Hi,
The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in September 2013 is
now available.
Wiki version:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/September
Blog version:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/02/engineering-report-september-2013/
We're also proposing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this
report that does not assume specialized technical knowledge:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/September/…
Below is the full HTML text of the report's summary.
As always, feedback is appreciated on the usefulness of the report and its
summary, and on how to improve them.
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Major news in September include:
- A recap on how our engineers worked with
volunteers<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/03/language-support-at-wik…
improve language tools at Wikimania;
- A call for wikis willing to experiment with using HTTPS for all
users<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/10/https-by-default-beta-progra…
;
- A recap on how our new image scaling
system<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/12/vipsscaler-implementation-w…
implemented by a volunteer developer;
- A call for technical
projects<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/16/call-for-wikimedia-tech-p…
could for instance be completed as part of our mentorship programs;
- Design experiments to show the community behind Wikipedia
articles<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/25/humanizing-wikipedia-edit…
mobile devices;
- Another release of the MediaWiki Language Extension
Bundle<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/26/get-introduced-to-internati…e/>,
with an explanation of how it's put together;
- The completion of the sixth round of the Outreach Program for
Women<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/30/foss-outreach-program-for-wo…
;
- A recap of the launch of
Notifications<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/01/notifications-launch…
more language versions of Wikipedia, and their impact.
VisualEditor<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/VisualEdi…
In September, the VisualEditor team continued their work to improve this
visual tool to edit wiki pages, and enabled it on more wikis. The focus in
the team's work this month was to continue to improve the stability and
performance of the system, fix a number of bugs uncovered by the community,
and make some usability improvements.
Improvements were also made to
Parsoid<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid>id>,
the program that converts wikitext to annotated HTML, and vice-versa. Bugs
were fixed, performance statistics were added, and the code base was
cleaned up. We planned out an implementation strategy for language variant
support, and started researching and experimenting with HTML storage
options, which is required for a number of projects in our roadmap.
Editor engagement <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_editor_engagement>
In September, we released Notifications on more
Wikipedias<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/01/notifications-launch-on…s/>,
such as the Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Ukrainian and
Vietnamese. Notifications allow users to stay informed of changes and
discussion that affect them. Community response has been very positive so
far, across languages and regions. For each release, we reached out to
community members weeks in advance, inviting them to translate and discuss
the tool with their peers. As a result, we have now formed productive
relationships with volunteer groups in each project, and are very grateful
for their generous support.
This month, we continued architecture work on
Flow<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal>al>,
the new discussion system, to integrate it with watchlists, recent changes,
mentions and notifications. We also started experimenting with
VisualEditor-enabled posting. We began a sprint to create a new
interface<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal/Design#Visual_desig…
the board and discussions that will work across desktop and mobile
platforms. We are aiming to implement this design next month, in
preparation for several rounds of new user and experienced user feedback
before the first release.
In September, the Growth <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth> team
(formerly known as Editor Engagement Experiments, or E3), primarily worked
on the onboarding new
Wikipedians<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Onboarding_new_Wikipedians>…roject.
In particular, this included the creation and deployment of two
new guided tours <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Guided_tours> to teach any
new user how to make their first edit, using wikitext or VisualEditor. The
guided tours feature was also enabled to the following language editions of
Wikipedia: Catalan, Hebrew, Hungarian, Malay, Spanish, Swedish, and
Ukrainian. Along with the renaming, the team held its third quarterly
review
(
minutes<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/…
available) and published its 2013–2014
product
goals<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2013-14_Goals…am>.
Last, in accordance with the 2013-14 goals, the Growth team began research
into modeling newcomer
retention<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newcomer_survival_mod…
Wikipedia, anonymous
editor
acquisition<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anonymous_editor_ac…on>,
and article creation
improvement<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Article_creation>
.
Mobile <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering>
This month, the Wikipedia
Zero<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero>team made a lot of
improvement to the Zero platform, which provides free
access to Wikipedia on select mobile carriers. They released enhanced URL
rewriting and debug flag-only Edge Side
Includes<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_Side_Includes>(ESI) banner
inclusion to production, supported the Ops implementation of
dynamic MCC/MNC <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_country_code> carrier
tagging, identified web access log and user agent anomalies, further
analyzed and recommended load balancer IP address-related changes in
support of HTTPS requirements, and tested JavaScript-based Wikipedia Zero
user interface enhancements.
The Mobile web <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_web_projects> team
mostly focused on Tutorial A/B testing, Notifications overlay in Beta, and
adding campaign tracking to MobileFrontend.
--
Guillaume Paumier
Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation
https://donate.wikimedia.org