Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for May 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month (as well as brief coverage of progress on Wikimedia Deutschland's Wikidata project). Two of the headlines for the month have already received coverage in previous issues of the Signpost (work on a new universal language selector and a Wikidata/RENDER summit followed by a hackathon, both hosted in Berlin). Other headlines selected for the report comprised the publication of the second volume of Architecture of Open-Source Applications, which contains a chapter on MediaWiki; a new and easier way to view a wiki's interwiki map (Wikimedia blog); and the surpassing of the one million milestone for images uploaded using Wikimedia Commons' Upload Wizard, which was first deployed in December 2010 (see previous Signpost coverage).

Elsewhere, the roundup contained details of a new Wiki Loves monuments mobile app; the conversion of the final aspects of the other Wikimedia apps that used screenscraping to instead get their data from the MediaWiki API; and the rapid upgrade and renewal of the Foundation's oldest servers (many of which were over four years old). Readers who recall the WMF's assurance in early February to undertake a full review of Gerrit three months after the Git switchover will also appreciate the inclusion of the news that Brion Vibber has agreed to lead that review, publishing his conclusions in early August. The report also noted that the outgoing bugmeister Mark Hershberger has completed a guide for triaging new bugs to allow volunteers to understand and more frequently contribute to the process.

On the negative side, code review was a significant issue in May, with the number of "unreviewed" commits nearly doubling to 250. The figure – although muddied by methodological problems – is already pushing on the target code review limits, less than three months after the Git switchover when it was approximately at zero.

Corrections:

Signpost poll

Tech events (corrected)

The above is a corrected version of the chart displayed in last week's issue. You can still give your opinion on: Which of these best sums up your view about the move to Git and Gerrit? if you haven't done so already

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

• IE7 support reaffirmed: The issue of continuing to support the antiquated Internet Explorer 7 browser was debated on the wikitech-l mailing list after the recent news coverage surrounding the Kogan IE7 tax.
• Time for change? The MediaWiki logo: The possibility of moving to an improved MediaWiki logo has been proposed.
• MediaWiki 1.19.1, 1.18.4, 1.17.5 released: Updates to MediaWiki 1.17, 1.18 and 1.19 were released this week to allow wiki owners to take advantage of a fix for bug #36938, which had made MediaWiki vulnerable to XSS attacks. The update to MediaWiki 1.19 also contained unrelated bugfixes.
• Visual editor prototype to be tested: The visual editor in development will be trialed on mediawiki.org beginning on 21 June.
• 3 million null edits to Commons: Due to templates changes failing to propagate properly from last year, a bot will go around making null edits. A side effect of this is that galleries may take longer to load.
• Four bots approved: 4 BRFAs were recently approved for use on the English Wikipedia:
  • Alirezabot's 1st BRfA, adding, removing and modifying interwiki links;
  • KLBot2's 1st BRfA, adding, removing and modifying interwiki links;
  • Makecat-bot's 1st BRfA, adding, removing and modifying interwiki links;
  • BattyBot's 10th BRfA, using AWB's general fixes to change {{No footnotes}} to {{More footnotes}} if an article has at least one inline citation.

At the time of writing, 17 BRFAs are active. As usual, community input is encouraged. If you have your own idea for an automated task, why not add it to the bot request page? Many bots help keep our wiki together running around and doing those little edits that would be far too tedious to do manually.

← Previous "Technology report"

Next "Technology report" →

In this issue

18 June 2012 (all comments)

Investigative report

News and notes

Discussion report

WikiProject report

Featured content

Arbitration report

Technology report

+ Add a comment

Discuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.

• Regarding "3 million null edits to Commons": I don't know if Commons has an equivalent to WP:PERF, particularly the part where if a sysadmin tells you to stop doing something, you should stop. But apparently the editor responsible for the 3 million edits didn't listen, so Tim Starling has disabled ApiPurge on Commons. Anomie⚔ 02:29, 20 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Null edits? Sounds awfully familiar with this incident OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 18:00, 20 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]