Archive for March, 2009
English Wikipedia brief outage
We had a crash on our database master for English Wikipedia. Domas is restarting it and swapping it out for another master server; should be back online in a few minutes.
In the meantime, Wikipedia in other languages and all other Wikimedia sites remain unaffected.
Update 23:39 UTC: We’re back! Looks like approximately 25 minutes of breakage.
An out-of-memory condition on the database master server ended up killing the MySQL daemon…
Google Summer of Code student applications open for Wikimedia!
Posted by brion in open-source, summer of code on March 30th, 2009
Google Summer of Code is now open for student applications!
We’ve had 5 submissions come in so far… don’t be shy! :) Also don’t be shy about hanging out on our mailing lists and IRC channels and getting feedback from other MediaWiki developers on your project ideas.
The more feedback you get, the better you can make your submission… and the awesomer the result will be!
The application period ends April 3, 2009 at 19:00 UTC — don’t be late!
(We could still use a couple more project mentors too…)
Add Media Wizard and Firefogg on test.wikipedia.org
Posted by Michael Dale in wikimedia on March 28th, 2009
I am inviting people to check out the add media wizard and Firefogg on test.wikipedia.org.To help test go to you user preferences on that server and enable the add media wizard gadget. You can add general feedback here.
This post is cross posted on metavid.org
Basic Feature Overview:
add media wizard
The Add Media Wizard adds a little “add media” button to every edit page letting you open up media search system to inject images and movie clips into your page. Presently the media search system searches commons, archive.org and metavid.org. (note archive.org inserts are not yet working because of a redirect bug we should have that fixed soon).
firefogg logo
Firefogg is the really cool extension that everyone using open video on the web should know about! It packages ffmpeg2theora transcoder letting web sites trigger clients uploads of videos from whatever local format they have. Once you have enabled the add media wizard the site upload form gets a little use Firefogg button. Which you can use to enable the transcoder.
You may also want to see Brianna’s blog post made early this year about these media features. Stay tuned for wider gadget deployment ;) … if your can’t wait you can always add
update you can now use the add-media-wizard via the mwEmbed gadget.
to your User:UserName/monobook.js page. (note we have not yet enabled copy by url uploads on the other sites so you can’t import resources from archive sites yet)
WikiSym, Wikimania submission deadlines coming
WikiSym 2009 has pushed back the deadline on their call for papers by a few more days — get your paper or workshop submissions in by April 2!
This year’s WikiSym will be in Orlando, Florida in October. WikiSym usually has a slightly more ‘academic’ feel than Wikimania, which tends to be more community-oriented (and of course more Wikimedia-specific), but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the ones I’ve been to (San Diego 2005 and Odense 2006).
Of course, the Wikimania 2009 deadlines are also coming up! Workshops and presentations are due April 15… just like my taxes. :P
Google Summer of Code needs you… to mentor student projects!
Posted by brion in mediawiki, summer of code, wikimedia on March 26th, 2009
We’re a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code again this year, and we’re dead set on making it our awesomest summer ever!
One key thing though is making sure that students and potential students have access to a mentor who can answer their questions and just help steer them into becoming an active member of our development community.
If you’re an experienced MediaWiki developer and would like to help out with selecting and mentoring student projects, please give us a shout! We’ll take you even if you live in the southern hemisphere. ;)
We need folks who’ll be available online fairly regularly over the summer and are knowledgeable about MediaWiki — not necessarily knowing every piece of it, but knowing where to look so you can help the students help themselves.
If you’re interested, don’t forget to apply soon! Student submissions will complete next week and we’ll need to start selecting then… (See Google’s FAQ on what mentorship organizations do and program eligibility.)
Code updates going live to Wikimedia sites
After a few weeks of bug fixes, we’ve caught up with MediaWiki development code review and I’m pushing out an update to the live sites. This fixes a lot of little bugs, and hopefully doesn’t cause introduce too many new ones. :)
As usual in addition to lots of offline and individual testing among our staff and volunteer developers, we’ve done a shakedown on test.wikipedia.org — and as usual we can fully expect a few more issues to have cropped up that weren’t already found.
Don’t be alarmed if you do find a problem; just let us know at our bug tracker or on the tech IRC channels (#wikimedia-tech on Freenode).
We should be resuming our weekly update schedule soon, and will continue to improve our pre-update staging and shakedown testing to keep disruption to a minimum and awesome improvements to a maximum.
For those of you reading via the Planet aggregator, I’d also like to announce that we’ve started a blog for Wikimedia tech activity & MediaWiki development, in part because I want to make sure community members can easily follow what we’re working on and give feedback before we push things out.
I’d very much like to make sure that we’ve got regular contacts among the various project communities who can help coordinate with us on features, bugs, and general thoughts which might affect some projects distinctly from others.
– brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
CTO, Wikimedia Foundation
San Francisco
MediaWiki’s SCAP map
I’ve been trying to keep MediaWiki software updates for Wikimedia’s sites going roughly on a weekly basis, but sometimes we do get a little behind. While you’re waiting, it can be nice to get a quick visual overview of the state of code review — how much still needs to be looked over, and how much is ready to go?
