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Expand the list of group 1 wikis to contain at least one (preferably 2) smaller "top ten size" wikis
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Description

We deploy via a train which progressively rolls out code on the course of the week.
On Wednesday's we currently deploy to 2 Wikipedia's: Catalan and Hebrew. We deploy to all over Wikipedia's on Thursday.
These wikis are indispensable for catching and fixing bugs before the train completes. However, due to the small size of the Wednesday group, many bugs get overlooked until the Thursday.

Having a larger (by page view/number of editors) wiki in that group would likely avoid many issues remaining in our software over weekends.

Getting software earlier should be a no-brainer for communities - they get bugs fixed and new features much quicker and are less likely to have bugs remain in their software during the Thursday lunchtime-Monday morning period.

From a product point of view, it is hypothesized that a larger wiki in group 1 will help give greater confidence about our software and report issues earlier so they can be addressed more timely.

Based on project sizes, having one of the following Wikipedias would be ideal:

  • Spanish
  • Russian
  • Chinese
  • Portuguese
  • Japanese
  • German
  • French
  • Italian
  • Polish

Ideally, these communities should have active users on Phabricator who can help report issues that do arise. For this reason, I lean more towards German, French, Italian and Polish as the communities that would be useful.

See also

QA

Event Timeline

@Jdlrobson friendly redirect to previous conversations about how to request my team's support - unless you only want to put this on our radar as an FYI, of course!

@ovasileva, @Jdlrobson and I have been discussing this briefly. We have had an idea to approach the French Wikipedia community first because:

  • They are:
    • Definitely large enough
    • Open to innovation and relatively risk-tolerant (they're a pilot wiki for the Desktop Improvements)
    • Perceptive and articulate (both on wiki and Phab) about the issues they notice
  • The Foundation has a contracted technical ambassador who helps me to process Desktop Improvements-related feedback

I'm going to:

  1. Draft a message and outline pros and cons there
  2. Get green light
  3. Post the message on frwiki's equivalent of the Village Pump
  4. See what the decision is

If frwiki's community says no, then I'd recommend Portuguese because they meet the #2 criterion above. However, I've got 2 questions now:

  1. Who's the owner of this on the Foundation end? (Optionally, also: what are the dependencies? How to ensure point #2 above can be checked?)
  2. What is the deadline?

Having Italian Wikipedia in group 1 would be wonderful. There are lots of really helpful volunteers there that would be able to notify us of any regressions we miss during code review / QA.

Change 715571 had a related patch set uploaded (by Jdlrobson; author: Jdlrobson):

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Italian Wikipedia is now a group 1 wiki

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/715571

My understanding on https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bar/Discussioni/Anticipazione_degli_aggiornamenti_settimanali_di_MediaWiki is that Italian Wikipedia are in favor. With that in mind I'd like to make this change next week. Could we send out a notice in next tech news that Italian Wikipedia will start getting deploys on Wednesdays beginning in September?

My understanding on https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bar/Discussioni/Anticipazione_degli_aggiornamenti_settimanali_di_MediaWiki is that Italian Wikipedia are in favor. With that in mind I'd like to make this change next week. Could we send out a notice in next tech news that Italian Wikipedia will start getting deploys on Wednesdays beginning in September?

Tech News isn't used to send notices to a specific wiki.
@Daimona @Sannita Can you please give a heads up there and confirm when all's good to go? Thanks.

My understanding on https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bar/Discussioni/Anticipazione_degli_aggiornamenti_settimanali_di_MediaWiki is that Italian Wikipedia are in favor. With that in mind I'd like to make this change next week. Could we send out a notice in next tech news that Italian Wikipedia will start getting deploys on Wednesdays beginning in September?

Tech News isn't used to send notices to a specific wiki.

@Elitre - I think a wider message might be helpful for all technical volunteers since they will now have another group2 wiki to test on in addition to the existing ones.

@Daimona @Sannita Can you please give a heads up there and confirm when all's good to go? Thanks.

With that in mind I'd like to make this change next week.

So is the below deployment schedule correct on itwiki?

  • 1.37.0-wmf.21: Thursday, September 2 (group2)
  • 1.37.0-wmf.22: Wednesday, September 8 (group1) (T281163 is declined? But the server switch will be only the week after.)
  • 1.37.0-wmf.23: Wednesday, September 15 (group1) (T281164 is not declined, although the server switch announcement says there will be no deploy that week.)

Or… what is correct?

Likely Wednesday, September 15 at current time, I forgot about the no deploy week.

  • 1.37.0-wmf.23: Wednesday, September 15 (group1) (T281164 is not declined, although the server switch announcement says there will be no deploy that week.)

