Mitmachen

Mitmachen is a small web-interface which helps Wikipedia editors find articles which are known to need improvement. It is aimed at new editors who are looking for ways to make their first meaningful edits and do not know where to start.

Mitmachen currently works for the German-language Wikipedia only, where it will be used as part of an onboarding campaign run by Wikimedia Deutschland planned to launch in August 2018.

Setup and Deployment

Mitmachen is written to run on the Toolforge Cloud-as-a-Service platform maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation. It requires direct access to some of the MediaWiki database tables of the German Wikipedia and will therefore not run on a server which does not provide such access.

To deploy Mitmachen, simply clone the Git repository to a Toolforge tool account and set up the webservice as described here.

Here are the steps to deploy the project on wikimedia server :-

Anywhere it says user please replace with user from step 3

• Create a tool on wikimedia
• ssh into it
• from replica.my.cnf file, get your user
• Clone the code and checkout the branch you want
• Update in the following files the DB name:-
• In api.py line number - 69, change to user_mitracking_p
• Second change the same in cron/main.py on line 4
• Then start running the following commands
• webservice --backend=kubernetes python3.5 shell
• python3 -m venv $HOME/www/python/venv
• source $HOME/www/python/venv/bin/activate
• pip install --upgrade pip
• pip install -r requirements.txt
• python3 www/python/src/cron/main.py
• exit
• webservice --backend=kubernetes python3.5 start

Side note (Important)

There is a need to create the DB on wikimedia server too. Run this command mysql --defaults-file=replica.my.cnf -h tools.db.svc.eqiad.wmflabs

Then run the following commands:- use 'user'_mitracking_p

then we need to create tables, so run the following commands

• CREATE TABLE tracking ( id INT unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, type VARCHAR(255), title VARCHAR(255), weblink TEXT, count INT unsigned, PRIMARY KEY (id) );

• CREATE TABLE crondata( id INT unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, categ TEXT, subcateg TEXT, page_id INT unsigned NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (id) );

After everything is done, we need to do something about cron Setting cron on wikimedia server Run crontab -e then in INSERT mode, type the following 0 5 * * 0 /usr/bin/python3 /data/project/mmt/www/python/src/cron/main.py Save and close

Update from master

The tool is currenctly running under https://mitmachen.toolforge.org/. In order to update to the current version of master, do the following:

• ssh login.toolforge.org
• become mitmachen
• git pull
• webservice --backend=kubernetes python3.5 restart

Contributing

If you found a bug, would like to contribute ideas or code, or are interested in bringing Mitmachen to another Wikipedia please head over to the Mitmachen project on Wikimedia Phabricator (or simply leave a pull request).

However, please note that there are no plans to expand Mitmachen beyond a simple web interface for a handful of database queries. For more experienced Wikipedia editors, PetScan already provides a fine-grained search functionality for articles with issues and there is a plethora of tools and bot-curated lists to find articles in need of attention.

License

The initial version of Mitmachen was licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

The version developed in this repository is licenced under GNU GPL 2.0.