Discovery November 2018

discovery@lists.wikimedia.org

5 participants
9 discussions

Upcoming Search Platform Office Hours—December 5th
by Trey Jones 04 Dec '18

04 Dec '18

The Search Platform Team <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Search_Platform> holds office hours the first Wednesday of each month. Come ask us anything about Wikimedia search! We’re particularly interested in: * Opportunities for collaboration—internally or externally to the Wikimedia Foundation * Challenges you have with on-wiki search, in any of the languages we support But we're happy to talk about anything search-related. Feel free to add your items to the Etherpad Agenda for the next meeting. Details for our next meeting: Date: Wednesday, December 5th, 2018 Time: 16:00-17:00 GMT / 08:00-9:00 PST / 11:00-12:00 EST / 17:00-18:00 CET Etherpad: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Search_Platform_Office_Hours Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/vyc-jvgq-dww *N.B.:* Google Meet System Requirements <https://support.google.com/meet/answer/7317473> —Trey Trey Jones Sr. Software Engineer, Search Platform Wikimedia Foundation

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Advanced Search is now a default feature on all wikis
by Johanna Strodt 28 Nov '18

28 Nov '18

// Sorry for cross-posting Hi everyone, the Advanced Search interface is now available as a default feature on all wikis. That means you, logged-in or not, can carry out advanced searches even if you don’t know any search syntax. The new feature provides some existing advanced search options in a visual interface. This can help you find pages that contain a particular template, search in page titles, for a specific sequence of characters, and much more. Plus, the way namespaces can be selected has been redesigned. Among other things, you can now select several namespaces with one click, e.g. to search in all talk namespaces. More detailed information is on the project page. [1] The feature was developed by Wikimedia Deutschland’s Technical Wishes Team. [2] The idea for it was born in 2016 in workshops with editors, followed by prototypes, several feedback rounds on dewiki and Meta, and finally the beta function, which 43,000 people across all wikis used. During the beta phase, bugs were fixed, the namespace selection was revised, and more search options were added. Many thanks to everyone who took the time to give feedback (onwiki, in discussions, at the dev summit and more), to test or to translate. A big thank you also goes to the Discovery team at the WMF for their support, by making backend adjustments and implementing a new search parameter for deep category searches. The development team hopes that the new feature will help you find what you’re looking for more easily. People who prefer to keep the previous search interface can deactivate the new feature in their user preferences. [3] As always, feedback is welcome on the central talk page. [4] Johanna for the Technical Wishes team -- Johanna Strodt Project Manager Community Communications Technical Wishlist, Wikimedia Deutschland [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/AdvancedSearch [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-searchop… [4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help_talk:Extension:AdvancedSearch

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haystack request for proposals
by Erik Bernhardson 28 Nov '18

28 Nov '18

Just a notice that RFP for haystack, https://haystackconf.com/ , has gone out. Proposals due jan 9th. Conference april 24th and 25th. I'll probably submit the recent autocomplete work as a talk. Something like the following. I don't like any of these titles yet and the abstract surely needs help too, but will ponder on it. Titles? Running millions of hits per second on a laptop Elasticsearch and Tensorflow, an offline evaluation story Exporting explains Abstract: What if we could export the scoring equation along with all the inputs and variables, and run this equation outside of elasticsearch? Simple queries can then be run on a laptop at a rate of several million hits per second. This opens up a variety of optimization techniques such as coordinate ascent or hyperopt to tune the query variables including boosts, tie breakers, similarity parameters, etc.

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Fwd: [Translators-l] Fwd: AdvancedSearch announcement: looking for translation support
by Johanna Strodt 22 Nov '18

22 Nov '18

Thanks a lot for forwarding! There'll also be a bigger, more extensive announcement of the feature deployment on this list soon. So stay tuned. :) Best, Johanna -- Johanna Strodt Project Manager Community Communications Technical Wishlist Forwarding to the Discovery list and more project email lists so that people know that this feature change is coming. Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Johanna Strodt <johanna.strodt at wikimedia.de <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery>> Date: Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 12:14 PM Subject: [Translators-l] Fwd: AdvancedSearch announcement: looking for translation support To: <translators-l at lists.wikimedia.org <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery>> Dear all, the Advanced Search interface will soon become a default feature on all wikis. Its deployment is planned for November 28. The feature adds an advanced parameter form to the Special:Search page in order to make already existing advanced search options such as "intitle" or "subpageof" more visible and accessible for everyone. It also changes the way namespaces can be selected. We want to announce the upcoming deployment on village pumps with this short message: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Johanna_Strodt_(WMDE)/Advanced_Search_… The feature has already been deployed to deWP, arWP, faWP and huWP, so we're now looking for translations in other languages. We're planning to publish the message on Monday, Nov 26, around 11 am UTC. Therefore it would be great to have the translations ready by Monday November 26, 7 am UTC. Thanks a lot. Any support is very appreciated! Johanna -- Johanna Strodt Project Manager Community Communications Technical Wishlist Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin Phone: +49 (0)30 219 158 26-0https://wikimedia.de Imagine a world, in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That‘s our commitment. Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207. _______________________________________________ Translators-l mailing listTranslators-l at lists.wikimedia.org <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery>https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/translators-l

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Fwd: [Translators-l] Fwd: AdvancedSearch announcement: looking for translation support
by Pine W 22 Nov '18

