MediaWiki

Vuetify app with Wikimedia OAuth login

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Do you often find yourself wanting to make a basic (or complex) web app that is client side only and will log users into Wikimedia sites with ease? Me to!

I have been trying this every year or so, and it’s gradually been getting easier. This year it only took me a couple of to get a really nice template web app setup using Vue, Vuetify and a OAuth 2.0 Wikimedia consumer (thanks to the OAuth extension).

Firstly, some links that you’ll find useful:

Starting off with a default Vuetify app install using vite (commit c3edb0f), you’ll end up with a basic web page that just says welcome to Vuetify. You can copy the code in my commit, or just follow the Vuetify instructions.

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mwcli (a MediaWiki focused command line tool targeting developers) over the years

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mcwli includes the third of so generation of “developer environments” that I have made for MediaWiki over the years. You can see the backstory in this earlier post.

Since the early days of 2022, there has been optional metric collection included within the mwcli tool.

This metric collection simply collects what command you run, and when you run it (without any parameters or inputs) so that the data can be aggregated, and the various commands usage can be graphed.

Each command run includes something like:

Commanddocker mediawiki exec
DateTime2025-01-07T12:45:18.213Z
Version0.25.1

I used to have live (ish) graphs in the Wikimedia Superset installation, however, the queries there appear to fail now. So I took some time to export the dataset as a CSV, and shove it around a bit in a Python notebook.

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Wikibase Phrase Entity, Viewing

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This entry is part 7 of 7 in the series Wikibase Entities

In my previous post, we got to the point of being able to create a new Wikibase Entity, it is stored in the MediaWiki database as a page, however we can’t actually view it via any interface currently.

In this post, we will work through another set of code changes, tackling each issue as we see it arise, until we can see the entity represented in the various places that users might expect.

Viewing the page

The provided entity serialization is neither legacy nor current

When clicking on one of the links on Special:RecentChanges to a phrase page that we have created, we get our first error.

/wiki/Phrase:Phrase66900b01937842.29097733 MWContentSerializationException: The provided entity serialization is neither legacy nor current
from /var/www/html/w/extensions/Wikibase/lib/includes/Store/EntityContentDataCodec.php(253)Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

The full stack trace is a little large, but you can find it in a paste bin.

This error is very similar to an issue we saw in the creation blog post, but this time the codec class can not deserialize what we have stored in the database, as we have not registered a deserializer for phrases.

Adding a deserializer to the entity registration file is very simple:

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Wikibase Phrase Entity, Creation

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This entry is part 6 of 7 in the series Wikibase Entities

Finally, after a long lead up of discussing what an entity is, looking at some examples of entity extensions, and one extension that chose not to make use of the Wikibase Entity system & EntityDocument. What does it take to create a new type of data entity within Wikibase that implements the EntityDocument interface and makes use of the various integrations that have evolved over the past 10+ years?

I slapped together a very rough branch exploring this in 2022, but it’s hard to follow at best, and doesn’t really discuss any of the challenges that crop up along the way. This post, and those following are the redo, with much more context. And with any luck, it will work mostly as before (as Wikibase hasn’t changed much internally when it comes to how Entities are handled in the last 2 years)

If you want to follow along, you’ll need a development environment, and for that I would recommend the mwcli walkthrough that I wrote in the past weeks.

Where to start

I have a slight advantage here, as the closest thing that comes to documentation around how to add a new entity type to Wikibase is the documentation of the various fields that make up the entity registration system.

Beyond that, your only way in would likely be to start looking at one of the extensions that already provides an additional entity type, such as WikibaseMediaInfo, and the entity type registration that it makes. But each of these extensions come with their own complexity to muddle your view.

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Wikibase Repository development environment (mwcli)

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This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series Wikibase Entities

Back in 2022, while working at Wikimedia Germany, I ran two sessions with people from the Wikibase Stakeholder Group, focused on Ecosystem Enablement.

These sessions were video recorded and documented in quite a lot of detail, but following through with the videos would probably lead to a bit of a drawn out experience, as they were focused around a workshop setting with participants following along.

  • Session 1, 2022-04-28: Using mwcli, loading extensions, understanding Mediawiki’s general extension mechanism (Video, Overview)
  • Session 2, 2022-05-24: Running your first extension, Wikibase stable interface policy, Mediawiki hooks, building a new API function (Video, Overview)

In this post, I will focus on the core steps required to get a MediaWiki and Wikibase Repository development environment setup in a few minutes with mwcli, and will serve as a basis for some blog posts that I will be writing in the future.

Getting mwcli

If you head to the home page of mwcli, you’ll see a link to an installation guide.

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Wikibase, from Entity to EntityDocument

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This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series Wikibase Entities

The term document has already come up a few times while discussing what a Wikibase entity is, and if that should change (be that in name only, code or structures), including in my first post of this series.

