MZ: >I feel that former MediaWiki Web API maintainers should actively pay attention to which mailing lists they're posting to. ;-) I doubt you intended to send this message to mediawiki-api-announce. Mz, I don't think I ever spent much time maintaining it :)) But yes, good point, reply all is evil at times :)
MZ: re why minimalistic lib - for most apis out there, people tend to write "reference implementation" - code that explains to would-be lib authors how to use API. It sets up prefered usage patterns and guidelines. We never had that for the api. This resulted in a large number of API libs that vary in how they use api. Pywikibot is a powerful platform, but is too big for many usecases (as discussed in Lyon). Hence the need. SW: >Most operator are volunteers and don't have time to change the code every month because there is a change in the api. * I might agree about every month, but we are talking about a feature that has been out for 2 years... > The old one was imho perfectly. * Most API users imho would laugh at this statement. See the roadmap <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/API_roadmap> which came as a result of analysing numerous bugs & wishes filed against the api, such as returning {} instead of [] for empty values, inconsistencies, the silly '*' value for text, and many other problems that have accumulated during the years. API might work for you, but it does not support multilingual error messaging, it overcomplicates the process of writing javascript clients, it does not easily cache. In short, lots of problems. > Was the new api coded by WMF or by volunteers? * I wrote the original API as a volunteer (took about a year in 2005/6). I recently coded the continuation as a volunteer, and Brad has improved it as a WMF employee. I later became a full time WMF employee as well, but my project was Zero, not API. As a volunteer, over 2 years ago I wrote a huge API improvement roadmap <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/API_roadmap>that Brad picked up and greatly extended, and is driving it forward with the amazing improvements. From what I know, Brad has now been officially moved into position of working on the API. In other words, that employee vs volunteer line is very fuzzy. No point of splitting it that way. TLDR; In short, we need to make improvements if we want to move forward in turning API into a platform, with flexible JavaScript-driven interfaces such as Visual Editor. To allow creative uses that go beyond AWB, that support complex interactions, and not just the way for bots to make edits. Unfortunately, that means that despite our best efforts, very infrequently, some bots must be updated. If the bot author cannot add a simple one line change "rawcontinue=1" once in two years because of their busy personal live, I don't think that person should be making automatic edits to Wikipedia - because sometimes bots make mistakes that require substantially more time involvement. I would not trust wikipedia edits to a bot runner under such circumstances. If the bot runner is not a programmer, they should get the latest version of their bot. If there is no up-to-date code because noone is maintaining it, it again should not be accessing wikipedia - we sometimes discover security bugs that require fixing, or because bot calls wiki too often, or other changes in content structure - e.g. introduction of WikiData for interwiki links required all interwiki bots to be updated. Wikipedia is a living, developing ecosystem, and it does require updates to all parties accessing it. People accessing wikipedia from the older browsers discover that they no longer can do everything they used to many years ago - because we now use newer browser features, and fallback into basic mode for older browsers. Please participate in the evolution of the project. On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 5:22 PM, Steinsplitter Wiki < steinsplitter-w...@live.com> wrote: > Most operator are volunteers and don't have time to change the code every > month because there is a change in the api. Because of this devs should > keep the api backward-compatible. > Also wondering why wee need this "new" api. The old one was imho perfectly. > > Was the new api coded by WMF or by volunteers? > > > I feel that bot operators should actively pay attention to the technical > > aspects of the community and the mailing lists. > Sorry, i disagree. Bot operators are volunteers and not payed staffers. > Most of them having a job and real live. > > -- Steinsplitter > > > Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2015 14:50:48 +0300 > > From: yastrak...@wikimedia.org > > To: wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > > CC: mediawiki-api-annou...@lists.wikimedia.org > > Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] API BREAKING CHANGE: Default continuation mode > for action=query will change at the end of this month > > > > I feel that bot operators should actively pay attention to the technical > > aspects of the community and the mailing lists. So, the bot operator who > > never updates their software, doesn't pay attention to the announcements, > > and ignores api warnings should be blocked after the deadline. Bot > > operators do not operate in a vacuum, and should never run bots just for > > the sake of running them. > > Community should always be able to find and communicate with the bot > > operators. > > Obviously we should not make sudden changes (except in the > > security/breaking matters), and try to make the process as easy as > > possible. The rawcontinue param is exactly that, simply adding it will > keep > > the logic as before. > > > > Lastly, I again would like to promote the idea discussed at the hackathon > > -- a client side minimalistic library that bigger frameworks like > pywikibot > > rely on, and that is designed in part by the core developers. See the > > proposal at > > > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Minimalistic_MW_API_Client_Lib_Specification > > On Jun 3, 2015 2:29 PM, "John Mark Vandenberg" <jay...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 3:42 AM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) > > > <bjor...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > > > > ... > > > > I've compiled a list of bots that have hit the deprecation warning > more > > > > than 10000 times over the course of the week May 23–29. If you are > > > > responsible for any of these bots, please fix them. If you know who > is, > > > > please make sure they've seen this notification. Thanks. > > > > > > Thank you Brad for doing impact analysis and providing a list of the > > > 71 bots with more than 10,000 problems per week. We can try to solve > > > those by working with the bot operators. > > > > > > If possible, could you compile a list of bots affected at a lower > > > threshold - maybe 1,000. That will give us a better idea of the scale > > > of bots operators that will be affected when this lands - currently in > > > one months time. > > > > > > Will the deploy date be moved back if the impact doesnt diminish by > > > bots being fixed? > > > > > > -- > > > John Vandenberg > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > 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 > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
