391:), the permission of their principle maintainer(s) notwithstanding. Extension maintainers will then be able to choose between pre- and post-review models for their extensions, and be given control over who is allowed to review code submitted to it. In the case of over 500 extensions, it is yet to be decided whether or not they will follow in the footsteps of their WMF-deployed counterparts, who were migrated on Git day itself; eventually, some will be converted, others will "move out" and continue to use Subversion, while other (mostly abandoned) extensions will be left in the WMF Subversion repository, frozen in read-only mode.
324:(GSoC) places available at the Wikimedia Foundation this summer. Students, of which eight were accepted last year, have until Friday to make proposals for development projects that they would like to work on over the summer months in return for a stipend provided by Google and worth up to US$ 5000. This year's WMF-GSoC coordinator, Sumana Harihareswara, described the selection criteria that would be used to whittle down the 20 or more applicants (of which your author is one) as "quantity over quality... promising continuing contributors... specifics of their proposals" (
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an idea for them to work on from the Ideas List. This took care of the biggest problem with hackathons with new people—half the day spent on figuring out what to work on, and when found, it is completely outside the domain of expertise of the people hacking on the idea. Talking together with them fast to pick an idea within 5 minutes that they can complete in the day fixed this problem and made sure people can concentrate on coding for the rest of the day.
334:: The Wikimedia movement's first new project in six years was launched this week by Wikimedia Deutschland with funding from prominent donors. Wikidata, a machine-readable central repository of data accessible to all, is the culmination of years of discussions and plans on how best to co-ordinate updated statistical information and metadata across multiple Wikimedia projects. To learn more on this "Commons for data", see this week's
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381:). Over 100 guests are expected for the "premier event for the MediaWiki and Wikimedia technical community", drawn from the "user scripts, gadgets, API use, Toolserver, Wikimedia Labs, mobile, structured data template" communities. The hackathon last year brought together some 96 attendees from four continents; no closing date for registrations has yet been announced.
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In total, the hackathon (one of an increasing number of tech-focused
Wikimedia meetups being scheduled across the globe) attracted some 21 programmers, overwhelmingly but not exclusively male. In writing up the event, WMF developer and attendee Yuvi Panda described why he thought coders at the "super
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The event started with us sailing past security reasonably easily, and getting setup with internet without a glitch... Since this was a pure hackathon, there were no explicit tutorials or presentations. As people came in, we asked them what technologies/fields they are familiar with, and picked out
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Though the current trend suggests that issues will continue to be either resolved or ameliorated over the coming weeks, a potential future fly in the ointment is a planned audit of Gerrit's performance in three months' time. Such an audit, a pre-switchover concession to those who initially disliked
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If you click on the images, you get a better idea of the numbers. Note that the figures quote last week were the only proper ones - week 1 couldn't be properly trailed the week before (being the first of its kind), and with the ones quoted this week, there were technical problems that stopped some
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The issues raised (many of which seem, at least on the surface, to be fairly minor) are both too numerous and in many cases too technical to be adequately summarised in a couple of lines; nevertheless, in doubtlessly a positive sign, developers seem to be treating the vast majority of the problems
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Hackathon (held in the Indian city on March 17) began to be posted online this week, giving an insight into the success of a hackathon with a deliberately broad remit. Overall, thirteen projects were demonstrated at the end of the day, including a "text-a-quote" service, a hand-held device-based
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that the slower-than-expected restore of the database is hoped to conclude sometime on April 3. The
Toolserver is normally able to catch up at about 2–3 times the rate of generation, so for each day the backup is old, catch-up will take eight to twelve hours. Based on these estimates, once the
250:"deserve attention public—they represent missing functionality or they have a different approach to something we are struggling with. They are all by people who have a keen interest in the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation and as such they represent our 'latest generation'".
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votes being registered. 10 people have given their thoughts already on next week's topic, and I would expect to reach 20-25 by publication time - hardly loads, but not no-one either. So do please give your own opinion, if you're reading this :) -
356:). In unrelated news, search functionality was broken for some time on March 31; the problem has since been traced to a single host issuing dozens of search queries simultaneously. It is not known whether they did so deliberately or accidentally.
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Simplified versions of the development workflow change, illustrating how code review will (when the dust has settled on the switchover) fit into the new workflow and giving a sense of the new vocabulary
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How many people participate in each of the technology polls Jarry1250 manages? That kind of information would help to determine whether the results fairly reflect the opinions of the community. --
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213:) simply as issues – bugs needing to be fixed – rather than internalising them as complaints with the fundamentals of the new code review process. Indeed, work on a number of these issues has
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328:). Those only just realising that the programme might be for them are advised to make contact immediately; the list of accepted proposals will be made public by April 23.
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344:: Performance issues for certain users (beginning on March 21) were traced this week to a network connection problem at EQIAD, Wikimedia's Virginia-based datacentre (
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Restoration of one of the databases for toolserver is complete. Replication lag is down to 3 days as I type and should be caught up in a few hours. For more info,
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362:: Over the last week, Toolserver lag problems have continued to prove problematic for visitors. Toolserver admin DaB has however
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Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
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If you were responsible for selecting Google Summer of Code proposals to go forward with, what would be your top priority?
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Gerrit, has the potential to lead to the code review system to being abandoned in favour of a competitor system such as
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Somewhere amongst the endless discussions about Gerrit lie details of hackathons, performance blips explained and more
387:: The first non-WMF-deployed extensions sitting in the WMF Subversion repository will be migrated to Git on April 6 (
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database restore completes, it will be less than a week before the lag is resolved and normal toolservice returns.
246:). The quality that WMF localisation team member Gerard Meijssen perceived in many of the projects prompted him
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I've updated the report with a section on toolserver lag; I'm guessing Friday/Saturday for the lag to be gone.
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awesome and super productive" event were able to get so much done in a single eight-hour day:
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for responding to comments and the overly personal nature of the
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Non-WMF-deployed extensions to begin migration to Git
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318:Google Summer of Code proposal deadline approaches
373:: Registration is now open for the fourth annual
469:to accommodate any future changes in domain name
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620:lagging almost 2 weeks behind at this time?
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457:http://www.zerozerofootball.com/jogador.php
768:Knowledge (XXG) Signpost archives 2012-04
360:Toolserver lag to end soon... possibly...
197:). By contrast, the new code review tool
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473:Helpful Pixie Bot's 49th BRfA
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436:Thehelpfulbot's 12th BRfA
332:Wikidata scheme launched
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379:wikitech-l mailing list
346:wikitech-l mailing list
244:wikitech-l mailing list
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174:The change in the core
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42:← Back to Contents
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