[Wikitech-l] Defining and marking inactive/unmaintained code repositories
Hi everybody, one requirement for the Gerrit Cleanup Day planned for September 23rd ([1], I still need to send a proper announcement, sorry for that) is to allow marking code repositories as inactive. This requires agreeing on criteria what's inactive, after which time span, and on a process that allows people to mark projects as such. There is a proposal in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T102920 concentrating on what's feasible currently with our given tools. It welcomes more feedback. If you're interested I kindly ask you to take a look at the Phabricator task and add your comments there. Thanks in advance! andre [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T88531 -- Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/ ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Lightning Talks August 25
Hello! Lightning talks start in 30 min. Here is the link the follow along on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnqEMIxFnGE IRC: #wikimedia-tech Topics and presenters here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lightning_Talks Rachel On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 11:43 AM, Rachel Farrand rfarr...@wikimedia.org wrote: Reminder - lightning talks tomorrow! We have four topics. Participation links will be send out just in advance of the talks. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lightning_Talks Thanks, Rachel On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 10:53 AM, Rachel Farrand rfarr...@wikimedia.org wrote: We (Kevin Leduc, Megan Nestler and I) will be doing a second run of lightning talks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_talk on August 25. The first round had about 40 people viewing living bother remotely and in SF as well as another 45 views after the talks. ~ More logistic details/signups found in the email below ~ These lightning talks are meant for anyone working on wikimedia tech and are not limited to WMF engineers. If you would like to do a lightning talk on any project you are working on please feel free to sign up. Make sure to include contact information (or email it to me) so that we (the lightning talk organizers) can coordinate with you. These lightning talks should be relevant to something related to our movement and will mostly be focused on tech related projects however it is not mandatory that they are related to tech. These talks will continue every month until there is no longer interest. A youtube stream will be sent out to this list just before the talks start so you can follow along, you can ask questions on IRC, and the talks will also be recorded so that you can watch them whenever you like. We will adapt this process as we go to make it as interesting and useful to everyone as we can. -- Forwarded message -- From: Kevin Leduc ke...@wikimedia.org Date: Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 6:26 PM Subject: To: wmf...@lists.wikimedia.org, Engineering list engineer...@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: Rachel Farrand rfarr...@wikimedia.org, Megan Neisler mneis...@wikimedia.org Hello! The next round of Lightning Talks are in two weeks. This effort will not work without your participation... Lightning Talks are an opportunity for teams @ WMF in the Community to showcase a Quarterly Goal acheived, significant milestone, release, or anything of significance to the rest of the foundation and the movement as a whole. These talks will be open to our communities. Each presentation will be 10 minutes or less, the formal part should be not be longer than 5 minutes and the remainder can be used for questions. Too many questions to answer in the allotted time? No worries, your lightning talk will be a great candidate for a future Tech Talk. Second Round of Lightning Talks: When: Tuesday August 25, 1800 UTC http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Lightning+Talks+-+Augustiso=20150825T18p1=1440ah=1, 11am PDT Where: 5th Floor Remotees: On-Air google hangout will be provided just before the meeting IRC: #wikimedia-tech Sign up for a 10 minute slot here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lightning_Talks With interest, this meeting will become a monthly event. Thanks! Kevin Leduc, Rachel Farrand, Megan Neisler ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] renaming Wikimedia domains
Hi, Is it possible in 2015 to rename Wikimedia domains? The usual domain name structure for a Wikimedia project is languageCode.project.org: en.wikipedia.org, it.wikisource.org, etc. In a few projects the language code in the domain is different from the actual language code: 'als' is a code for Tosk Albanian, but als.wikipedia.org is written in Alemanic; 'no' is a code for both Bokmal Norwegian and Nynorsk Norwegian, but no.wikipedia.org is only Bokmal; and there are several other examples. In the past when requests to rename such domains were raised, the usual replies were along the lines of it's impossible or it's not worth the technical effort, but I don't know the details. Is this still correct in 2015? I would love to get that done, because these inconsistent and non-standard codes repeatedly cause issues in various languages applications, the current big one being ContentTranslation. Thanks! -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] renaming Wikimedia domains
On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 10:50 AM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: In a few projects the language code in the domain is different from the actual language code: 'als' is a code for Tosk Albanian, but als.wikipedia.org is written in Alemanic; 'no' is a code for both Bokmal Norwegian and Nynorsk Norwegian, but no.wikipedia.org is only Bokmal; and there are several other examples. In the past when requests to rename such domains were raised, the usual replies were along the lines of it's impossible or it's not worth the technical effort, but I don't know the details. Also see: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T21986 (Wikis waiting to be renamed (tracking)) -- Kartik Mistry/કાર્તિક મિસ્ત્રી | IRC: kart_ {kartikm, 0x1f1f}.wordpress.com ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Evaluation of clustering solutions (continued)