Inspired by the disk defrag tools of yore, Splarka whipped up a JavaScript gadget to do just that:
Until we get it fully integrated, for now you can enable the “SCAP map” gadget in your MediaWiki.org user preferences, then click the “Overview” tab that’ll appear on the code review revision list pages to pop up the summary map. Spiffy!
(”scap”, originally “sync-common-all-php”, is the internal deployment script we use to update the code files to all our servers. It’s a word you’ll hear a lot if you hang in #wikimedia-tech IRC. ;)
Welcome to Fred Vassard
I just wanted to post on our blog a warm welcome to our new systems administrator, Fred Vassard. Today is Fred’s first day at Wikimedia, and we are already giving him a ton of work to do ;]
Welcome Fred, you will crash the cluster soon enough….
Abuse Filter activated on English Wikipedia
I am pleased to announce that the Abuse Filter has been activated on English Wikipedia!
The Abuse Filter is an extension to the MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia allowing automatic “filters” or “rules” to be run against every edit, and to take actions if any of those rules are triggered. It is designed to combat vandalism which is simple and pattern-based, from blanking pages to complicated evasive page-move vandalism.
A warning given by the Abuse Filter
We’ve already seen some pretty cool uses for the Abuse Filter. While there are filters for the obvious personal attacks, many of our filters are there just to identify common newbie mistakes such page-blanking, give the users a friendly warning and ask them if they really want to submit their edits.
The best part is that these friendly “soft” warning messages seem to work in passively changing user behaviour. Just the suggestion that we frown on page-blanking was enough to stop 56 of the 78 matches of that filter when I checked. If you look closely, you’ll even find that many of the users took our advice and redirected the page or did something else more constructive instead.
I’m very pleased at my work being used so well on English Wikipedia, and I’m looking forward to seeing some quality filters in the near future! While at the moment, some of the harsher actions such as blocking are disabled on Wikimedia, we’re hoping that the filters developed will be good enough that we can think about activating them in the future.
If anybody has any questions or concerns about the Abuse Filter, feel free to file a bug, contact me on IRC (werdna on irc.freenode.net), post on my user talk page, or send me an email at agarrett at wikimedia.org.
Upload-by-URL for test.wikipedia.org
Since we increased the upload filesize limit to 100MB on the main wikis a few months ago it’s been easier to upload large images and medium-size video clips, but there’s always something that’s just a leeeeetle over the limit… MediaWiki’s upload form does have an option for pulling a file from an external web site, which wouldn’t be restricted to the HTTP post limits in the Squid->Apache->PHP system.
We hadn’t been able to deploy it initially on Wikimedia sites because the web servers are walled off and don’t have direct access to the internet; further we were worried about safety given security reports about how the CURL library can follow malicious redirects to local filesystem resources.
On investigation, Tim found that CURL is safe in the default case — you need to explicitly enable redirect following to be exploited, which we don’t. We also have an HTTP proxy which our internal servers can use to reach outside files… I’ve made some tweaks to Special:Upload to support the proxy setting, and it’s now enabled on test.wikipedia.org:
My very first URL-uploaded file was a screenshot from one of my blog posts, Spiffy!
The default configuration limits URL uploads to sysops, so for now you’ll need to be a sysop on Test Wikipedia to try it out. If everything seems fairly problem-free we’ll start rolling this out a bit more widely for Commons and other sites.
The upload-by-URL functionality is also needed for future-facing work Michael Dale is working on to allow an on-wiki media picker to fetch freely-licensed files from Flickr, Archive.org, and other places.
Google Summer of Code 2009
Posted by brion in mediawiki, open-source, software, summer of code, wikimedia on March 18th, 2009
On 3/10/09 5:17 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
I’ve just put in Wikimedia’s org application for Google Summer of Code 2009… Hopefully we’ll get in.
We’re officially in! Woo!
Student applications will open starting March 23, ending April 3. This intermediate week before applications open is a good time to chat us up with your ideas and try to pair up with potential mentors. :)
Developer meet-up is out of room
We have been completely overrun by registrations for the developer meet-up in Berlin. That’s exhilarating, but forces on me the sad duty to tell you: we are out of room, we are closing registration early.
So: if you have not yet send a registration mail, you will not be able to attend! Sorry. We may even have to reject some registrations we have already received.
There’s some good news too, though: anyone interested my join us at the c-base for the party on saturday April 4., starting 8pm. The developers will be there and people from the chapter and board meeting will also come. This will be a good opportunity for getting to know Wikimedians from all over the world.
Pretty Servers
Since we now have our own blog, we can do neat stuff like point out that we have photos of one of our new datacenter deployments. They are tagged on Commons with the Category of Wikimedia Servers. However, if you just want to see the new photos you can do that here. Keep in mind all these are possible due to the generous donations of our readers!
Techblog is online.
Posted by RobH in open-source, software, wikimedia on March 13th, 2009
Starting today the Wikimedia Technical Team now has a single, unified blog for updates. This is a much more technical blog than the Wikimedia Blog (which covers Foundation issues and news). Software updates, server changes, and other such issues will be covered here.