How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

Incidents

6 documented incidents last month. That's above the two-year and five-year median of 4 per month (per Incident graphs).

2021-11-04 large file upload timeouts
Impact: For 9 months, editors were unable to upload large files (e.g. to Commons). Editors would receive generic error messages, typically after a timeout. In retrospect, a dozen different distinct production errors had been reported and regularly observed that were related and provided different clues, however most of these remained untriaged and uninvestigated for months. This may be related to the affected components having no active code steward.

2021-11-05 TOC language converter
Impact: For 6 hours, wikis experienced a blank or missing table of contents on many pages. For up to 3 days prior, wikis that have multiple language variants (such as Chinese Wikipedia) displayed the table of contents in an incorrect or inconsistent language variant (which are not understandable to some readers).

2021-11-10 cirrussearch commonsfile outage
Impact: For ~2.5 hours, the Search results page was unavailable on many wikis (except English Wikipedia). On Wikimedia Commons the search suggestions feature was unresponsive as well.

2021-11-18 codfw ipv6 network
Impact: For 8 minutes, the Codfw cluster experienced partial loss of IPv6 connectivity for upload.wikimedia.org. This did not affect availability of the service because the "Happy Eyeballs" algorithm ensures browsers (and other clients) automatically fallback to IPv4. The Codfw cluster generally serves Mexico and parts of the US and Canada. The upload.wikimedia.org service serves photos and other media/document files, such as displayed in Wikipedia articles.

2021-11-23 core network routing
Impact: For about 12 minutes, Eqiad was unable to reach hosts in other data centers via public IP addresses. This was due to a BGP routing error. There was no impact on end-user traffic, and impact on internal traffic was limited (only Icinga alerts themselves) because internal traffic generally uses local IP subnets which we currently route with OSPF instead of BGP.

2021-11-25 eventgate-main outage
Impact: For about 3 minutes, eventgate-main was down. This resulted in 25,000 MediaWiki backend errors due to inability to queue new jobs. About 1000 user-facing web requests failed (HTTP 500 Error). Event production briefly dropped from ~3000 per second to 0 per second.

Incident follow-up

Remember to review and schedule Incident Follow-up work in Phabricator, which are preventive measures and tech debt mitigations written down after an incident is concluded. Read more about past incidents at Incident status on Wikitech.

Recently resolved incident follow-up:

Disable DPL on wikis that aren't using it.
Filed after a July 2021 incident, done by Amir (Ladsgroup) and Kunal (Legoktm).

Create easy access to MySQL ports for faster incident response and maintenance.
Filed in Sep 2021, and carried out by Stevie (Kormat).

Create paging alert for primary DB hosts.
Filed after a Sept 2019 incident, done by Stevie (Kormat).

Trends

November saw 27 new production error reports of which 14 were resolved, and 13 remain open and carry over to the next month.

Of the 301 errors still open from previous months, 16 were resolved. Together with the 13 carried over from November that brings the workboard to 298 unresolved tasks.

For the month-over-month numbers, refer to the spreadsheet data.

Outstanding errors

💡 Did you know:

To find your team's error reports, use the appropriate "Filter" link in the sidebar of the workboard.

View Workboard

Issues carried over from recent months:

Thanks!

Thank you to everyone who helped by reporting, investigating, or resolving problems in Wikimedia production. Thanks!

Until next time,

– Timo Tijhof

In spring 2018, Mike Benjamin was in his third year of graduate school for Occupational Hygiene at the University of Cincinnati. As an assignment for one of his classes, Mike was asked to edit Wikipedia through Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Student Program. Mike enjoyed the experience so much that he knew he wanted to stay engaged with Wikipedia.

Today, Mike teaches his own classes at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte — and for the last three terms, he’s been assigning his own students to edit Wikipedia through our Wikipedia Student Program.

“I think the main difference as an instructor is seeing some of the same reservations and mistakes I made as a student, but now I am able to see that article edits won’t stop after publishing each contribution in order to continually improve each article,” he says. “I was a little afraid to make my first edit as a student, in case I messed up the article. Now I hear that same hesitancy from a good portion of my students (and they sometimes make the first sentence edit with me watching via Zoom). After they submit the edit, they realize that it didn’t crash Wikipedia, so they feel more confident with the next one.”