Hi all, as previously announced, we've been evaluating a clustering solution for use as an alternative to GridEngine for toollabs https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2015-August/082853.html Our goal is also to find a suitable, modern, stable tool to run not only toollabs webservices, but also - on a longer term - to find a modern, easier, more convenient way to run our microservices in production: a clusterized environment that will allow us to enhance single service availalbility and also to apply easier scaling of applications, reducing further the friction surface and the direct ops involvement in the day-to-day setup and deployment of services. Our evaluation of the available solutions is ongoing, and while we're mostly done filling up an evaluation spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YkVsd8Y5wBn9fvwVQmp9Sf8K9DZCqmyJ-ew-PAOb4R4/edit?usp=sharing), we would welcome and we encourage further involvement/suggestions. You can provide these easily on the tracking ticket for the evaluation, https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T106475 We received some interesting feedback already, and we look forward incorporating more! We are considering two solutions - mesospheres' Marathon (which is based on Mesos) - https://mesosphere.github.io/marathon/ and Google's Kubernetes https://kubernetes.io. Now let us summarize a bit our findings so far: MESOS/MARATHON: Pros: - Mesos is stable and battle tested, although Marathon is quite young and mostly used in mesosphere's commercial offering - Supports overcommitting resources (which is important in toollabs, probably less so in production) - Has a nice, clean API and is fully distributed with no potential SPOFs - Chronos is another framework that can run on mesos and is a great distributed cron Cons: - Multitenancy story is non-existent, it was not designed to be a public PaaS offering. This is an issue even in production if we want to grant independence to single teams. - Container support seems experimental at best.(but getting better in newer versions) - Adoption of Marathon seems little and the community is not very lively. - Discovery/scaling logic is somewhat limited KUBERNETES Pros: - The design seems to be very well thought out, based off of experiences running Google's internal Borg system (see http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43438.html for details of Google's Borg clustering system). - A pretty refined security model is already implemented, so that single users/teams could be given access to individual namespaces and act independently - The community is very lively, and adoption is gaining momentum: kubernetes is the default way to deploy apps on Google Compute Engine, it's used by Red Hat for its own cloud solution (and they contribute patches to it), it has a clear roadmap to overcome most of its limitations - Container support is native and it's tecnology-agnostic, allowing (for now) Docker and Rkt containers to be used - The API is quite nice - Documentation is decently complete - Google engineers are actively supporting us in evaluating its usage Cons: - The master node is not highly available, although our cluster survived a pretty serious outage in labs that froze the master and wiped out one worker - No overcommitting allowed, it will be possible to mimic it with QoS (coming in the next version) - The ability to schedule one-off jobs is offered, but there is no distributed cron facility - In general it's a younger project with some outstanding bugs As you can see there are pretty big pros/cons for both these technologies, due to the fact they are still quite not boring - although one could argue that mesos and chronos at least have entered their boring stage. Our spreadsheet slightly favours Kubernetes at the moment, but that might change drastically, if we evaluate that some limitations are absolute showstoppers for us. In the remainder of this week and the next few ones, we will keep stress testing both our test installations to find out surprises and bugs. Let us know what you think - or reach out to us if you want to help in this evaluation process. We will keep you posted! Cheers, Giuseppe Yuvi ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Code of conduct committee
On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 9:01 AM, Brion Vibber bvib...@wikimedia.org wrote: But I strongly recommend we seek out people who have experience with organizing this sort of thing before we try cobbling together an enforcement committee on our own, just as we seek out people with domain expertise on technical issues that we wish to implement. Agree completely. Within the WMF, my sense is that Community Advocacy has the most domain expertise around community enforcement mechanisms, although the dynamics in the projects' communities of course don't map perfectly to those in our technical community, and I'd value their input. More generally: I think it's pretty well-known within our community (that includes me, that includes you if you're reading this, that includes everyone who works on MediaWiki, MediaWiki extensions, JS gadgets and user scripts, templates and Lua modules for Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and other sites, etc) that we've seen lot of negative interactions between people: anger, put-downs, not my department, RTFM, passive-aggressive eye-rolling sarcasm, etc -- these are the sorts of things that poison a community and make it harder to attract and retain people who start out excited about helping. I believe it's important that we explicitly acknowledge this and improve our community norms -- and especially our enforcement systems -- with it in mind. Among other things, this means that listing out specific offenses has only limited utility; toxic behavior can easily extend itself through rules-lawyering, as I think we've all seen on Wikipedia. I agree that lists of specific behaviors aren't enough to produce a genuinely welcoming community, but it's still very important to have them in order to address the oh, I didn't know that was inappropriate argument (an unfortunately common one almost no matter what the offense). As they say, common sense isn't, especially in as broad a community as Wikimedia contributors. -Frances ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [Engineering] Code of conduct
