MediaWiki Product Insights/Reports/October 2023

Hi All,

Welcome to the monthly MediaWiki Insights email!

Enable more people to know MediaWiki and contribute effectively

In the last MW insights email we gave a preview into the work that is underway to help people feel more comfortable touching MediaWiki, enable teams and volunteers to contribute effectively, and retain and grow the number of contributors to MediaWiki in Wikimedia production (WMF Annual Plan, WE3.2). We’ve used the first quarter to invest in code improvements, consultancy and code review, explore and test approaches and defined three main focus areas:

Design low-entry-level initiatives for contributions to MediaWiki core and a set of extensions, enriched by workshops, improved documentation, code review and support to enable more people to feel confident contributing to MediaWiki.
Provide consultancy for Wikimedia’s teams in projects that touch MediaWiki core domains to help sustain current contributors and to enable more people to contribute to MediaWiki effectively.
Invest in code improvements, logging, monitoring and test coverage in specific areas to make it easier to debug issues and ease onboarding in MediaWiki.

Target audiences are Wikimedia staff and volunteers. For example, as part of the work above and as a practice from early on, the MediaWiki Platform team provided code review for around 200 patches submitted by volunteers in the first quarter (https://w.wiki/7qa3).

The goal is both retention, and growth (a 20% increase in the number of authors who have submitted >5 patches to a selected set of MediaWiki repositories in Wikimedia production).

Currently the numbers are trending positive: We can observe a 17% increase in the number of people who have submitted >5 patches to MediaWiki core from July 1st - October 30th, 2023 compared to the same time period last year. However, we’re still at the start of this and it’s too early to cheer :).

A draft overview on approach, baselines and work underway can now be found on this page.

Project snapshot: New database features, new security feature, and Source Maps now live on all Wikimedia wikis + default in MediaWiki

The Data Persistence team (lead: Amir Sarabadani) is currently undertaking several improvements to the MediaWiki Rdbms library’s interface to make it easier for developers to get database connections and perform common queries. One improvement is a new database feature that allows extension developers to specify more cleanly when they need special external databases (Phab:T330590). As part of phasing out accepting and passing around raw SQL in the MediaWiki rdbms library (Phab:T210206), there is now also a new basic expression builder for use in conditions. This work is done to improve security, readability and to ease onboarding in MediaWiki. The team will soon create tickets for extensions that build raw SQL to ask to migrate to expression builders (see this change for an example). If you have questions or already want to get started, phab:T350075 is the ticket to coordinate the work and get in touch. Amir Sarabadani, Timo Tijhof and Bartosz Dziewonski can help with questions.

More on security: There is a new security feature that allows developers to set the language as x-xss to help find potential cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. See Phab:T340201 for more information. Many thanks to Lucas Werkmeister for the idea and work on this! <3

Finally, Source Maps (already highlighted in the last MW Insights email) is now live on all Wikimedia wikis and shipped by default in MediaWiki.

Part of the initial work done by the new MW group is about setting the teams up to be effective stewards. One upcoming focus of the MW Platform team is on improving logging, monitoring and test coverage for the authentication-related components to make it easier to debug issues, respond to incidents and enable periodic health checks and alerts. See Phab:T348206 for an initial assessment of the situation and possible improvements.

MediaWiki within Wikimedia’s ecosystem. Next: WikiCon NorthAmerica

Conversations with staff and volunteers on their experiences with contributing to MediaWiki, challenges and opportunities around MediaWiki within Wikimedia’s ecosystem are still ongoing. Next “stop” is at WikiCon North-America from Nov 9-12: We’re hoping for many hallway-track conversations and possibly an unconference session on topics like: “What does core functionality mean to you?” - which is one of the questions we’re exploring on the way to develop a strategy for MediaWiki. Hope to see some of you there - reach out to me if you want to connect!

We expect to wrap up the first round of interviews and explorations by mid of November and publish the outcome (first “Product Insights report”) around the beginning of December (which is a small delay from the original plan to have this ready to share in November).

Thanks for reading! --BMueller (WMF) (talk) 23:30, 31 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]