Both the course he took as a student and now the courses he teaches are supported by both Wiki Education and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which has a long-standing effort to support content development on occupational safety and health-related topics on Wikipedia. As a student, Mike edited two articles: National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA) and Workplace Health Surveillance.

“I chose NORA as a topic because in my graduate program, we took a lot of Industrial Hygiene coursework, and we were focused on so many topics that we sometimes lost sight of the bigger picture — namely, the focus areas that NIOSH had identified as priority areas for occupational health research (industries and their related health outcomes). It’s important for people to see that such a strategy is needed when limited resources are available, and NIOSH tries to direct those resources responsibly,” he says. “The other topic, Workplace Health Surveillance, seemed to combine multiple topics together, and editing was needed. I’m not sure how much improvement I provided on that one, but it was still a good learning experience.”

Mike kept editing after the end of his coursework, adding information about safety to several articles throughout 2019. When he started teaching at UNC Charlotte in 2020, his courses were cross-listed as both undergraduate and graduate courses, so Mike immediately thought that adding the Wikipedia assignment as the additional work needed for the graduate level was a perfect fit. The NIOSH community, including longtime NIOSH-Wikipedia advocate Thais Morata and NIOSH Wikimedian in Residence John Sadowski, offered support. And Wiki Education’s framework and training have also been helpful, as well as the course Dashboard, which shows page views.

“It’s easy to get a sense of satisfaction when you know that people are reading the information you provided in your article,” he says.

Mike’s program attracts many international students. To make the assignment more meaningful to them, he’s opened the possibility of translating course-related Good Articles from Wikipedia into their native languages, including Arabic and Spanish.

“I believe this has increased the motivation of many of our international students, since the students demonstrate the value of their language in a translation, learn how to write formally in their language, and provide service to their home communities, where occupational health and safety information may be lacking,” he says. “After their page is published, they can look at their article ‘statistics’, like page views, which provides positive feedback for them. In short, I think that this effort is a respectful effort for inclusion and sharing of ideas in our program, which sometimes gets overlooked in the engineering disciplines.”

And his students and Wikipedia’s readers aren’t the only ones getting something out of writing for or translating Wikipedia articles.

“I learn new things as part of the assignment, too,” he says. “The translations are pretty cool actually. For example, what do you do when there’s not a direct translation for an English word? I had a few students argue in class about whether a translated word was correct or not, but nobody knew the ‘correct’ answer. I usually have to ask for assistance — a contact at NIOSH for Arabic translations and a colleague in my department who is fluent in Spanish. English speakers can learn more than they expect about translations (and how dialects create a challenge) and appreciate some of the language differences.”

This engagement with students is part of what Mike values most about running a Wikipedia assignment, and why he keeps doing it every term. He’s already signed up to teach with Wikipedia again in spring 2022.

To teach with Wikipedia, visit teach.wikiedu.org.
Image credit: Bz3rk, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

30/11/2021-06/12/2021

Breaking news

• At the OSMF general meeting on 12 December, chair, Allan Mustard announced the results of the election to the board. Guillaume Rischard, Amanda McCann, and Mikel Maron were re-elected. Roland Olbricht joins them as a new member. 742 ballots were cast. The detailed results are available.

Mapping campaigns

• [1] The UN Mappers – IIEP UNESCO mapping campaign, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education in Madagascar, brought together almost 900 volunteers to advance education planning: 9845 km of roads were mapped around the Vakinankaratra region in Madagascar. 97% of schools are now connected to road network data, compared to just over half at the beginning of the project. The road network produced is processed using the IIIEP-UNESCO school catchment plugin to assess travel times children undertake every day from home to school, and to design better interventions.

