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FlaggedRevs en.wp deployment update

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erik at wikimedia

Oct 15, 2009, 11:14 PM

Post #1 of 12 (1050 views)
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FlaggedRevs en.wp deployment update

All,

this is a quick note to let you know that we've signed on two people,
William Pietri and Howie Fung, to help us on a contract basis with the
deployment of Flagged Revisions on the English Wikipedia.

William is an IT consultant and systems/software engineer; see his
userpage at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri --
he is also a long-time Wikipedian. He will support the overall
roll-out coordination and requirements planning.

Howie is an experienced Product Manager who previously worked with
Real Networks/Rhapsody and PayPal; see LinkedIn profile here:
<http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=3830901>.

We met Howie during our search for the Multimedia Usability Product
Manager position, and were impressed by his background, particularly
with regard to user focused product development, and some great first
thoughts he sent us on how to improve the usability of Wikimedia
Commons. Given his background, we thought it would be great to have
his help in doing some more systematic analysis of usability,
terminology and workflow issues with the proposed English Wikipedia
roll-out.

We are eager to roll out the "Flagged Protection" functionality soon.
As Howie and William get up to speed, they'll post info on remaining
work, and get community feedback on what's vital to have before the
first release.
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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mrzmanwiki at gmail

Oct 16, 2009, 9:20 AM

Post #2 of 12 (997 views)
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Re: FlaggedRevs en.wp deployment update [In reply to]

Erik Moeller wrote:
> All,
>
> this is a quick note to let you know that we've signed on two people,
> William Pietri and Howie Fung, to help us on a contract basis with the
> deployment of Flagged Revisions on the English Wikipedia.
>
> William is an IT consultant and systems/software engineer; see his
> userpage at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri --
> he is also a long-time Wikipedian. He will support the overall
> roll-out coordination and requirements planning.
>
> Howie is an experienced Product Manager who previously worked with
> Real Networks/Rhapsody and PayPal; see LinkedIn profile here:
> <http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=3830901>.
>
> We met Howie during our search for the Multimedia Usability Product
> Manager position, and were impressed by his background, particularly
> with regard to user focused product development, and some great first
> thoughts he sent us on how to improve the usability of Wikimedia
> Commons. Given his background, we thought it would be great to have
> his help in doing some more systematic analysis of usability,
> terminology and workflow issues with the proposed English Wikipedia
> roll-out.
>
> We are eager to roll out the "Flagged Protection" functionality soon.
> As Howie and William get up to speed, they'll post info on remaining
> work, and get community feedback on what's vital to have before the
> first release.

What exactly is William going to be doing? From what I understood, all
of the coding work is basically done and enwiki has settled on a
configuration (and if there is coding work to do, it seems like it would
make more sense to hire someone who is already familiar with the
FlaggedRevs/MediaWiki code).

As far as usability goes, FlaggedRevs has been in use on other large
projects (German Wikipedia, English Wikinews) for quite a while now, and
I know the eventual goal has been to have this on the English Wikipedia,
why did we wait until now to start studying this?

This seems like it has the potential to introduce even more delays into
something that people are already impatient for.

--
Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)

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erik at wikimedia

Oct 16, 2009, 10:12 AM

Post #3 of 12 (999 views)
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Re: FlaggedRevs en.wp deployment update [In reply to]

2009/10/16 Alex <mrzmanwiki [at] gmail>:
> What exactly is William going to be doing?

For one thing, hand-hold the process until the technology is rolled
out, since there is nobody else internally who can actually devote any
attention to it - Brion just left the organization, so we have a CTO
vacancy to fill, plus several other key vacancies, and an upcoming
fundraiser, etc. The project needs focused attention.

Secondly, while the technology is basically feature-complete at least
for the flagged protection part, the configuration used on en.wp is
unique: it's a per-page approach to FlaggedRevs. The flagged
protection functionality was integrated into the page protection UI by
Aaron just very recently, for example, and we need to systematically
assess things like labels, icons, and workflows together with the
community, which will require a few further changes to the extension
as well. Again, this is about coordinating this process.
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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william at scissor

Oct 16, 2009, 11:26 AM

Post #4 of 12 (1002 views)
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Re: FlaggedRevs en.wp deployment update [In reply to]

Hi, folks! Erik already answered this, but I wanted to add one bit.

Alex wrote:
> What exactly is William going to be doing? [...]
>
> This seems like it has the potential to introduce even more delays into
> something that people are already impatient for.
>

That's a very reasonable worry, but I don't think that will be the case.

Aaron will continue to do any coding[1], and my goal is to maximize the
amount of time he can spend actually doing that. Partly by handling the
communication with the community, and partly by turning that, plus
Howie's usability recommendations, into a queue of clear, precise
feature requests.

In addition, I'm hoping we can split the future work into a series of
releases, rather than one big one. That will let us get the core part
out as soon as possible. Not only will that benefit readers and the
community, but feedback and data from real-world usage will help make
future releases better.

