MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group/Blog/2018-03-07

MediaWiki Stakeholders' March News Roundup

Author: Chris Koerner

People: Jeroen De Dauw, Yaron Koren, James Hong Kong, Daren Welsh, Cindy Cicalese, Mike Cariaso, Niklas Laxström, Moritz Schubotz, Toni Hermoso Pulido

Tags: News, Events, MediaWiki release, Extensions, Podcasts

We're a little past due, but here's the MediaWiki Stakeholders' News Roundup for March 2018. Edits and additions are welcome.

• MediaWiki 1.30 has been released!

• Jeroen De Dauw shares best practices for team collaboration from his experiences working in a small 3 people dev team at Wikimedia Deutschland

• Yaron Koren, of Semantic Forms, Cargo, and other bouts of fame has started a podcast called "Between the Brackets", a MediaWiki-focused podcast. His guests so far include folks like Cindy Cicalese, Product Manager for the MediaWiki Platform team at the Wikimedia Foundation, Niklas Laxström, the creator and co-maintainer of translatewiki.net, and Mike Cariaso, co-founder of SNPedia, a MediaWiki-based repository of genomic information.

• Enterprise MediaWiki Conference Spring 2018 (EMWCon) is fast approaching! The 3-day event is March 21-23 in Houston, TX. The program is shaping up and registration is still open. Act fast if you want to attend!

• Toni Hermoso Pulido just sent out the last reminder(!) for the Wikimedia Hackathon that they are getting close to maximum capacity and that this is the last week they will be accepting registration from anyone needing accommodation support. The deadline for any additional registrations is Wednesday, 14 March.

• Wikimedia Developer Support is a new support channel for all developers working with MediaWiki or other Wikimedia related technologies. It's based on the open-source Discourse tool and is currently a pilot project.

• Karsten announced the latest creation from James Hong Kong (MWJames), a MediaWiki extension called Mermaid. From the announcement, "It provides the #mermaid parser function to support the generation of diagrams and flowcharts with the help of the mermaid script language, e.g. flowcharts, sequence diagrams and gantt diagrams."

• Installing the MediaWiki Math extension is easier now - Moritz Schubotz shared the news that the Math extension is now easier. From the announcement, "In the past, administrators of MediaWiki installations faced a challenging installation procedure when they tried to enable rendering of mathematical formulae. As of February 22, no configuration or custom installation is required with the latest versions of MediaWiki core and the Math extension, if your wiki is connected to the internet."

• TemplateStyles, an extension that introduces a tag to specify that a stylesheet should be loaded from a wiki page, has been released to the first Wikimedia content wiki. This extension allows a template template to have custom styles without having to place them in MediaWiki:Common.css.

• Cindy Cicalese announced that aggregate pingback data from MediaWiki installations (opt-in) is now viewable at https://pingback.wmflabs.org. This feature shows data from March 2017 and shows over 40,000 unique installations of MediaWiki in the wild!

• Daren Welsh, Extravehicular Activity Flight Controller & Instructor and MediaWiki administrator and developer, shared a retrospective of his experience over the last five years in supporting the growth of MediaWiki at NASA.