MediaWiki Product Insights/Reports/November 2023
Hi All,
Welcome to the monthly MediaWiki Insights email!
Enable more people to know MediaWiki and contribute effectively
[edit]In the last MW insights email we shared more about our approach to helping people contribute effectively to MediaWiki. A few interesting data points:
The number of contributors to MediaWiki core who have more than > 5 patches continued to grow: We just hit for the first time the goal of 20% since the start of the Foundation’s fiscal year in July, compared to the July-November time period last year. This is exciting to see - now it’s about keeping the momentum and continuing on that path.
Many thanks to all the people who have contributed to MediaWiki core!
The average and median time to first review for patches in MediaWiki core decreased significantly in the period July 1st to Nov 30 compared to the same time period one year earlier.
- Average time to first review dropped from previously 16.5 days to 4.5 days
- Median time to first review dropped from previously 1.2 days to 0.6 days
Many thanks to all the code reviewers of MediaWiki core patches!
Keep in mind that this data is only one data point. There are many factors that play into the experience of contributors; a helpful comment may be more relevant than a fast +1/-1, etc.
Over the past weeks, we have been spending some time with planning initiatives to further support people in onboarding and contributing to MediaWiki:
- We are preparing for a WMF internal MediaWiki code jam in December to try out a few things and focus specifically on the needs of teams.
- One thing we wanted to test in practice at the code jam is the “MediaWiki Quick Install” guide. This has been a collaboration between the Tech Docs team and the MediaWiki Platform team - you can find the latest version of this experiment here: mw:Local_development_quickstart
- We discussed a possible focus project in the next quarter on improving first time MediaWiki (core) contributors’ experience. We’re looking for a few simple, small ideas that we could implement/try out in the next quarter (ticket follows!).
Project snapshot: Analysis of MediaWiki execution timings, fixing issues with logging in on Mobile, progress on RESTBase deprecation and more!
[edit]Performance: Piotr and Timo conducted an analysis of MediaWiki execution timings and identified areas for improvement. One of the fixes promises a 50ms improvement! Timo and Derick worked on bagOStuff improvements (cache layer), shipped on MW-1.42. This work aims to lower the barriers for contributors by making interfaces leaner and more intuitive and is reducing storage access cost from 10ms to ~1 ms. Thank you for your work!
More highlights:
MediaWikiIntegrationTestCase now automatically tracks what database tables get touched during the integration test, removing the need for developers to keep track (Phab:T342301). Many thanks to Daimona and others for their work on this!
Work towards PHP 8.2 support continues, with one helpful outcome being a new DynamicPropertyTestHelper feature (Phab:T326466). Many thanks to TK-999 and all reviewers!
Gergö worked on solving a variety of problems with logging in on mobile (see Phab:T257852#9347008 and below). Many thanks to Gergö and everyone who provided support!
RESTBase sunset: Wikifeeds now calls the Parsoid endpoint in MediaWiki core rather than RESTBase. Many thanks to Yiannis and Daniel for their hard work on making this happen! Cxserver is preparing a deployment to the same soon (thank you, Language team!).
Upcoming:
There is an OutputTransform pipeline that is being introduced to replace ParserOutput::getText(). This pipeline initially targets content that comes from the ParserCache before it is rendered (as a 1:1 getText() equivalent ). The team is likely going to introduce another layer of cacheability of this output so that we can store richer canonical Parsoid content and use this pipeline to transform it for final rendering. Many thanks to Isabelle, CScott and Daniel for this work in progress (Gerrit:967449)!
As one puzzle piece of our product research efforts and platform design explorations, Moriel and others have been working on mapping high level essential user workflows such as edit and patrol against platform components to explore workflow patterns and potential architectural opportunities in the platform. One outcome of this is going to be to describe the key challenges when trying to model our system. Many thanks to Moriel for leading on this work, and Daniel, Timo, Subbu, James, Cindy, Emanuele and Amir S for their support, great questions and ideas!
Up next: Presentations at Semantic MediaWikiCon
[edit]Semantic MediaWikiCon is coming up, virtual and in person from Dec 11-13. We shared about the updates to the rdbms library in the last MW Insights email - if you want to learn more about this work, check out Amir’s presentation at Semantic MediaWikiCon! Subbu and C.Scott are also going to give their yearly update on the parser unification work, Chris will be talking about Codex, and Stef about automated testing for complex MediaWiki topologies. Since the theme of this edition is MediaWiki in the age of AI, Mike will be presenting on the recent experiences with the experimental Wikipedia ChatGPT plugin. Keynote speaker of this years’ Semantic MediaWikiCon is Markus Krötsch.
That’s the last insights email for 2023. The deployment train pauses for the end of the year break, and so does the monthly MW Insights email!
We’ll be following up with a double-edition in January.
Thanks all for reading,