Abstract Wikipedia/Updates/2022-11-17

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Abstract Wikipedia Updates

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Code of Conduct for Wikifunctions

An important non-technical goal for Wikifunctions is to have a friendly and welcoming environment for newcomers, both for people from the existing Wikimedia communities and from beyond, right from the start.

A way to ensure that this will happen is to establish a code of behavioral policies, to which all the community members must adhere. As of now, we have several (non-exclusive) possibilities.

As a Wikimedia project, the Universal Code of Conduct will apply to Wikifunctions automatically. That is a great starting point.

The first question is: whether we should also adopt the Technical Code of Conduct, which in some places is more specific than the Universal Code of Conduct. Since Wikifunctions is a technical project it seems to make a lot of sense.

The second question is: whether we should have some additional behavioral/conduct policies in place, which are either more specific or cover additional ground compared to the Universal and the Technical Codes of Conduct. Inspiration can be taken from the lists of existing behavioral/conduct policies. Also in the case that we do not want to adopt the Technical Code of Conduct, we should write our own version of it.

I would like to see suggestions for policies around giving newcomers a bit of extra protection, particular given the complexity of our project. I'd also like to hear thoughts on policies regarding the multilinguality of Wikifunctions, which can hopefully learn from the best examples on Wikimedia Commons or Wikidata, the large multilingual projects we already have. Similarly, a policy that limits any discussion about “vim vs emacs” to no more than two posts per month per contributor could be needed, and some of you may have a few thoughts on how to avoid edit wars around code style.

As with the previous recommendation for starting to draft a new policy before Wikifunction launches, we encourage everyone to discuss options, and perhaps draft content. Let’s centralize the discussion in this update's talkpage, and link to draft policies from there.

We will put a space where folks can state their agreement and disagreement with adopting the Technical Code of Conduct (as well as state their indifference, so we can estimate engagement). Besides that, the page is open for suggestions for further behavioral policies, and even drafts for these.

We are aware that we will not start with a perfect set of policies, and this is not the goal. The goal is to at least try to have the most important pieces in place from day one, so that we don’t start with an entirely blank slate. This is similar to the initial staff editing policy that was recently drafted. And just as with that policy, it is clear that the results are not written in stone, but will be amenable to change and will evolve as the actual community of Wikifunctions starts forming. But it is a good idea to have the first few guidelines at hand right from the beginning, and not to scramble reactively too much.

As it is always the case with such policies, a strong turnout would show a strong commitment to these policies. I hope that our nascent proto-community that is forming around Wikifunctions will show up and demonstrate our commitment to a set of policies that will lead to an inclusive and civil community in the future. Please take the time to let us know your thoughts.

WikiConference North America

Last Saturday, we were presenting Wikifunctions virtually at the WikiConference North America / OpenStreetMaps USA. The session was recorded, but at the very end Denny’s Internet connection failed which took away that opportunity from the community to ask questions live. However, we still collected the questions and answered them on the wiki of the conference. Thanks to all attendees, and thanks for these great questions!

Development updates

Experience & Performance:

• Fixed more FE bugs
• Enabled websockets in the evaluator, allowing two-way communication with orchestrator (T318359)
• Implemented versioning of Avro schema (T321752)
• Submitted fixes and test coverage improvements for current perform_test flow (T321495, T321492, T312290)
• Made function view page implementation and test tables mobile-friendly (T310162)
• Implemented FE integration test for connecting implementations and testers to functions (T318426)

Meta-data:

• Revised version finished: Record which implementation gets selected (T320457)
• Further work on caching tester results in MediaWiki DB (T297707)
• Drop back-compat. code in orchestrator & evaluator (T291136)