Wikimedia CH/Tech boost
Wikimedia CH sometime organizes a Tech Boost during which a project will be boosted with development support.
About
[edit]During a Tech Boost, at least one IT staff member will be available in this channel:
During these meetings you can meet one of these developers anftecd system administrators, have a Jitsi Meeting conference with them, discover what they do, what are the current issues, share your ideas about a development, report bugs, leave feedback etc.
Projects
[edit]Here a showcase of some projects often involved in Wikimedia CH Tech boosts:
| Description and challenges | |
|---|---|
| DicoAdo.org
|
core innovation principle: Factory DicoAdo.org is an independent community project powered by the MediaWiki software. Since 2023, it's hosted in the Wikimedia CH's infrastructure. Boosting this entry, the technical quality of the DicoAdo.org project will be advanced.
|
| Wikimini.org
|
core innovation principle: Factory Wikimini is an independent community project founded in 2008 and designed as a MediaWiki wiki farm, covering multiple languages. Since 2021, it's hosted in the Wikimedia CH's infrastructure. Boosting this entry, the technical quality of the Wikimini project will be advanced.
Activities that can be boosted:
|
| WMCH Contributors annual report
|
core innovation principle: Incubator The WMCH contributors annual report is a tool born in 2020 to generate community reports, useful to give prizes to the community. This project can be boosted to improve criteria, data collection methods, performances, maintainability, documentation, user interface, etc. Activities that can be boosted:
|
| Community technical support
|
core innovation principle: Pit-stop During this boost we will invest some development for community templates and Scribunto Lua modules (introducing new functionalities, fixing bugs, improving documentation - whatever you think should be prioritized).
|
| WMCH Matomo
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core innovation principle: Safe space During this boost Wikimedia CH can contribute in making reports with their dedicated Matomo instance. We can analyze web traffic on some websites and some interesting projects adopting very strange criteria, create new variables, check global performances, monitor internal goals, etc.
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| WMCH Cronos
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core innovation principle: Incubator During this boost Wikimedia CH will contribute in developing our "definitive wiki-calendar", a wiki-friendly calendar.
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| Minipedia
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core innovation principle: Incubator During this boost Wikimedia CH will contribute in developing Minipedia: a prototype born in 2021, to access simplified and reduced ("mini") versions of Wikipedia articles. Try Minipedia's concept online.
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| WMCH Grant
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core innovation principle: Pit-stop During 2020, Wikimedia CH implemented an automatic notification system in its Grant apply page. This activity is considered stable but can be boosted to introduce new features.
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| WMCH Tech Infrastructure
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core innovation principle: Safe space During this boost we will invest on new powerful tools for Wikimedia CH members or the Wikimedia community or we will just maintain Wikimedia CH components up 'n' running with latest security patches. This takes in consideration documentation, release of our configurations to the community, installation of new features, hardening, etc.
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| MediaWiki goodies
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core innovation principle: Pit-stop Development activities related to MediaWiki integrations and extensions can be boosted. Core Activities concluded:
|
| Zabbix monitoring
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core innovation principle: Safe space The Zabbix monitoring is a Wikimedia CH activity that can be bosteed to be even more proactive in identifying an infrastructure problem in Wikimedia CH's servers hosting community projects. Activities that can be boosted:
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| LimeSurvey
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core innovation principle: Safe space The WMCH LimeSurvey platform is available to WMCH staff members to conduct multi-language surveys, in a GDPR-friendly way and 100% data ownership. |
| Argo Wikimetrics
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core innovation principle: Pit-stop The Argo Wikimetrics was a project started in 2017 to collect metrics from wiki. Project information: Wikimedia CH/Project/Argo Wikimetrics Activities that can be boosted: Bug fixes, addition of more languages, etc. |
| Wiki2Map
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core innovation principle: Pit-stop Wiki2Map is a cute project that helps in visually showing concepts from Wikipedia articles. History of the tool: (Italian) wikibooks:it:Software libero a scuola/Wiki2map Activities that can be boosted: |
FAQ
[edit]- How to report a bug?
- How to hack?
If you are a Free/Libre software developer, we have a lot of amazing stuff to be realized! Contact us in the talk page to discover how to do a "pull request" to introduce new features in the software we maintain and develop.
You can also suggest new features directly in the talk page or in this Wikimedia Phabricator Workboard:
- How to propose a new priority?
Feel free to contact Wikimedia CH, or directly User:Ilario (Community & Education program manager for Wikimedia Switzerland), to candidate your favorite Wikimedia project for a boost.
The funds are not infinite but we will try to do what we can. Thanks for your tips!
- How to contribute?
Apart from all the ways already mentioned above, feel free to donate to Wikimedia CH to directly fuel the Wikimedia CH Tech boosts and other initiatives!
Team
[edit]Feel free to contact the users involved in the WMCH Tech Boosts:
- User:Ilario – technical supervisor and project manager (main contact - tech boost evaluator and activator)
- User:Valerio Bozzolan – 2020-2022 tech boost operator (tech boost operator)
- ...
Your help in contacting us to activate a Wikimedia CH Tech boost on your idea or problem is very precious. Don't be afraid to contact us! Thank you!
