Concerning the choice of language to make it easier to maintain / deploy in a Wikimedia context:

• PHP seems like a pretty widespread choice, and is mandatory if the API is to be implemented as a MediaWiki extension . My understanding from our meeting with @Lokal_Profil is that it would generally be helpful to other Wikimedia organizations who are familiar with this stack, even if the service is not directly integrated in MediaWiki;
• @Mvolz told me that Node.js is also used to run services at WMF (but Parsoid is moving from Node.js to PHP-only, perhaps a sign that Node.js is not a good long-term choice).

Have you tried with a more recent version (such as 5.0 and above)? 3.3.11 is quite old and might not support INCRBYFLOAT, which is used to compute usage statistics for the endpoint.

This does not have anything to do with you indeed! I was just trying to explain that I stopped trying to help solve this issue (therefore unsubscribing from this).

I don't know - I stopped working on this task and T240369 since T240374 was declined. I don't think I can contribute to solving this problem in the current state of affairs, sorry!

It is actually possible to retrieve the current maxlag value from the API without making any edit (see @Addshore's comment above).
So, just retrieve the current maxlag value and compute your desired edit rate for this maxlag with the function plotted above. Then sleep for the appropriate amount of time between any two edits to achieve this rate. Refresh the maxlag value from the server periodically.

The task has been resolved.

OK! This connection should never be idle given that bot edits on Wikidata never stop, so I am still not sure why this happens. It might be due to the specifics of how Django handles these long-running SQL connections.

This seems like a pretty important bug… I would not get held up by design worries: just make sure no exception is thrown!

Thanks! I think dynamically changing the maxlag value is likely to still introduce some thresholds, whereas a continuous slowdown (by retrieving the lag and compute one's edit rate based on it) should in theory reach an equilibrium point.

Thanks for the analysis! Whether this is a breaking change or not is not my concern: Petscan and other mass-editing tools based on Widar should play by the book. I can provide a simple patch which ensures maxlag=5 is applied to all Widar edits: if someone wants to do a refined version which allows specific user-triggered edits to go through without a maxlag parameter, that is great. @Magnus, what is your take on this?

If clients are able to retrieve the current lag periodically (through some MediaWiki API call? which one?), then this should not require any server-side change. Clients can continue to use maxlag=5 but to also throttle themselves using the smoothed function proposed.

@Bugreporter have you got details of where this behaviour is currently implemented in PetScan? In particular, how do you request the current maxlag with the MediaWiki API?

@Theklan let's move your issue to a different ticket as your issue does not seem to be related: T240436

I've had a quick look at the code to see if I could submit a patch for this myself but it is not clear to me where the edits are done - I have looked in petscan_rs and wikibase_rs to no avail. Petscan edits might be done in the browser by sending them to some Widar-like interface?

@Bugreporter yes indeed! I was off by one hour there. Thanks for your help! Feel free to add more bots which match that period.

Matching pull request: https://github.com/arthurpsmith/author-disambiguator/pull/107

If you have not changed anything in user-config.py then you should be good to go, it might have been a false positive on my side. Sorry for the noise!

I am first getting in touch with people who seem to be running bots with maxlag greater than 5 or no maxlag parameter at all, to see if they would accept to follow @Addshore's advice never to use maxlag greater than 5 at all.

There has been one attempt I think but it did not go very far - and the ids do not seem to have been imported so far!

I think it is a bit harder to extract more than 1000 records (I didn't cap it on purpose to make it manageable for the workshop).

@Jheald I don't think anyone is working on this anymore: if you are still interested in the scraped dataset, it is here: http://pintoch.ulminfo.fr/adc2c9aaba/lakes-portal.tsv

OK! If you have ways to check what sort of maxlag values are used it would be great!

Actually, some tools seem to be doing something like that already, since edits are still going through despite max lag being above 5 for more than an hour now (Author Disambiguator does this, QuickStatements too probably, Edoderoobot too). So these tools use higher (more agressive) maxlag values than 5.

One problem with the current policy (requesting all automated editing processes to use maxlag=5) is that this creates a binary threshold: either the query service lag is under the threshold, in which case bots will edit at full speed, or the query service lag is above the threshold, in which case they should all stop editing entirely. This is likely to create an oscillating behaviour, where all bots start and stop periodically. This is probably not ideal neither for the infrastructure nor for the users.

We have an import here: https://tools.wmflabs.org/editgroups/b/OR/8cf42ae3c0/
Good job!

Moving to "Done" although this is not complete, but we did have a lot of new translations (not just in Dutch) during the event.

Data is getting into Wikidata!

If you have trouble reconciling, use this reconciliation service: http://ulminfo.fr:3894/en/api

For people who cannot install OpenRefine on their laptops, use: http://5.135.188.139:48379/

So this is what we get with an exponential back-off (1.5 factor), at the moment:

22:37:27.148 [..baseapi.WbEditingAction] [maxlag] Waiting for all: 5.4916666666667 seconds lagged. -- pausing for 1000 milliseconds. (19338ms)
22:37:28.729 [..baseapi.WbEditingAction] [maxlag] Waiting for all: 5.4916666666667 seconds lagged. -- pausing for 1500 milliseconds. (1581ms)
22:37:33.809 [..baseapi.WbEditingAction] [maxlag] Waiting for all: 5.4916666666667 seconds lagged. -- pausing for 2250 milliseconds. (5080ms)
22:37:37.931 [..baseapi.WbEditingAction] [maxlag] Waiting for all: 5.4916666666667 seconds lagged. -- pausing for 3375 milliseconds. (4122ms)
22:37:42.663 [..baseapi.WbEditingAction] [maxlag] Waiting for all: 5.4916666666667 seconds lagged. -- pausing for 5062 milliseconds. (4732ms)
22:37:49.437 [..baseapi.WbEditingAction] [maxlag] Waiting for all: 5.4916666666667 seconds lagged. -- pausing for 7593 milliseconds. (6774ms)
22:37:58.429 [..baseapi.WbEditingAction] [maxlag] Waiting for all: 5.4916666666667 seconds lagged. -- pausing for 11389 milliseconds. (8992ms)
22:38:18.217 [..baseapi.WbEditingAction] [maxlag] Waiting for all: 6 seconds lagged. -- pausing for 17083 milliseconds. (19788ms)
22:38:36.461 [..baseapi.WbEditingAction] [maxlag] Waiting for all: 6 seconds lagged. -- pausing for 25624 milliseconds. (18244ms)
22:39:05.013 [..baseapi.WbEditingAction] [maxlag] Waiting for all: 6.4666666666667 seconds lagged. -- pausing for 38436 milliseconds. (28552ms)

So it looks like this means no OpenRefine edits at all with these new rules, in the current situation.

Thanks for the notification! I would be happy to release a new version of OpenRefine with a patch applied - I can do this in the coming days. The exponential back-off suggested by @Multichill makes sense intuitively - could WMDE confirm that this is the policy they recommend? Happy to adapt the policy as required.

@Ecritures shouldn't we rather assign tasks to the participants who decide to tackle them?