Background

The Similarusers service only works with English Wikipedia, for now.

The SimilarEditors extension is a MediaWiki interface to the Similarusers service, for the purpose of gathering feedback.

There is a plan to generalise the Similarusers service to other wikis, and gather feedback via SimilarEditors. Until the service is updated, however, SimilarEditors should also be restricted to English Wikipedia.

Example of the problem we want to avoid

We are about to deploy SimilarEditors to the beta cluster. Once we do:

• The user input will only accept IP addresses or users that exist on that beta wiki. (This doesn't make sense, because the service will only have data for English Wikipedia users.)
• When results are returned, the results table will create links to user pages on that wiki. (This doesn't make sense, because any results would be for English Wikipedia users.)

(Though when we first deploy to beta, we will not connect to the real Similarusers service; instead we will return mock results. That means we will avoid the above issues, but won't be able to test with the real service.)

Acceptance criteria

Before we do configure beta to use the real Similarusers service, we should do the following:

• Allow any user to be entered in the user input (ideally we would allow any user that exists on English Wikipedia, but I don't think that complexity is necessary for this temporary change)
• In the results table, link to user pages on English Wikipedia
• Where we make these changes, comment that they are temporary until the service is updated, with a reference to T309675

This will allow SimilarEditors to use the Similarusers service in our testing environments as well as on English Wikipedia.