Wikimedia CH/Tech boost/Diary
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)