Early announcement at https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/very-early-announcement-wikidata-read-only-time-at-the-end-of-the-month/413

Is there an existing procedure for reflecting the page moves and deletions that will occur during the period that Wikidata is read-only?

Items are updated for moves via the job queue, so unless I’m mistaken the job should fail while the wiki is read-only and be retried automatically at a later time.

Could someone confirm what @Lucas_Werkmeister_WMDE is saying about the job retry? (Asking since he's hedging with "unless I'm mistaken".) Would prefer this to be clear when we communicate this.

In T227063#5320325, @Johan wrote:

Could someone confirm what @Lucas_Werkmeister_WMDE is saying about the job retry? (Asking since he's hedging with "unless I'm mistaken".) Would prefer this to be clear when we communicate this.

Lucas is right, technically any job that fail for any reason will gets retried until they pass or they pass the max number of failures (it's 30 I think) but strangely UpdateRepoOnMoveJob (more precisely UpdateRepoJob) doesn't fail if it can't edit, it just sends a debug message and act like nothing happened in saveChanges, is it intentional @hoo or do you think we should change the behavior.

Thanks! And since UpdateRepoOnMoveJob doesn't fail and won't try again, the page move wouldn't actually be reflected in Wikidata? Or am I missing what function it has?

In T227063#5323883, @Johan wrote:

Thanks! And since UpdateRepoOnMoveJob doesn't fail and won't try again, the page move wouldn't actually be reflected in Wikidata? Or am I missing what function it has?

Yes, we might fix that or we might say it's a bearable loss. I don't know enough context to say which one is better.

@Ladsgroup @hoo Either way it'd be great if we could come to a conclusion on what, so we know what to tell the communities.

(I mean, I'd certainly prefer if pages weren't lost for years in the language links because of a move during these minutes, but I don't know what the cost of making sure that wouldn't happen would be.)

but strangely UpdateRepoOnMoveJob (more precisely UpdateRepoJob) doesn't fail if it can't edit, it just sends a debug message and act like nothing happened in saveChanges

More specifically, saveChanges() does return true/false to indicate if everything’s okay, but run() ignores the return value and unconditionally returns true itself. I don’t know if this was intentional at the time, but I also think it would probably be better to retry such cases (i. e. return $this->saveChanges( $item, $user );).

Can we see those debug messages anywhere, by the way? I assume the X-Wikimedia-Debug header doesn’t help us with jobs, and I’m not sure if debug-level messages are usually saved elsewhere (except on testwiki and test2wiki, apparently, which aren’t Wikibase repositories).

In T227063#5328194, @Lucas_Werkmeister_WMDE wrote:

but strangely UpdateRepoOnMoveJob (more precisely UpdateRepoJob) doesn't fail if it can't edit, it just sends a debug message and act like nothing happened in saveChanges

More specifically, saveChanges() does return true/false to indicate if everything’s okay, but run() ignores the return value and unconditionally returns true itself. I don’t know if this was intentional at the time, but I also think it would probably be better to retry such cases (i. e. return $this->saveChanges( $item, $user );).

But that would also retry on for example sitelink conflicts (other item already has that sitelink), but I guess that's bearable.

Why are jobs even being run during read only time? After quickly skimming the job queue code, this shouldn't happen AFAICT, is there a task/ documentation about that?

@hoo Shouldn't happen, as in "won't happen, we're worrying unnecessarily"?

So far posted in:

• Wikimedia Space
• Tech News
• Wikidata:Status updates/2019 07 08
• Wikidata:Project Chat
• wikitech-l

I'll figure out what to do about banners and include it in the issue of Tech News the weak of the read-only period, and then we should be done with this part of the preparations.

In T227063#5332149, @Johan wrote:

@hoo Shouldn't happen, as in "won't happen, we're worrying unnecessarily"?

It seems to me, yes.

I talked to @Trizek-WMF about banners. Since edits coming from other wikis will be run after the read-only period which hopefully will be rather short I don't think we need to do a banner for all Wikimedia wikis, but we'll set up one for Wikidata.

An information banner will be displayed on Wikidata, between 04:30 UTC and 05:30 UTC on the 30th of July.

If some messages are planed to be left on the wikis, here is the link for that banner's translations: https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Translate&group=Centralnotice-tgroup-read_only_banner&task=view&filter=!translated&action=translate Main languages are translated (at least most of them), but more languages are always welcomed.