According to someone who is more closely involved with wiki creation than me, having a web interface for stewards would be pretty scary. Wiki creation breaks often enough that you want to have someone competent on hand, with shell access, to deal with any problems.
If we had a decent semi-automated system in place for a while, like the one I describe, and no problems occur, then that would build confidence for granting access to a wider user group. But for now, it will require shell access. I think part of the problem is that wiki creations are not done often enough. If we created a test wiki once a week, with every release cycle, then we would know at the time if a software deployment caused wiki creation to break. Note that the backlog is quite small, only two wikis are awaiting creation at the moment (another two tickets are stalled for good reasons). As I said in my private email, renames are much more complicated. The task I wrote today would help with renames, in that it provides a way to notify services when wikis are renamed, but there are a lot of other known issues with renames to fix. I'm not sure of the ETA at the moment. I can't personally implement the whole thing, since it touches a lot of services that have different owners. -- Tim Starling On 22/02/17 17:48, Milos Rancic wrote: > I was talking with Tim Starling about the automation of the wiki > creation, renaming (locking, removing). In theory, this should be > the first and the most important step. > > I am in favor of giving the button to stewards, as LangCom should > stay clearly a non-executive body in relation to the Wikimedia web > projects. However, it shouldn't be a big deal if we have the button, > as well. > > I would like to know what do you think, as well as what do stewards > think (so, MF-Warburg, may you talk with stewards about that and > give us their opinion). After we articulate our own opinions, this > should be put on Meta for wider community discussion and decision. > > At this moment we don't have ETA for the application, but I suppose > something between the next couple of months and the end of the year > should be reasonable to expect, as Tim has taken that to do. > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: *tstarling* <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> > Date: Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 4:51 AM > Subject: [Maniphest] [Created] T158730: Automate WMF wiki creation > To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > > > tstarling created this task. > tstarling added projects: Services, Release-Engineering-Team, > MediaWiki-Configuration. > Herald added a subscriber: Aklapper. > > > *TASK DESCRIPTION* > > Wiki creation is quite an involved process, documented on wikitech > <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Add_a_wiki>. I think, at least > for certain common cases, the task could be almost completely automated. > > For uncomplicated creation of new language editions under existing > projects, with default configuration, the following tasks need to be > done, none of which require complex human decision-making: > > * Reconfigure many services by pushing configuration changes to > Gerrit, and deploy those commits > o mediawiki-config: wikiversions, *.dblist > o WikimediaMessages > o DNS > o RESTBase > o Parsoid > o Analytics refinery > o cxserver > o Labs dnsrecursor > * Run addWiki.php. This script aims to automate all tasks which > can be executed with the privileges of a MW maintenance script. > * Run Wikidata's populateSitesTable.php. It should probably be > incorporated into addWiki.php. > * Run labsdb maintain-views > * Update wikistats labs > > So at a minimum, you need to write and deploy commits to 8 different > projects, run three scripts, and manually insert some rows into a DB > in a labs instance. > > Despite there being no human decision making in this process, the > documentation requires that you involve people from approximately > four different teams (services, ops, wikidata, analytics). > > In my opinion, something is going wrong here in terms of development > policy. The problem is getting progressively worse. In July 2004, I > fully automated wiki creation and provided a web interface allowing > people to create wikis. Now, it is unthinkable. > > Obviously services are the main culprits. Is it possible for > in-house services to follow pybal's example, by polling a central > HTTP configuration service for their wiki lists? As with pybal, the > service could just be a collection of static files on a webserver. > Even MediaWiki could profitably use such a central service for its > dblists, with APC caching. > > So let's suppose we could get the procedure down to: > > 1. Commit/review/deploy the DNS update > 2. Commit/review/deploy a configuration change to the new central > config service. > 3. Run addWiki.php > > Labs instances needing to know about the change would either poll > the config service, or be notified by addWiki.php. WikimediaMessages > could be updated in advance via translatewiki.net > <http://translatewiki.net>. > > (Thanks to Milos Rancic for raising this issue with me.) > > > *TASK DETAIL* > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T158730 > <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T158730> > > *EMAIL PREFERENCES* > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/ > <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/> > > *To: *tstarling > *Cc: *mobrovac, Reedy, demon, millosh, tstarling, Aklapper, > Liudvikas, Luke081515, Eevans, Hardikj, zeljkofilipin, Jay8g, > Krenair, Legoktm, greg >
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