William

[1] If I end up with extra cycles, I'd love to write some automated
tests for this to hook into the existing test suite. The usage by the en
and de wikis is divergent enough that it seems like there's a real risk
of accidentally breaking something, and I'd rather have the computer do
my worrying for me. I aim to stay out of the production code, though.

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Simetrical+wikilist at gmail

Oct 16, 2009, 11:29 AM

Post #5 of 12 (1003 views)
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Re: FlaggedRevs en.wp deployment update [In reply to]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 2:26 PM, William Pietri <william [at] scissor> wrote:
> [1] If I end up with extra cycles, I'd love to write some automated
> tests for this to hook into the existing test suite.

What existing test suite?

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william at scissor

Oct 16, 2009, 11:35 AM

Post #6 of 12 (1000 views)
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Re: FlaggedRevs en.wp deployment update [In reply to]

Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 2:26 PM, William Pietri <william [at] scissor> wrote:
>
>> [1] If I end up with extra cycles, I'd love to write some automated
>> tests for this to hook into the existing test suite.
>>
>
> What existing test suite?

Well, looking here, I see a column for "Tests":

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki

I figure that means there are some tests in the code base and a
continuous integration server that runs them. And I see at least a brief
mention of testing here:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker#Testing

If anybody has more info, though, I'm all ears.

William

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innocentkiller at gmail

Oct 16, 2009, 11:37 AM

Post #7 of 12 (1002 views)
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Re: FlaggedRevs en.wp deployment update [In reply to]

You know...that /tests directory. It always keeps fooling
people into thinking we keep unit tests there ;-)

-Chad

On Oct 16, 2009 2:29 PM, "Aryeh Gregor"
<Simetrical+wikilist [at] gmail<Simetrical%2Bwikilist [at] gmail>>
wrote:

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 2:26 PM, William Pietri <william [at] scissor> wrote:
> [1] If I end up with ...
What existing test suite?

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innocentkiller at gmail

Oct 16, 2009, 11:41 AM

Post #8 of 12 (1003 views)
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Re: FlaggedRevs en.wp deployment update [In reply to]

Right now the only test we run is the parser tests which
is just a big list of expected input/output for the parser.
It's by no means complete and only covers the parser.

The stuff in /t and /tests should be ignored...as they're
wildly out of date and completely unmaintaned.

-Chad

On Oct 16, 2009 2:35 PM, "William Pietri" <william [at] scissor> wrote:

Aryeh Gregor wrote: > On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 2:26 PM, William Pietri <
william [at] scissor> wrote: >...
Well, looking here, I see a column for "Tests":

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki

I figure that means there are some tests in the code base and a
continuous integration server that runs them. And I see at least a brief
mention of testing here:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker#Testing

If anybody has more info, though, I'm all ears.

William

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william at scissor

Oct 16, 2009, 12:01 PM

Post #9 of 12 (997 views)
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Re: FlaggedRevs en.wp deployment update [In reply to]

Hi, Chad. Thanks for the help.

Chad wrote:
> Right now the only test we run is the parser tests which
> is just a big list of expected input/output for the parser.
> It's by no means complete and only covers the parser.
>

That's interesting. Some tests are better than no tests, for sure.

Luckily, we have a giant corpus of known-good inputs and outputs, so it
would be fun to do some mutation testing to find the holes in the parser
coverage. At a conference yesterday I asked around to see if anybody had
heard of a mutation testing tool (like http://jester.sourceforge.net/)
for PHP and regexes, but alas, nobody had.

If somebody gets interested in that, let me know, and I'm glad to dig
further.

> The stuff in /t and /tests should be ignored...as they're
> wildly out of date and completely unmaintaned.

Good to know. If I get to the point where I have time to write tests,
I'll ask here further about the best way to go about it.

William

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Oct 16, 2009, 12:05 PM

Post #10 of 12 (1000 views)
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Re: FlaggedRevs en.wp deployment update [In reply to]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 2:35 PM, William Pietri <william [at] scissor> wrote:
> And I see at least a brief mention of testing here:
>
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker#Testing

I've updated that to be more accurate.

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bryan.tongminh at gmail

Oct 16, 2009, 12:30 PM

Post #11 of 12 (999 views)
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Re: FlaggedRevs en.wp deployment update [In reply to]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 8:41 PM, Chad <innocentkiller [at] gmail> wrote:
> The stuff in /t and /tests should be ignored...as they're
> wildly out of date and completely unmaintaned.
>
I suggest that we svn rm them, because they are only tricking people
into thinking we have a testing framework.

Bryan

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william at scissor

Oct 16, 2009, 1:00 PM

Post #12 of 12 (1001 views)
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Re: FlaggedRevs en.wp deployment update [In reply to]

Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 2:35 PM, William Pietri <william [at] scissor> wrote:
>
>> And I see at least a brief mention of testing here:
>>
>> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker#Testing
>>
>
> I've updated that to be more accurate.
>

Thanks. That's helpful to know.

If end up with enough time to do something about the lack of tests, I'll
start by bringing it up here to see if there's a way to do it that
avoids the fate of previous efforts.

Thanks,

William
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