First extension (Echo), successfully added! Work in progress and relevant notes for each extension or change can be monitored here until completion: https://github.com/wmde/wikibase-release-pipeline/pull/914

Implementation Complete

The implementation work for the full scope of this ticket is now complete and up for code review. The added extensions and configuration changes have all been covered by tests, and I've done some additional manual verification. Overall this went fairly smoothly, and these inclusions and changes feel stable.

In total this work spans 3 pull requests: one that includes minor/non-breaking changes, and two separate pull requests for changes to Wikibase defaults that are breaking changes. The non-breaking feature work could be merged and released on the current 6.x line by itself as part of a minor release (6.1.0), however my recommendation is to orchestrate the full set as a coordinated major release (7.0) for both the Wikibase Docker image and Deploy products at once.

A summary of the related PRs is below. I encourage everyone, not just engineers, to review the PR descriptions as well as they contain some additional detail that may be relevant to release and product decisions:

• #914 Echo, DiscussionTools, and Wikidata-style Statement Grouping ("Group External Identifiers")
• #915 Disable WikibaseEDTF extension
• #916 Enable Temporary Accounts by default

Remaining work as I see it:

• PR review and merge decisions across the three linked pull requests
• Agreement on the release plan, including whether to ship the full set as a coordinated 7.0 release for Wikibase and Deploy
• Any additional user-facing documentation needed beyond the code-level README and inline configuration guidance already added here; that may already be sufficient, but I leave that final call to PM/DA/comms

Note regarding expanding Wikibase image and size/scaling: Image size for the additional extensions was something I had flagged as a possible concern going in, but in the end the Wikibase image has actually not become meaningfully larger than the image before these changes. This is good news in terms of looking at possibly bundling still more add'l commonly used extensions. Where the new extensions and changes are felt most is in the test suite, as running integration-style tests to confirm function of each new extension could become of issue if we were to add many more extensions. As it is in this set the total test run time only increased by 1-2 minutes on average from the baseline before these changes.*

@Deepesha_WMDE please have a look at these changes and scope potential documentation work

@lojo_wmde release 7.0 makes sense together with deploy update. Let's plan for that.

I confirmed that anonymous editing is currently enabled by default in our WBS Wikibase Docker image distribution, following MediaWiki’s default permissions model for the * group.

If we do not want anonymous users to be able to edit or create content, we should explicitly disable that in our image configuration, e.g. in LocalSettings.php:

$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;

If we also want to prevent self-registration by anonymous visitors, we should additionally disable:

$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;

So I think the decision point is:

• if we want to disallow anonymous contribution by default in Wikibase Suite, we should change our image configuration accordingly
• if we want to continue allowing anonymous contribution, then proceeding with Temporary Accounts makes sense, since that is the mechanism intended to avoid exposing contributor IP addresses publicly

In other words: anonymous contribution is on today; if that remains the intended default, moving ahead with Temporary Accounts is the privacy-improving next step.

@Leif_WMDE @Deepesha_WMDE