What's New
[edit]Welcome in the WMCH Tech Boost Diary! (Subscribe)
VisualEditor for members and executive wikis
[edit]Last friday, during the GLAMHack 2023 in Geneve, we unlocked VisualEditor for both these internal wikis:
Certainly those who do not wish to use VisualEditor can continue not to use it. But this may be useful to speed up editing of tables. For example, these huge tables (visible to members at the moment). Have fun! --ValerioBozz (talk) 07:57, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
https://members.wikimedia.ch/wiki/Infrastructure/Inventories
DicoAdo.org successfully migrated
[edit]Thanks to the great supervision of the DicoAdo's author User:DSwissK, last week the Tech Team concluded the migration of this lovely community project. We also tested the destination server against a couple of workshops without any problem.
The server will still be in full-control of the community, with some little assistance that could be requested. Thanks DicoAdo, and take care of this server!
Next step? Upgrading the wikis to latest stable version, etc. --ValerioBozz (talk) 07:57, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/dicoado.org/
Fixed technical debt in Argo Metrics
[edit]Technical debt is when our airplane hasn't belts. That's not a problem for a prototype, but you know that will be to do. Today we fixed some small technical debt in the Argo Metrics platform.
The platform deals with querying databases of some wikis, and then do stats. The problem: some time ago, many databases were on the same Wikimedia server and you could make certain undocumented speculations. The instrument stopped working because all connections were being made to a server that did not have requested databases, but some others. In fact, you should, for each language, query the related hostname, pointing to the right server. So you cannot just query one hostname, but you should this operation dynamically, basing on what language you need.
But in addition, these servers are not public. So to query them, it is necessary to do some hacky things.
Today we have both corrected this tool and proposed a potential simplification for the whole community. Please see both tickets for info. --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 21:56, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
Migrating from Gerrit to Gitlab
[edit]Since we are creating some new Wikimedia CH -related git repositories, it seems like a good thing to migrate our old repositories from Gerrit, which has a pretty complicated user interface, even just to find your repository by name, browse its README and see last commits and who can commit. So we started migrating everything to Wikimedia GitLab, which on the other hand is very cute and it has tons of stuff within a single click away. In addition, people are much more familiar with the concept of pull requests, so we expect more contributions (note: we will consider 1 contribution more than 0 contributions). --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 21:35, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
Self-Hosting a Nextcloud
[edit]Wikimedia CH requested a new NextCloud (read more on Wikipedia: w:Nextcloud) to share documents with the community. In this way, users only execute Free software on their devices.
This is in line with multiple points in the document Wikimedia CH/Information Technology Strategy, at least:
- 1. Technology as support for Free Knowledge
- 2. In Wikimedia, the User is never the Product
- 3. People creates services. IT processes support people.
- 5. We communicate with Open Standards
- 6. Technology respects Environmental Resources
As usual, our NextCloud instance is hosted in a Switzerland data center, and using massive use of renewable energy. Now we're going to try to make the best use of it.
The probable next step, is enabling a collaboration suite like Collabora VS OnlyOffice. We will probably land on Collabora, since it gives super-compatibility with legacy documents. But this will need a further Tech Boost. ValerioBozz (talk) 08:45, 24 April 2024 (UTC)
Software Development Guidelines
[edit]Everyone is welcome in sharing feedback on this document:
Wikimedia CH/Software Development Guidelines
The above document received some internal feedback, and has yet to receive consent from Ilario Valdelli and more interns, so, this is really an early request for comments.
Why this stub was already shared? That's desired. Because it's nice to work with "public as default":
Wikimedia_CH/Information_Technology_Strategy#8. Public as Default
Thanks for any early feedback in the Software Development Guidelines. ValerioBoz-WMCH (talk) 08:20, 3 June 2024 (UTC)
Open Source Adoption Boost
[edit]WMCH is currently evaluating partners to adopt:
- BigBlueButton (to create a communication tool that records video/audio and scale, without the need to become a customer of a proprietary software)
- Discourse (to create a community forum, connected with the Fediverse; to simplify the creation of event announcements, with OAuth registration with Meta-wiki)
- Moodle: to create an e-learning platform for WMCH and partners for the Education
- Vault Garden
What we already have:
- Nextcloud
- Discourse internal demo
- Zabbix notification platform
Stay tuned --ValerioBoz-WMCH (talk) 07:08, 29 July 2024 (UTC)
Adopted Vaultwarden: to share and archive encrypted secrets
[edit]
Wikimedia CH, like many other organizations, has some secrets to be shared among staff. Why not sharing secrets with a simple, collaborative, encrypted, and nice Free/Libre and open source way?
Our new technological partner kindly activated a demo instance for us. I cannot share details, contact Ilario! :D ValerioBoz-WMCH (talk) 21:34, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
Cassandra GLAM tool is working again
[edit]
The Cassandra GLAM tool is working again and showing statistical info about Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums in Switzerland and so on. For all technical details see the mentioned task phabricator:T374302. ValerioBoz-WMCH (talk) 19:20, 29 November 2024 (UTC)