Looking at the very first definition of entity in the duck duck go search that I performed 6 seconds ago, an entity is:

Something that exists as a particular and discrete unit.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition

At the most basic level, it’s fairly straightforward to say that a Wikibase doesn’t hold the actual entities (such as a type of tree), rather data about said entities.

And in a nutshell, this data is collected within a document.

Image from “What is the semantic web” by onotext.com

Quoting a few choice people again, before diving deeper into this topic…

The “entities” in the Wikibase base are not Entities. They are descriptions of entities. The entity is the thing in the world not the data we have about it, even tough colloquially, we don’t make the distinction. But we have separate URIs for the thing and the description in the abstract and for specific renderings.
I think that’s important to mention when discussing what an entity “is”.

Daniel Kinzler in conversation, June 2024

The data model chose to use the term “Entity” for the top-level Thing/class in the hierarchy of the data model. But in reality, a better term would have been “Document” or “Record”. In general, the confusion is often due simply to folks that are more familiar with one of the domains than the other, between OOP Objects and Semantic Web Objects.

Thad Guidry in a comment, June 2024

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Verifying Wikimedia user page links on Mastodon

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While reviewing the ongoings of the 2023 Wikimedia hackathon, I learned about the RealMe MediaWiki extension, which is already deployed to Wikimedia sites and allows verification of URLs that appear on user pages within other software or platforms, such as Mastodon.

Link verification for dummies

Imagine you want to show that your online profiles, like on Mastodon, truly belong to you. One way to do this is by using a special code called “rel=me”. It’s like saying, “Hey, this link over here is connected to me.” However, there’s a catch: both the link and the page it points to need to say they’re connected.

On platforms like Mastodon, you can add links to your other profiles. The platform then checks if those profiles also point back to your original page using the same “rel=me” code. If they do, your link gets a stamp of approval, showing it’s really yours.

The RealMe extension allows you to configure a set of links on your user page that include this “rel=me” special code that other systems, such as Mastodon, can check.

Configuring it

This one took me a few minutes to get working after reading the instructions, but on meta.wikimedia.org I added a link to my Mastodon profile, enabled the setting on meta, headed over to my Mastodon profile to add the link, and tada, it is verified!

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Wikidata maxlag, via the ApiMaxLagInfo hook

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Wikidata tinkers with the concept of maxlag that has existed in MediaWiki for some years in order to slow automated editing at times of lag in various systems.

Here you will find a little introduction to MediaWiki maxlag, and the ways that Wikidata hooks into the value, altering it for its needs.

Screenshot of the “Wikidata Edits” grafana dashboard showing increased maxlag and decreased edits

As you can see above, a high maxlag can cause automated editing to reduce or stop on wikidata.org

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Small commits

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There are many blog posts and articles out there about making small git commits. I’m sure most people (including me) bring up the same few topics around why small commits are good and why we should all probably be making smaller commits.

In this post, I’ll look at some of the key topics from my perspective, and try to tie these topics to concrete examples from repositories that I have worked on. The topics are in no particular order, so be sure to give them all a read.

One thing to note is that “small” doesn’t necessarily mean small in terms of lines of code. Small here is also relative. Also, small commits can benefit you in many different places, but to stand the test of time they must end up in your main branch.

Git features during development

Git only takes full responsibility for your data when you commit

Commit Often, Perfect Later, Publish Once: Git Best Practices

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Profiling a Wikibase item creation on test.wikidata.org

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Today I was in a Wikibase Stakeholder group call, and one of the discussions was around Wikibase importing speed, data loading, and the APIs. My previous blog post covering what happens when you make a new Wikibase item was raised, and we also got onto the topic of profiling.

So here comes another post looking at some of the internals of Wikibase, through the lens of profiling on test.wikidata.org.

The tools used to write this blog post for Wikimedia infrastructure are both open source, and also public. You can do similar profiling on both your own Wikibase, or for your requests that you suspect are slow on Wikimedia sites such as Wikidata.

Wikimedia Profiling

Profiling of Wikimedia sites is managed and maintained by the Wikimedia performance team. They have a blog, and one of the most recent posts was actually covering profiling PHP at scale in production, so if you want to know the details of how this is achieved give it a read.

Throughout this post I will be looking at data collected from a production Wikimedia request, by setting the X-Wikimedia-Debug header in my request. This header has a few options, and you can find the docs on wikitech.wikimedia.org. There are also browser extensions available to easily set this header on your requests.

I will be using the Wikimedia hosted XHGui to visualize the profile data. Wikimedia specific documentation for this interface also exists on wikitech.wikimedia.org. This interface contains a random set of profiled requests, as well as any requests that were specifically requested to be profiled.

Profiling PHP & MediaWiki

If you want to profile your own MediaWiki or Wikibase install, or PHP in general, then you should take a look at the mediawiki.org documentation page for this. You’ll likely want to use either Tideways or XDebug, but probably want to avoid having to setup any extra UI to visualize the data.

This profiling only covered the main PHP application (MediaWiki & Wikibase extension). Other services such as the query service would require separate profiling.

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