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Maniphest T415027

Enable GrowthExperiments on a brand new wiki
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Description

As part of T304052: Enable Growth features on Wikipedias upon creation, we want to enable GrowthExperiments on all newly created Wikipedias. However, GrowthExperiments depends on several services that are not readily available for very new wikis (within the same day of creation). We never attempted to enable GrowthExperiments on any such wiki, so we do not know precisely what the behaviour would be. In this task, we want to enable GrowthExperiments on a brand new wiki (within the wiki creation process), observe what happens and fill any followup tasks that might be necessary.

Recently, Language Committee has approved Jju Wikipedia, which is being created in T413283: Create Jju Wikipedia. As a one-off, @Urbanecm_WMF will carry out the Wikipedia creation and enable GrowthExperiments on that wiki while doing so.

This task is somehow time-sensitive (and tricky to plan for in the long term), as Wikipedias do not get created every days, we are unable to predict when the next one will be ready, and we just happen to have one now.

Details

Related Changes in Gerrit:
SubjectRepoBranchLines +/-
kajwiki: Enable GrowthExperimentsoperations/mediawiki-configmaster+2 -1
Customize query in gerrit

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Event Timeline

Urbanecm_WMF created this task.Tue, Jan 20, 10:27 AM
Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald TranscriptTue, Jan 20, 10:27 AM
Urbanecm_WMF added a parent task: T304052: Enable Growth features on Wikipedias upon creation.Tue, Jan 20, 10:28 AM
Urbanecm_WMF moved this task from Inbox to FY2025-26 Q3 Sprint 1 on the Growth-Team board.Tue, Jan 20, 3:09 PM
Urbanecm_WMF edited projects, added Growth-Team (FY2025-26 Q3 Sprint 1); removed Growth-Team.
Urbanecm_WMF triaged this task as Medium priority.Wed, Jan 21, 1:21 PM
Urbanecm_WMF moved this task from Incoming to Doing on the Growth-Team (FY2025-26 Q3 Sprint 1) board.
gerritbot added a comment.Mon, Jan 26, 3:53 PM

Change #1233206 had a related patch set uploaded (by Urbanecm; author: Urbanecm):

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] kajwiki: Enable GrowthExperiments

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1233206

gerritbot added a project: Patch-For-Review.Mon, Jan 26, 3:53 PM
gerritbot added a comment.Mon, Jan 26, 3:55 PM

Change #1233206 merged by jenkins-bot:

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] kajwiki: Enable GrowthExperiments

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1233206

Stashbot added a comment.Mon, Jan 26, 3:56 PM

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2026-01-26T15:56:00Z] <urbanecm@deploy2002> Started scap sync-world: Backport for [[gerrit:1233206|kajwiki: Enable GrowthExperiments (T415027)]]

Stashbot added a comment.Mon, Jan 26, 3:58 PM

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2026-01-26T15:57:59Z] <urbanecm@deploy2002> urbanecm: Backport for [[gerrit:1233206|kajwiki: Enable GrowthExperiments (T415027)]] synced to the testservers (see https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mwdebug). Changes can now be verified there.

Stashbot added a comment.Mon, Jan 26, 4:06 PM

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2026-01-26T16:06:04Z] <urbanecm@deploy2002> Finished scap sync-world: Backport for [[gerrit:1233206|kajwiki: Enable GrowthExperiments (T415027)]] (duration: 10m 04s)

Maintenance_bot removed a project: Patch-For-Review.Mon, Jan 26, 4:31 PM
Michael edited projects, added Growth-Team (FY2025-26 Q3 Sprint 2); removed Growth-Team (FY2025-26 Q3 Sprint 1).Tue, Jan 27, 5:48 PM
Michael moved this task from Incoming to Doing on the Growth-Team (FY2025-26 Q3 Sprint 2) board.
DMburugu added a project: Essential-Work.Wed, Jan 28, 2:05 PM
Urbanecm_WMF added subscribers: OKarakaya-WMF, KStoller-WMF.EditedMon, Feb 9, 1:45 PM

The creation was surprisingly smooth. The only hiccup was related to wiki creation logic itself (T415555). Once the wiki was created, I created GrowthExperiments tables by running WikimediaMaintenance:createExtensionTables.php growthexperiments, enabled GrowthExperiments by setting wmgUseGrowthExperiments to true and everything worked as expected. As far as I could see, there were no errors in Logstash related to eg. unreachable services etc. The interface doesn't offer much, but that is not expected. The important part is that communities can set it up via Community Configuration on their own, without needing intervention from the Growth team.

After a discussion with @KStoller-WMF, we decided to (eventually) enable GrowthExperiments on all wikis, recognising the interface would be of limited usability early on. To do that, we need to:

  1. First, manually enable GrowthExperiments on new wikis where the Growth tables are missing. This would fix the discrepancy described at T414600: Figure out missing GrowthExperiments db tables on new wikis.
  2. Then, enable GrowthExperiments on all remaining Wikipedias that exist.
  3. Finally, ensure wmgUseGrowthExperiments is set to true by default on Wikipedias.

Ideally, we would offer new wikis something. Add Link is – in theory – a simple task that only requires some content. I had a short discussion with @OKarakaya-WMF (internal meeting notes) to understand how difficult would that be. I learned that as of now, Add Link datasets are only generated for explicitly allowlisted wikis. Adding new wikis is possible (there, and to copies of the allowlist in 2 other Add Link DAGs), but it needs to be done manually. @OKarakaya-WMF said it would be possible to generate the Add Link datasets for all Wikipedias automatically (once enough data is available). At that point, it would be very much possible for the Growth team to offer Add Link to those wikis by default.

Urbanecm_WMF added a comment.Mon, Feb 9, 1:51 PM

Next step: I'm going to fill out tasks to take the actions described in the previous comment. Then, this task can be closed.

Urbanecm_WMF closed this task as Resolved.Tue, Feb 10, 3:17 PM

I updated T304052 with a checklist of tasks. I think this can be closed now.

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