Mapping

• darkonus gave instructions explaining how to install JOSM on a Mac with Apple Silicon.
• Forteller shared the adventure of surveying by bike and then mapping more than 100 parks in Oslo, which led to an opportunity to discover new places.
• Requests have been made for comments on the following proposals:
  • amenity=library_dropoff for mapping a place where library patrons can return or drop-off books, other than the library itself.
  • ele=* to allow the use of any of the documented height units for tagging elevations.

Community

• OpenMapChile reported on their progress on the mapping of urban trees, specifically in the city of Valdivia, where they have achieved a total of 15,062 trees added.
• OpenStreetMap Belgium’s Mapper of the Month for December is d1sr4n from Russia.
• TechnicallyNotDeaf, a beginner contributor from Victoria, Australia, outlined what they have learnt from their first week of mapping.
• User pedr0faria was the winner of the second edition of the UN Map Marathon, the event organised by UN Mappers to contribute to UN projects through mapping in OpenStreetMap.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Michael Spreng, on behalf of the Membership Working Group, indicated that during the election season, which often leads to huge volumes of messages, contributors are limited to one message a day on talk-osmf.

OSM research

• A scientific article discussed > the contribution of cartography to the real and the virtual, including the case of mapathons that make it possible to make real the presence of people missing from maps other than OSM.

Maps

• Yves noted having added the remaining missing functionality of the OpenSnowMap website to the mobile-friendly version, it’s time to de-commission the older version. In case you feel lost, you can still find the old version (at least for a while) from the menu option ‘LEGACY OPENSNOWMAP.ORG’

Open Data

• Michael Cieslik demonstrated how open elevation profile data can be used to compare buildings heights with LOD2 style 3D renderings of OSM data. The discussion in Michael’s tweet focuses on the differences in the datasets and potential means of synchronisation.

Software

• While discussing the topic of software governance Roland Olbricht pointed out that the Overpass API has a low bus factor. mmd added > that the existence of their fork doesn’t necessarily increase the bus factor and things other than the number of developers can help a project survive in the long term.
• The development team behind the OSM Welcome Tool recently wrote instructions on how to use the tool (available on the tool’s wiki page) and are looking for feedback from new users.
• Robhubi explained > the workflow they use to import data from GIP to compare with OSM. The Graph Integration Platform (GIP) is Austria’s online system for collecting and sharing transport route information.
• The Russian internet company VK (the russian Facebook ex-MailRu Group) has deployed an overpass turbo website. They have also published > a tutorial on how to use it.

Other “geo” things

• Anonymaps informed us of an exciting opportunity to work for Google in return for no pay.
• The Bucharest court confirmed [ro] > the decision of a chief prosecutor of DIICOT (Direcţia de Investigare a Infracţiunilor de Criminalitate Organizată şi Terorism) to reopen the criminal investigation in a case in which the Romanian Patriarchate filed a criminal complaint after the location and name of the ‘Cathedral of the Salvation of the Nation‘ on Google Maps was changed to the ‘Cathedral of the Stupidity of the Nation’.
• The Department of Geoinformatics at Heidelberg University is seeking a part-time research assistant (m, f, d) as soon as possible to develop methods for generating spatially high-resolution CO2 emission inventories using methods from Spatial Data Science and Machine Learning (esp. Deep Learning) in the context of the GeCO project.
• Google Mexico has proposed a crowdsourced project for mapping all sorts of street stalls, which account for 50% of the businesses in the country. These businesses are not visible on the map, and Google Mexico took notice of the situation from custom maps prepared by a freelance data analyst.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
建设街道	长株潭区域作业绘图后续修正		2021-12-10 – 2021-12-15
Grenoble	OSM Grenoble Atelier OpenStreetMap		2021-12-13
臺北市	OSM x Wikidata Taipei #35		2021-12-13
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2021-12-13
	Toronto OpenStreetMap Enthusiasts Meeting		2021-12-14
Washington	MappingDC Mappy Hour		2021-12-15
20095	Hamburger Mappertreffen		2021-12-14
Derby	East Midlands OSM Pub Meet-up : Derby		2021-12-14
	Reunión mensual de la comunidad española		2021-12-14
Decatur County	OSM US Mappy Hour		2021-12-16
京都市	幕末京都オープンデータソン#15：岩倉具視と岩倉村		2021-12-18
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle Lyon		2021-12-21
Bonn	146. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2021-12-21
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2021-12-21
京都市	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第28回 智積院		2021-12-25
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)	✓	2021-12-27
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Treffen (online)		2021-12-29

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by PierZen, SK53, TheSwavu, cafeconleche, derFred, Can.

