MediaWiki Product Insights/Artifacts/Huma: Bird eye view of MediaWiki

Huma is a tool to give more visibility and structured insight into MediaWiki and its components. It provides a "bird eye view" on MediaWiki by making it possible to query and explore dependencies in the code. It's a helpful research tool to support our work on evolving the MediaWiki platform under the Wikimedia Foundation's annual plan 2024/2025 (WE5.1-5.4) and beyond.

Author: Amir Sarabadani

How to query Huma

Huma is a database of code in MediaWiki (core and all Wikimedia deployed extensions). Queries to the database can be made via https://huma.wmcloud.org. The database provides information on:

• Classes, their methods, attributes and constants and
• A record of function calls to allow building dependency graphs between methods and classes and components.

Combining these two parts allow us to extract valuable information such as all calls to methods that have been soft deprecated deprecated in 1.2x. You can find more example queries here.

More information

• File:Huma bird eye view of mediawiki.pdf: Showcase slides from the Wikimedia Hackathon 2024
• Project page