug#XHGui_profiling>.
Today, Jaeger focuses on high-level metadata from services around
MediaWiki. This quarter, SRE and MediaWiki Engineering are expanding Jaeger
to include some tracing from MediaWiki itself. Last month, Maté finished
development of a lightweight and sustainable OpenTelemetry client
<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/1061573> for MediaWiki.
Implementation was guided by Timo and Piotr. Next month we will use this
client to instrument parts of MediaWiki (T340552
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T340552>).
Outlook: Improving API documentation sustainability
We are kicking off work on improving API documentation sustainability
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/7456/>. This
intervention will introduce three main benefits: 1) automatically generate
OpenAPI specifications for all of the MediaWiki endpoints so that we can
adopt industry standard tooling, 2) leverage the generated specs for
automated endpoint validation to ensure documentation consistency and
prevent accidental breaking changes, and 3) automatically translate the
generated specs so that our documentation is more accessible for the global
developer community. By adopting automatically generated API documentation
using standard, open source OpenAPI specifications
<https://swagger.io/specification/>, we can improve the sustainability for
API producers while increasing stability for API consumers. This approach
reduces reliance on manual maintenance for API documentation pages and
ensures that the documented API responses always match the actual behavior
of the underlying endpoints by unlocking automated validation and error
handling. This will prevent accidental breaking changes from entering the
Wikimedia developer ecosystem, improving platform stability and reducing
disruption for API users. Additionally, the generated specs can be used to
automatically enable interactive experiences using SwaggerUI
<https://swagger.io/tools/swagger-ui/>, where API users will be able to
test the endpoints inline with the documentation, all without additional
overhead from the Wikimedia teams creating and managing the APIs.
Reminder: MediaWiki 1.43 LTS release
The next MediaWiki Release is coming
<https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/…>,
and it will be an LTS. Version 1.43 will branch for alpha on October 22nd
and contain essential changes you should look for, like native MathML in
favor of Mathoid deprecation and drop of support to PHP versions < 8.1. If
you consider your task a relevant blocker for the next MW Release, please tag
it on our board <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/mw-1.43-release/>
for the team’s evaluation.
With this, we’re wrapping up this edition!
Thanks all for reading,
Birgit
--
Birgit Müller (she/her)
Director of Product, MediaWiki and Developer Experiences
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>