Blog Post:55

by Mark Hershberger on 4 September 2020 17:47 (EDT)

Tags:	MediaWiki, News
People:	Bryan Hildebrand, Mark Hershberger

From the recent #mwstake meeting:

• One week left to comment on the proposed MW Logo change.
• The deprecation policy discussion.
  • Comment from former WMF staff @legoktm.
  • Comment from Hallo Welt! employee Rober Vogel.
• Final(?) MW 1.35 release candidate announced.

One major feature is that Parsoid, a library necessary to use Visual Editor is now written entirely in PHP and both Parsoid and VisualEditor are bundled in the tarball. This means extensions like DiscussionTools can be used without any external dependencies.

• There is an updated visualization of the pingback statistics using the heartbeat ping: chart.

The new heartbeat ping (from 1.30—October 2018—forward) are showing only new installations instead of accumulating all pings. This explains the sawtooth on the chart.

• The creation of a new Developer Portal is is in process. Hopefully, this means that it will be easier to find documentation for MediaWiki.
• PHP 7.2 (which is not supported after November 2020) will not be supported for MW 1.35.
• There is still a discussion (no link found) about no longer supporting single-step upgrades over interim versions.
• Many third party developers will be pleased to hear about the new Gitlab consultation process that is one of the first steps of moving away from gerrit and towards a more familiar development workflow.
• Professional.wiki's MediaWiki user survey is now live! Please contribute.
• There is an upcoming discussion for the Wikimedia Universal Code of Conduct.

This CoC will probably replace the technical one, so it would apply to third party MW users who participate in WMF spaces.

Story time: A morality tale about the MagicNumberedHeadings extension

This past week, Mark was going to update a wiki and needed to make sure the MagicNumberedHeadings extension was up-to-date. He noticed that there used to be a Gerrit-hosted repository for the extension, but the repository and the page itself were gone.

There was a previous copy of the extension in Github, so this wouldn't matter too much, but, upon investigation, there turned to be some good lessons and a bit of a reminder.

Initially, the extension stored its code on the mediawiki.org. Mark uses git to deploy code on, so he needed a repository. He set one up at github and forgot about it (except when he needed to maintain it).

Shortly after importing the extension into github and doing some fixups, he requested a gerrit repository be created from the github repo. Again, though, he didn't update mediawiki.org to point to the repo. And he forgot about the gerrit repository, even when he wanted to later fix the code like he did this past June. If he remembered that he had made a gerrit repo, or documented its creation on MediaWiki.org, he would have seen that @legoktm had already fixed it.

During all this, the mediawiki.org page went unmodified except for a small typo fix up until last month when Karsten Hoffmeyer came across it, saw the code on the page had not been updated since 2016, noticed it didn't work with the newer MagicWordFactory and archived it.

And, so it happened that this past March 28th, a diligent MediaWiki.org administrator created a task to archive the MagicNumberedHeadings gerrit repo. (Mark asked for it to be un-archived.)

All this because Mark did not update the extension page on MediaWiki.org originally.

Documentation is important! How many times do we need to learn that?

3 point buzzer beater

Bryan showed us how the Flex Diagrams extension allows you to easily create and edit BPMN diagrams, Gantt charts, and Mermaid diagrams.