I think the plan is to not cancel deployments for that week (like last time), cc @Legoktm to confirm.

Likely Wednesday, September 15 at current time, I forgot about the no deploy week.

Thanks for the answer. I moved the Tech News item to the September 13 issue.

Change 715571 merged by jenkins-bot:

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Italian Wikipedia is now a group 1 wiki

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/715571

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2021-09-08T18:26:13Z] <urbanecm@deploy1002> Synchronized dblists/: 6bcbe61f9a89086b775d84a81d55a7587cf26780: Italian Wikipedia is now a group 1 wiki (T286664; 1/2) (duration: 00m 58s)

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2021-09-08T18:27:29Z] <urbanecm@deploy1002> Synchronized wmf-config/config/itwiki.yaml: 6bcbe61f9a89086b775d84a81d55a7587cf26780: Italian Wikipedia is now a group 1 wiki (T286664; 2/2) (duration: 00m 58s)

Jdlrobson updated the task description. (Show Details)

The relevant changes have been made so Italian should get updates next week on 15th instead of 16th.

Jdlrobson moved this task from QA to QA in Prod on the Web-Team-Backlog (Kanbanana-FY-2021-22) board.

Is there any sort of "Group 3" wikis? A problem that frequently comes across when ITSTHURSDAY is determining "what DID that ACTUALLY look like in production yesterday?".

Jdlrobson added a subscriber: Edtadros.

I confirmed that Italian got group 1 in the train this week.
@ovasileva @sgrabarczuk do we want to keep this task open to get other group 1 wikis or close it?

I confirmed that Italian got group 1 in the train this week.
@ovasileva @sgrabarczuk do we want to keep this task open to get other group 1 wikis or close it?

I think we can close for now and open a new one if more wikis are interested in joining.

My understanding on https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bar/Discussioni/Anticipazione_degli_aggiornamenti_settimanali_di_MediaWiki is that Italian Wikipedia are in favor. With that in mind I'd like to make this change next week. Could we send out a notice in next tech news that Italian Wikipedia will start getting deploys on Wednesdays beginning in September?

Tech News isn't used to send notices to a specific wiki.

@Elitre - I think a wider message might be helpful for all technical volunteers since they will now have another group2 wiki to test on in addition to the existing ones.

@Daimona @Sannita Can you please give a heads up there and confirm when all's good to go? Thanks.

Ciao Olga, your argument makes sense, thanks for sharing that perspective. I guess I was mostly worried about "Italian Wikipedia learning about the change from Tech News" rather than by their own conversations. :)

My understanding on https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bar/Discussioni/Anticipazione_degli_aggiornamenti_settimanali_di_MediaWiki is that Italian Wikipedia are in favor. With that in mind I'd like to make this change next week. Could we send out a notice in next tech news that Italian Wikipedia will start getting deploys on Wednesdays beginning in September?

Tech News isn't used to send notices to a specific wiki.

@Elitre - I think a wider message might be helpful for all technical volunteers since they will now have another group2 wiki to test on in addition to the existing ones.

@Daimona @Sannita Can you please give a heads up there and confirm when all's good to go? Thanks.

Ciao Olga, your argument makes sense, thanks for sharing that perspective. I guess I was mostly worried about "Italian Wikipedia learning about the change from Tech News" rather than by their own conversations. :)

Ah, that's a good point! Maybe we should do a wider announcement there? It was done by consensus vote on-wiki, but looking at the conversation, it does seem like a wider audience on itwiki would be helpful: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bar/Discussioni/Anticipazione_degli_aggiornamenti_settimanali_di_MediaWiki

My understanding on https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bar/Discussioni/Anticipazione_degli_aggiornamenti_settimanali_di_MediaWiki is that Italian Wikipedia are in favor. With that in mind I'd like to make this change next week. Could we send out a notice in next tech news that Italian Wikipedia will start getting deploys on Wednesdays beginning in September?

Tech News isn't used to send notices to a specific wiki.

@Elitre - I think a wider message might be helpful for all technical volunteers since they will now have another group2 wiki to test on in addition to the existing ones.

@Daimona @Sannita Can you please give a heads up there and confirm when all's good to go? Thanks.

Ciao Olga, your argument makes sense, thanks for sharing that perspective. I guess I was mostly worried about "Italian Wikipedia learning about the change from Tech News" rather than by their own conversations. :)

Ah, that's a good point! Maybe we should do a wider announcement there? It was done by consensus vote on-wiki, but looking at the conversation, it does seem like a wider audience on itwiki would be helpful: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bar/Discussioni/Anticipazione_degli_aggiornamenti_settimanali_di_MediaWiki

It's been a while since the news came out, so no worries, let's just keep it in mind for the next time!