MediaWiki

User:Sharihareswara (WMF)/TODO

< User:Sharihareswara (WMF)

I'm on sabbatical till January 2014. Please contact User:Qgil in my absence. I won't be doing any of the below before then.

Sumana Harihareswara's TODO list General, braindump, somewhat prioritized, necessarily incomplete.

Nowish

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Continuing

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New/one-time

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  • in the future, all gadgets will need to be RL2-compatible -- start publicizing this -- will start sometime after the 1.19 deployment (check w Roan for when)
  • make a Labs/Gerrit account for Beau
  • follow up with Patrick Reilly and general situation re wikidiff changes from PerfektesChaos http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:PerfektesChaos/WikidiffLX/coding
  • work with Guillaume to figure out priorities for possible hwalls work on mediawiki.org and related tech topics -- maybe redoing the mobile pages & moving to mediawiki.org or wikitech.wikimedia.org ?
    • maybe we need IA for a few intro documentation-improvement tasks.
    • articulate my approach suggestion
  • check commit logs for Lucene work to see who we have to get permission to relicense to Apache license. Sumana to delegate to Stephen LaPorte.
  • follow up on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Jean-Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric/digiKam - French chapter work re uploading from DigiKam to Commons

Soon

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Recruit

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  • UI/IA frontend person to do the gerrit UI work -- we have an existing data model
  • Sumana to document best practices for aiding enthusiastic general & specifically driven volunteers
  • get volunteers to keep our documentation up-to-date wrt 1.19, SWIFT, and git
  • Review https://github.com/wikimedia/WikipediaMobile/pulls and https://github.com/wikimedia/WikipediaMobile/network for mobile volunteers to recruit
  • testers for MediaWiki OpenID extension
  • More on Chad's global config RfC
    • redlink off Wikimedia Platform Engineering
    • recruit volunteers to work on this
    • Get into gadgets/user scripts community
    • Get into extensions community
    • Get into toolservers community
      • Get privileges on mwbot project
    • Get into templates community
  • Ask community - what conferences should we sponsor?
  • Make our CREDITS file more complete, perhaps by looking at commit summaries.

Longer-term

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My goal is to facilitate volunteer contributions, and there are a few missing parts right now that slow me down, and slow down volunteers who want to help. The main problems I'm worried about:

  • Code review in general.
    • Ideas: I know RobLa is working on this. Some ideas: Get aggressive about hiring the security engineer (who will do code review)...
  • We are simply not good enough at reviewing and responding to new volunteers' contributions quickly. They usually come through Bugzilla, and we have 146 MediaWiki patches in BZ waiting for review: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=patch%2C%20need-review%2C%20&keywords_type=allwords&order=Last%20Changed&type0-0-6=matches&field0-0-4=short_desc&query_format=advanced&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&product=MediaWiki&type0-0-2=substring . I predict the Bugzilla patch queue will continue to exist even after we switch to git, because many newbies won't learn git until after they start contributing patches.
    • Ideas: Mark and I try to get through twenty patches each week (we failed at sprinting in early November; maybe we need a daily meeting?); I encourage a patch review squad, especially new developers who don't have as many commitments already; do it at hackathons as a way to teach code review?
  • Our best source of interested developers will be MediaWiki administrators. But we don't provide a good pipeline for them to get involved in development. And it's hard for administrators to even learn of the existence of extensions and to intuit which extensions would be best to install, and thus to get on the path to becoming power users (and possibly developers).
    • Ideas: get a pointer onto the last page of the install screen that to links to an extensions portal on mediawiki.org, and mention the four that people really ought to install, like Cite; do a sweep of some "powered by MediaWiki" sites and their Special:Version pages and contact them to suggest extensions to install; publicize Gadgets more when ResourceLoader 2 comes out, and suggest to them that they use the main gadgets repo...
  • Investigate contributor agreement/ToS
  • think, and soon, about community/contributor guidelines, both behavioral & coding
  • Build awareness of our Great Movement Projects & Strategic Opportunities in the existing volunteer development community and in new & returning volunteers -- important
    • Goal for the TL;DR team - not just about increasing contribution, also aligning community around our goals.
    • Sumana to author post(s) about priorities from whitepaper (help from Guillaume), to reach out to tech communities, encourage volunteers
  • Ask Arthur Richards to look into easy bugs in MobileFrontend
  • http://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/109091.html
  • check out the gerrit community
  • Get toolserver account to make, host tools to gather & display stats re SVN & bugzilla
  • Blog about AOSA document and mention that programmers often seek "rationale" (from Making Software "Code Talkers" chapter)
  • Ask Global Education team to ask partners: do you need a web API for Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiversity? Do you have any requests? Integrate with Moodle/Desire2Learn/Blackboard/Koha/etc.?
  • email 6th floor people and suggest that they can ask me or Guillaume if they have questions about engineering projects, feasibilities of ideas, etc.
  • Build my knowledge of conferences, distribution channels, and other means by which we can find potential volunteers, and running pilot events as seems feasible.
    • PHPNW: (Manchester, UK) http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/phpnw11/
    • Codemash (not just PHP), Sandusky, OH January
    • Dutch PHP Conference, Amsterdam, usually June
    • php|tek, Chicago, IL, usually May
    • PHP Community Conference, Nashville, usually April
    • PHP Benelux, Belgium, usually January
    • POSSCON (not just PHP), Columbia, SC, usually Feb or March
    • Confoo (not just PHP), Montreal, usually Feb
  • Leslie Carr for Ops-focused meetups for next hackathons in SF?
  • Ask Ian Baker for ideas re SF hacker community outreach
  • Consider PCF, Mozilla, GNOME, etc for QA infrastructure idea -- mailing list, etc.
  • Look into Bugzilla management ops stuff, consult with RobLa
  • Check how Mozilla & Canonical do Agile, + Launchpad, OpenStack & other open source Agile projects
    • investigate Mozilla (they started requiring tests a few years ago) on how they get volunteers to write tests
  • shell bugs: Communication plan. E.g. foundation-l, & think about longterm messaging for all admins, for notifications, & translations.
    • watch out for shell bug process & organize volunteer sprints
  • chase deployment privilege separation
  • travel plans -- submit proposals
  • Ramp up on my technical knowledge of MediaWiki
  • LCA videos to watch - Jake Appelbaum, Trevor & Roan's talk, Leslie Hawthorn's talk, The Ada Initiative, Jacinta

Recruit

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  • reach out to userscripts community
  • look into code review mentorship program
  • ask ops to contribute upstream their custom hacks to OTRS
  • documentation: per RobLa's suggestion:
I would suggest is that we potentially recruit people who work on the more technical parts of enwiki, rather than just focusing on people who are already on mediawiki.org. Maybe start at "Village Pump (technical)" and then also see what editors are active on things like template help pages and other scarier parts of the system.
  • find PHP students/kids to encourage into MediaWiki at schools
    • help them with travel to hackathons & invite them
  • Zend & phpcloud
  • HipHop: Sumana will target Fedora and Ubuntu for recruiting packagers, maybe CentOS (RPMs anyway)
    • (Sumana to help get contributors to package HipHop for different *n*x distros, to make it easier to work with)


Wishlist/to delegate

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