Talk pages are a pretty key part of how wikis have worked over the years. Realtime chat apps and services are probably changing this dynamic somewhat, but they are still used, and also most of the history of these pages is still recorded.

I started up an IPython Notebook to try and take a look at some of the connections between different users on Wikidata over the years. Below you’ll find a few representations of these connections, as well as notable things I spotted along the way, the generating code, SQL query and more!

The data

MediaWiki maintains links tables for all pages, so getting all of the current links out of Wikidata is very easy. I made use of the Wikimedia Cloud Quarry service to run this query and host a CSV of the results.

Code language: PHP (php)

I then loaded this data directly into an IPython Notebook and did some cleaning, such as removing all IP addresses. I then spent quite some time applying more filtering and twiddling knobs to try and get some graphics out that are easy to look at. The first attempts looked like solid blobs as you can see in this tweet.

You can find a copy of the Notebook on notebooksharing.space.

The Graphs

For all of these graphs, edges are relationships between user talk pages and project talk pages on Wikidata. Edges occur if their talk pages (or subpages) are linked. Various filtering is then applied (see notebook) to visually show the graph in a nice way.

The first graph tries to show as much of the community as possible. Generally speaking, any page names, be that user name or project page names, that are toward the middle of the graph have the most connections to other nodes. This centre section includes many long time Wikidata users, as well as key project pages such as “Request for comment”, “Property Proposal”, “Notability” and more.

The next graph moves toward highlighting the hubs of these link graphs, now requiring hubs with 900 links rather than 200. 10 or so very well linked users pop out at this point.

• Jura1
• VIGNERON
• Tobias1984
• Jon Harald Soby
• Cycn
• Pigsonthewing
• Liuxinyu970226
• Epidosis
• Alexmar983
• M2k~dewiki

The names that appear within the centre of these nodes probably make us a core part of the community over the years.

The final graph focuses on these key hubs once again, filtering out the rest of the cruft. We see that there are 5 hubs that have over 1500 potential edges.

There are now also some key connectors between these hubs that can be easily identified in the middle, even if some of the names are hard to read.

• MediaWiki message delivery
• WikiProject Railways
• Lexicographical data
• WikiProject Ontology
• WikiProject Authority control
• Property proposal

The post Wikidata user and project talk page connection graph appeared first on addshore.

New Wikimedia Code of Conduct

Remedial Skills In Open-To-The-Public Working Groups

Design, and Friction Preventing Design Improvement, in Open Tech

Inclusive-Or: Hospitality in Bug Tracking

Grief

Leadership Crisis at the Wikimedia Foundation

What Should We Stop Doing? (FLOSS Community Metrics Meeting keynote)

Comparing Codes of Conduct to Copyleft Licenses (My FOSDEM Speech)

How To Improve Bus Factor In Your Open Source Project

The Triumph Of Outreachy

Join Me In Donating to Stumptown Syndicate and Open Source Bridge

How I made a tidepool: Implementing the Friendly Space Policy for Wikimedia Foundation technical events

The Continuing Adventures (Transitioning From Intern To Volunteer)

The next Tor, role models, and criticism: the future I want

I'm Leaving My Job At The Wikimedia Foundation

Case Study of a Good Internship

Here Are Some Grants You Could Apply For

The Art Of Writing In The Dark

If You Log In To Wikipedia You Can Customize A Bunch Of Stuff

Citations and Links for My WCUSA Keynote

Dipping My Toes Into PHP

A Change Of Roles

Open Source Jobs (We're Hiring)

Some Help for New Open Source People

Hidden Jewels of the RFC or PEP Process