Thanks for sharing this, Risker. If I were a casual contributor, I'm not sure that I would attend either--not because I'd expect that Wikimedia conferences/hackathons would necessarily be worse than other tech conferences, but because I'd have no reason to expect them to be better. Same with our online spaces: I was hesitant to apply to the internship that started me contributing technically because I'd observed profoundly unfriendly open source projects and had also been bitten on enwiki, and I expected the technical spaces to be similar. I'm glad I did apply. Since then, I've been able to work with some wonderful people here and I've made contributions I'm proud of for a cause I support. I would like to be able to point the next person with similar worries to a community-supported code of conduct as a reassurance that the community as a whole will have their back even if one or a few individuals treat them poorly. -Frances On Sat, Aug 22, 2015 at 6:04 PM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: David, thanks for this find. THIS is why the Code of Conduct is needed. I recognized myself in this blog. I remembered avoiding any aspect of socialization at conferences I had to attend for work, and simply didn't even consider attending conferences for any other purpose. I remembered how readily the guys assumed that any woman there was there for more than just networking and learning. I remembered having my butt pinched, my breasts accidentally touched, my questions ignored or laughed at. I remember how the buzz of background conversation is always much louder when the speaker is a woman than when the speaker is a man. It's changed for me. Not because there's any less of all of this going on. No, it's because my hair is grey and I'm now old enough to be the mom of half the people in the room at any male-dominated conferences I attend; and outside of Wikimedia events, the conferences I go to are usually full of conservative businesswomen, and alcohol is rarely involved. So yeah...you need a code of conduct. Because if I was even 15 years younger, I'd never go to a Wikimedia conference. Risker/Anne On 22 August 2015 at 20:03, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: I saw this today, I wonder if it's relevant to the thread: http://www.perpendicularangel.com/2015/08/no-i-dont-trust-your-conference-without-a-code-of-conduct/ Of course we're talking about stuff beyond conferences, but it still applies I'd think. - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Improving CAPTCHA friendliness for humans, and increasing CAPTCHA difficulty for bots
Jamison Lofthouse wrote: The subject sounds exactly like the reCAPTCHA https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html tagline. Not sure how beneficial the project would be but I have seen it used. Maybe worth looking into. Thanks, Negative24 I should note that the latest reCAPTCHA¹ is actually *less* friendly. ¹ the “please select all images of foobars” version. I don't think it should be considered as the “best solution” (for wikis where it's suitable to install), nor should we repeat their errors. A small list: 1) It still has user assumptions based on 1a) language: the user must understand what a foobar is before he can select those², and they aren't always common use words, precisely. 1b) cultural: will the user easily discover all the photos expected to be coffee if that's not a common beverage on his country? ² no, the sample image³ is not enough to discern what they want. At least with the expected easiness. ³ confusing UI btw, since the naive assumption would be to expect you also had to tick it (which is disabled). 2) confusing images: Sometimes it's not clear what is depicted in the photograph. Not even being a human. 3) wrong images: Sometimes there are images that are not really foobars (suppose they are the similar barfoos), and thus *shouldn't* be marked as such. But according to recaptcha they are. (and your grudgingly selection of the barfoo in order to pass the captcha probably means that Google is performing a wrong training reinforcing their idea that it is indeed a foobar) In terms of difficulty for humans I would score them as: images recaptcha original reCaptcha door numbers recaptcha nocaptcha recaptcha ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Improving CAPTCHA friendliness for humans, and increasing CAPTCHA difficulty for bots
On 19 August 2015 at 23:06, Matthew Flaschen mflasc...@wikimedia.org wrote: I agree this is an important issue. It just isn't resourced right now by the WMF, as far as I know. Indeed. There have been numerous discussions about the captcha on this mailing list over the past few years, but no progress because this issue just isn't being worked on by anyone. Dan -- Dan Garry Lead Product Manager, Discovery Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Improving CAPTCHA friendliness for humans, and increasing CAPTCHA difficulty for bots
On 8/25/15, Dan Garry dga...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 19 August 2015 at 23:06, Matthew Flaschen mflasc...@wikimedia.org wrote: I agree this is an important issue. It just isn't resourced right now by the WMF, as far as I know. Indeed. There have been numerous discussions about the captcha on this mailing list over the past few years, but no progress because this issue just isn't being worked on by anyone. Dan Well there's that, but its also because its very unclear what we actually want and how we would get there. Make captchas not suck, well a great goal, is not an action plan in itself. -- -bawolff ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l