Technical Community Newsletter/2025/January

The Wikimedia Technical Community Newsletter shares highlights and news from the past quarter and information about events coming up in the next quarter.

What's new

Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, now has an early-stage implementation in PHP. It is available for general use in MediaWiki extensions and Toolforge apps through Composer, with use in MediaWiki core coming soon (phab:T379662). More information is available in the documentation. Special thanks to Doğu for their inspiration and contribution to the library!
- Relatedly, Design System Team has collected the various transformative improvements in Codex, empowering Wikimedia projects with accessibility, dark mode, and streamlined tools in collaboration with global volunteers in a Codex 2024, Year in Review blog post.
The project to migrate our Airflow services to Kubernetes (task T362788) has reached an important milestone recently, having fully switched over the first of our production instances (WMDE) and instantiated our first new instance (ML) on Kubernetes. Airflow is framework that the Data Platform Engineering team uses primarily for scheduling and orchestrating data processing operations on the Data Lake. We also offer managed Airflow instances to a number of other WMF teams in support of self-service operations. Migrating these to Kubernetes will allow us to operate these services at greater scale and with higher levels of reliability and flexibility. Our intention is to complete the migration of all remaining instances during January 2025. We have also been invited to present about our use of Airflow and this recent enhancement project at FOSDEM 2025.
The Data Engineering team, in an effort to modernize their NodeJS services stack, created a replacement for service-runner called service-utils. It is still in its early stages but has already been used successfully by other teams. We invite more teams to adopt it and contribute if they can.
Technical documentation contributors can find updated resources, and new ways to connect with each other and the Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team, at the Documentation hub on MediaWiki.org. This page links to: resources for writing and improving documentation, a new #wikimedia-techdocs IRC channel on libera.chat, a listing of past and upcoming documentation events, and ways to request a documentation consultation or review. If you have any feedback or ideas for improvements to the documentation ecosystem, please contact the Technical Documentation Team.
The Cloud Services team is introducing Toolforge UI, an initiative to provide a web platform that allows creating and managing Toolforge tools through a graphic interface, complementing existing command-line workflows. This project aims to streamline active maintainers’ tasks, as well as make registration and deployment processes more accessible for new tool creators. The initiative is still at a very early stage, and the Cloud Services team is in the process of collecting feedback from the Toolforge community to help shape the solution to their needs. Read more and share your thoughts on Toolforge UI.

Coming soon

Last quarter, temporary accounts were deployed on the first pilot wikis, mostly small or medium-sized ones. Soon, they will be rolled out on at least 10 large wikis. If you maintain Toolforge tools, bots, gadgets, user scripts, and abuse/edit filters that use IP address data or that are available/work for logged-out or logged-in users, please add those tools to this list. The Trust and Safety Product team wants to identify this code, monitor it, and assist in updating it ahead of the deployment to minimize disruption to workflows.

In addition, please review the documentation to learn how to adjust the tools. Join the discussions on the project talk page or in the dedicated thread on the Wikimedia Community Discord server (in English) for support and to share feedback.

Community metrics: Phabricator, Gerrit, and GitLab

Phabricator

Number of tasks created in Q4/2024:
Number of tasks closed in Q4/2024:
Number of different people who created tasks in Q4/2024:
Number of different people who closed tasks in Q4/2024:

Gerrit

xxx people wrote patches (xxx of them being volunteers) in Q4/2024.

GitLab

xxx people (xx of them being volunteers) requested xxxx merges in xxx repositories in Q4/2024

WM:TechBlog Posts

Diff Blog Posts

Upcoming conferences and workshops

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