Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-11-12/Technology report
MediaWiki 1.20 and the prospects for getting 1.21 code reviewed promptly
Code review statistics bounce back in October after difficult September
In late September, the Technology report published its findings about (particularly median) code review times. To the 23,900 changesets analysed the first time (the data for which has been updated), the Signpost added data from the 9,000 or so changesets contributed between September 17 and November 9 to a total of 93,000 reviews across 45,000 patchsets. Bots and self-reviews were also discarded, but reviews made by a different user in the form of a superseding patch were retained. Finally, users were categorised by hand according to whether they would be best regarded as staff or volunteers. The new analyses were consistent with the predictions of the previous analysis.
Our investigation found that September represented a particularly poor month for code review (across both extensions and "core" MediaWiki code) but that this loss was more than picked up in October, which was the best month on record for code review. Specifically, 50% of patchsets submitted during October were reviewed just two and a half hours after submission, and 75% within 18 hours. The 95% percentile remains stubbornly high at nearly two weeks, suggesting that finding reviewers for certain types of patch remains hard.
The staff–volunteer divide highlighted in the last report remains. The median patchset was reviewed twice as quickly if you were a staff member working on an extension in October rather than a volunteer, and although it is too early to tell conclusively, there seems to be a similar gap for contributors to "core" and/or WMF-deployed extensions. 44% of all-time first reviews come from five reviewers (all staff), though this figure is down from 55% at the time of the last report, suggesting a significant diversification in the last 7 weeks. On a positive note, the percentage of all-time first reviews coming from volunteers has also increased – from 14% to 25% – as the Foundation gives a large number of volunteers more reviewing power.
As with any statistics, these figures should be taken with a degree of caution. The full dataset is available upon request.
In brief
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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 several weeks.
- MediaWiki 1.20 released: MediaWiki 1.20, the first release to external sites since May, was finalised this week (wikitech-l mailing list). Thanks to the decoupling of (now biweekly) WMF deployments and (six-monthly) external releases, Wikimedians will already be familiar with its contents, which include new diff colours, action=info pages and the new Special:MostInterwikis special page. Most WMF wikis, meanwhile, are currently on MediaWiki 1.21wmf3 and will receive wmf4 (which includes a change to the user toolbox dropping use of the word "my") shortly.
- TimedMediaHandler goes live on all wikis: After a development spanning almost two years (see previous Signpost coverage), the TimedMediaHandler extension went live on Wikimedia Commons this week, having already gone live on other smaller wikis earlier in the week, meaning that it is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. The extension overhauls MediaWiki's video-handling capabilities, as was highlighted in a post on the Wikimedia blog and in several news articles.
- Wikivoyage hosted on WMF servers: Starting from this week, wikivoyage.org and its subdomains (en, fr, and so on) are hosted on Wikimedia servers as part of the Foundation's central wiki cluster. Readers may in fact already be logged in to Wikivoyage as it is also now in the SUL auto-login list. A user account migration plan is available; as detailed in previous Signpost coverage, much technical work is ongoing, including the import of images and support work for the aforementioned user migration.
- Wikidata booming, but interface translations needed: As Wikidata.org, the central data repository currently functioning purely as an interwiki repository, has continued its rapid expansion, now documenting the interwiki links of some 50,000 articles (though its is not yet installed on any "client" wiki). WMF Language team member Amir Aharoni took the opportunity to appeal for interface translations for the project as its audience internationalises (Wikimedia blog).
- Two bots approved: 2 BRfAs were recently approved for use on the English Wikipedia:
- SantoshBot's 1st BRfA, adding, removing and modifying interwiki links;
- Legobot's 27th BRfA, creating Palestine related redirects;
- At the time of writing, 18 BRfAs are active. As usual, community input is encouraged.
Discuss this story
Next week's poll
Next week's poll is extremely subjective. All of the available answers (except "Other") rely on the assumption that lowest-priority bugs are worthless. I (and many other) strongly disagree. Lowest means in particular "Patches very welcome", and it is often a gathering point for motivated volunteers to write a patch and get an ACTUAL PROBLEM FIXED. Quite the contrary of "worthless". Please cancel this poll, as its results will necessarily be flawed and mis-used. Also: You write "This week saw a discussion [...]", so the least you could do is provide a link to said discussion. Previous polls were usually of high quality, so I am surprised by how obviously unethical this one is. Nicolas1981 (talk) 03:25, 15 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]