Technical Community Newsletter/2024/July

Notes on this issue

The Wikimedia Technical Community Newsletter shares highlights and news from the past quarter and information about events coming up in the next quarter.

Got something to highlight in the next quarterly newsletter? Add your suggestion to the talk page.

Highlights

• As we previously announced, the Trust and Safety Product team would like to ask volunteer developers who maintain features and tools, including gadgets and user scripts, to adjust their code to temporary accounts. The team wants to minimize the impact of temporary accounts on the technical ecosystem. There may be breaking changes.
• In the week of July 22, Trust and Safety Product will deploy temporary accounts on testwiki and loginwiki. Functionaries, volunteers maintaining tools, and teams will be able to test them on the production cluster. No further temporary account deployments are scheduled yet. We invite you to share your opinions and questions on the project talk page. Ahead of testwiki deployment, temporary accounts will be enabled by default in Wikimedia CI. This means that PHPUnit, Selenium, API-Testing, and QUnit tests run in an environment where temporary account autocreation is enabled.
• On June 24, a decision to continue support for both Gerrit and GitLab as code forge solutions for the Wikimedia movement was announced on wikitech-l. Additionally we have decided not to revisit this decision for at least the next two years to reduce change fatigue across the teams responsible for supporting our code forges and related infrastructure.
• The MediaWiki Interfaces team is working on improving the MediaWiki REST framework, making it more accessible and convenient for developers. As a preview of things to come, we enabled Special:RestSandbox page on testwiki. Similar to Special:ApiSandbox that you know and love, Special:RestSandbox allows developers to discover and explore available REST endpoints. Let us know what you think on the talk page! You can learn more about the teams work on the REST API in the June edition of the MediaWiki insights email.
• A new documentation site is available for the API that provides data about Wikimedia projects, such as page views and unique devices. The new docs site replaces the documentation for the /metrics endpoints at https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/#/.
• The Graphs/Charts Project is live! If you'd like to learn more, please check out the project page and follow our progress on Phabricator.
• With its recent deployment at English Wikipedia, Permalinks for talk page comments and topics are now a default feature at all Wikimedia wikis.
• Community Configuration is now available at all Wikipedias. At the moment, Growth features can be configured, and more features will be added in the coming months.
• The 2024 edition of the Coolest Tool Awards will be handed out at Wikimania in Katowice, Poland on August 10, 2024.

What's new

Recent Toolforge changes

• Toolforge bastions have been rebuilt with a newer Debian version ("Bookworm") and most language runtimes and compilers removed. (learn more)
• The default quota for Deployments was increased to 16 (this affects continuous jobs and webservices)
• toolforge jobs run --continuous now supports a --port PORT argument to expose a port to other Kubernetes objects. This can be used to run backend services. (learn more)
• toolforge jobs run --continuous now supports a --health-check-script HEALTH_CHECK_SCRIPT argument to specify a script to run to test the health of your continuous job. When configured, Kubernetes will restart your job when it is reported as unhealthy. (learn more)
• A new toolforge jobs dump subcommand generates a YAML file describing your active jobs. This YAML can later be used with toolforge jobs load. (learn more)

Debian Buster support ending on cloud-vps

Upstream LTS support for Debian Buster ended on June 30, 2024, and dozens of volunteers have been working over the last days and weeks to replace servers running Debian Buster with new more modern VMs. A few projects still need work; Buster VMs that are unclaimed on the workboard will be shut down later in the month. As of 2024-07-11, VMs in the following projects are at risk of shutdown:

• commons-corruption-checker
• etytree
• google-api-proxy
• linkwatcher
• machine-learning
• maps-experiments
• petscan
• schematreerecommender
• shiny-r
• wikicommunityhealth
• wikidata-dev
• wikilabels
• wikipathways
• wikisource

Conferences and meetups

• Register for Wikimania 2024, 7–10 August! (Registration privacy policy.) Do this by 26 July to attend in-person in Poland. There is no deadline for registration for remote attendance. There will be a Wikimania Hackathon and many technical sessions in the regular Wikimania program.

Community metrics: Phabricator, Gerrit, and GitLab

Phabricator

• Number of tasks created in Q2/2024: 7,410
• Number of tasks closed in Q2/2024: 7,482
• Number of different people who created tasks in Q2/2024: 1,061
• Number of different people who closed tasks in Q2/2024: 508

Gerrit

• 392 people wrote patches (245 of them being volunteers) in Q2/2024.

GitLab

• 153 people (19 of them being volunteers) requested 2,271 merges in 209 repositories in Q2/2024

Suggested Reads

• Wikimedia Toolforge: migrating Kubernetes from PodSecurityPolicy to Kyverno
• Iterative Improvements in the Wikimedia Phabricator Codebase
• Community Wishlist is open!
• How many languages does Wikimedia Search support?

Get involved!

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