Hi,
The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in March 2014 is now
available.
Wiki version:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2014/March
Blog version:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/04/18/engineering-report-march-2014/
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/2014/March/summ…
Below is the 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.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Major news in March include:
- an overview of
webfonts<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/03/07/webfonts-making-wikimedia…e/>,
and the advantages and challenges of using them on Wikimedia sites;
- a series of
essays<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/03/25/seeing-through-the-eyes-of-…
written
by Google Code-in students who shared their impressions, frustrations and
surprises as they discovered the Wikimedia and MediaWiki technical
community;
-
Hovercards<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/03/26/hovercards-now-availabl…
now
available as a Beta feature on all Wikimedia wikis, allowing readers to see
a short summary of an article just by hovering a link;
- a subtle typography
change<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/03/27/typography-refresh/>
across
Wikimedia sites for better readability, consistency and accessibility;
- a recap of the upgrade and
migration<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/03/28/wikimedias-road-to-bugzi…
of
our bug tracking software.
VisualEditor<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/VisualEdi…
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:VisualEditor_-_2013-14_Q2%E2%80%93Q3_quarterly_review_deck.pdf>
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:VisualEditor_-_2013-14_Q2%E2%80%93Q3_quarterly_review_deck.pdf>
Presentation slides from theVisualEditor team's quarterly review
meeting<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/…
on
March 26
In March, the VisualEditor <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor> team
continued their work on improving the stability and performance of this
visual tool to edit wiki pages. They also added some new features and
simplifications, helping users edit and create pages more swiftly and
easily. Editing templates is now much simpler, moving most of the advanced
controls that users don't often need into a special version of that window.
The media dialog was improved and stream-lined to make it clearer what the
controls are for. The overall design of dialogs and controls was improved
to make it flow better, like double-clicking a block to open its dialog. A
new system for quickly and simply inserting and editing "citations"
(references based on templates) neared completion and will be enabled in
the coming month.
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Parsoid_review_Q3,_March_2014.pdf>
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Parsoid_review_Q3,_March_2014.pdf>
Presentation slides from the Parsoid team's quarterly review
meeting<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/…
on
March 28
The Parsoid <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid> team continued with a
lot of bug fixing and
tweaking<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/Deployments> of
this parsing program that converts wikitext to annotated HTML, behind the
scenes of VisualEditor. Media and image handling in particular was
improved. In the process, we discovered a lot of edge cases and
inconsistent behavior in the PHP parser, and fixed some of those issues
there as well.
We revamped our round-trip test server
interface<http://parsoid-tests.wikimedia.org/> that
compares the wikitext code of a page before and after it's been converted
into annotated HTML, and back into wikitext. We fixed some issues in the
round-trip test system, and improved our error logging system.
We also designed and implemented a HTML templating
library<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_template_system> which
combines correctness, security and performance. This will notably be used
to evaluate HTML templating for translation messages and eventually wiki
content.
Editor engagement <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_editor_engagement>
This month the Core Features team focused on improvements to how the new
Flow <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow> discussion system works with key
MediaWiki tools and processes. We made changes to the history, watchlist,
and recent changes views, adding more context and bringing them more in
line with what experienced users expect from these features. We released a
thank feature in Flow, allowing users to thank each other for posts, and
began work on a feature to close and summarize discussions. Lastly, we
continued work on rewriting the Flow interface to make it cleaner, faster,
and more responsive across a wide number of browsers/devices.
In March, the Growth <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth> team primarily
focused on bug fixing, design enhancements, and refactoring of the
GettingStarted <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GettingStarted>
and GuidedTour <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GuidedTour>
extensions,
which were recently launched on 30 Wikipedias. We updated icons and button
styles, rewrote the interface text, and refactored the interface to be more
usable in non-English languages. We also began to refactor of the
GuidedTour API, in order to support interactive tours that are non-linear.
Non-linear tours will not depend on a page load to run, which will notably
enable better support for tours in
VisualEditor<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor>or>.
Last but not least, we made progress on measuring the impact of
GettingStarted<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Onboarding_new_W…
across
all wikis where it is deployed, with results for the first 30 days of
editor activity expected in early April.
Mobile <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering>
The Wikimedia Apps <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps> team
worked on logged-out editing to logged-in editing, and table of contents
refinements.
The Mobile web projects
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_web_projects> team
worked on the link inspector for VisualEditor on tablets, and a switch
between VisualEditor and wikitext on tablets. Both are in alpha.
During the last month, with the assistance of the Operations and Platform
teams, the Wikipedia Zero <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero> team
set up the upcoming Partners Portal and continued work on reducing image
size for the mobile web. Additionally, the team added Wikipedia Zero
detection to the Wikipedia for Firefox OS app, as well as contributory
features support for users on partner networks supporting zero-rated secure
connections. With the assistance of the Apps team, new features were added
to the forthcoming reboots of the Android and iOS apps; proof of concept
for full-text search was started on iOS.
Smart, the largest mobile operator in the Philippines, is giving access to
Wikipedia free of data charges through the end of April. We arranged a
meeting with local community members and Smart to explore ways to
collaborate in support of education. The partnerships team started to
review the 27 existing Wikipedia Zero partners, to update the
implementation, identify opportunities for collaboration in corporate
social responsibility (CSR) initiatives and get feedback on the program.
The account reviews will continue for the next few months.
--
Guillaume Paumier
Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation
https://donate.wikimedia.org