22 Nov '18

Forwarding to the Discovery list and more project email lists so that people know that this feature change is coming. Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Johanna Strodt <johanna.strodt(a)wikimedia.de> Date: Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 12:14 PM Subject: [Translators-l] Fwd: AdvancedSearch announcement: looking for translation support To: <translators-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Dear all, the Advanced Search interface will soon become a default feature on all wikis. Its deployment is planned for November 28. The feature adds an advanced parameter form to the Special:Search page in order to make already existing advanced search options such as "intitle" or "subpageof" more visible and accessible for everyone. It also changes the way namespaces can be selected. We want to announce the upcoming deployment on village pumps with this short message: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Johanna_Strodt_(WMDE)/Advanced_Search_… The feature has already been deployed to deWP, arWP, faWP and huWP, so we're now looking for translations in other languages. We're planning to publish the message on Monday, Nov 26, around 11 am UTC. Therefore it would be great to have the translations ready by Monday November 26, 7 am UTC. Thanks a lot. Any support is very appreciated! Johanna -- Johanna Strodt Project Manager Community Communications Technical Wishlist Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin Phone: +49 (0)30 219 158 26-0https://wikimedia.de Imagine a world, in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That‘s our commitment. Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207. _______________________________________________ Translators-l mailing list Translators-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/translators-l

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Discovery Weekly Update for the week starting 2018-11-12
by Chris Koerner 20 Nov '18

20 Nov '18

Good day, This is the weekly update from the Search Platform team for the week starting 2018-11-12 Programming note: Given the upcoming US holiday the next update will be for the week starting 2018-11-26. As always, feedback and questions welcome. == Discussions == === Search === * David and Trey have resolved the problems with 32-bit Chinese characters (like 𨨏—[0]), which were returning irrelevant results, and showing lots of unicode replacement characters (�) in the results. The highlighter fix was deployed [1] first so there aren't any more � characters in the results. The re-indexing [2] to improve the relevance of results is now also done for Chinese-language wikis. == Did you know? == * Letters are encoded internally by computers as numbers—for example, “A” is 65 and “a” is 97.[3] Years ago, programs and even websites would use different encodings[4] to represent text, often leading to unreadable gibberish on screen. Unicode[5] was intended to be a single encoding for most of the world’s writing systems. The most-used parts of it fit into a 16-bit representation,[6] which can handle about 65 thousand characters. But that's not enough for the very large number of rare and historical Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) characters, which are represented in 16-bit Unicode using “surrogate pairs”.[7] 1,024 Unicode characters are set aside to be “high surrogates”—the first half of a 32-bit character—and 1,024 characters are set aside to be “low surrogates”—the second half. By themselves, the surrogates aren’t valid and don’t represent anything, but in pairs they can represent over a million additional characters. Since these characters are usually rare, software can sometimes treat them incorrectly split them up, which can result in you seeing the Unicode replacement character �,[8] which is used when something has gone wrong processing Unicode text. (When the character is fine, but you don’t have a font to show it, you sometimes get little squares instead. Since the most common source of these squares for English speakers is unrepresented CJK characters, a slang term for the squares is “tofu”.[9]) [0] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T168427 [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T209293 [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T209156 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#Printable_characters [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding#Common_character_encodings [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16 [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Character_Set_characters#Surrogates [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specials_(Unicode_block)#Replacement_character [9] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tofu#Noun ---- Subscribe to receive on-wiki (or opt-in email) notifications of the Discovery weekly update. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Newsletter:Discovery_Weekly The archive of all past updates can be found on MediaWiki.org: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Discovery/Status_updates Interested in getting involved? See tasks marked as "Easy" or "Volunteer needed" in Phabricator. [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/qW51XhCCd8.7/#R [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/5KEPuEJh9TPS/#R Many thanks, Chris Koerner Community Relations Specialist Wikimedia Foundation

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Discovery Weekly Update for the week starting 2018-11-05
by Chris Koerner 14 Nov '18

14 Nov '18

Howdy, This is the weekly update from the Search Platform team for the week starting 2018-11-05 As always, feedback and questions welcome. == Discussions == === Search === * Gehel and Mathew worked on the separation of concerns for WDQS puppet module [0] * The team worked on calculating autocomplete examination probabilities from eventlogging data [1] * Mathew worked on fixing Type constraints in entry point for the WDQS puppet module [2] * David and Stas worked on creating a SearchQuery to be an immutable class holding all the information known after parsing the query [3] and it will ride the train the week of Nov 13th. [0] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T208394 [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T205348 [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T208393 [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T189880 ---- Subscribe to receive on-wiki (or opt-in email) notifications of the Discovery weekly update. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Newsletter:Discovery_Weekly The archive of all past updates can be found on MediaWiki.org: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Discovery/Status_updates Interested in getting involved? See tasks marked as "Easy" or "Volunteer needed" in Phabricator. [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/qW51XhCCd8.7/#R [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/5KEPuEJh9TPS/#R Yours, Chris Koerner Community Relations Specialist Wikimedia Foundation

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Upcoming Search Platform Office Hours—November 7th
by Trey Jones 08 Nov '18

08 Nov '18

The Search Platform Team <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Search_Platform> will be holding office hours the first Wednesday of each month, starting next week. Come ask us anything about Wikimedia search! We’re particularly interested in: * Opportunities for collaboration—internally or externally to the Wikimedia Foundation * Challenges you have with on-wiki search, in any of the languages we support But we're happy to talk about anything search-related. Details for our next meeting: Date: Wednesday, November 7th, 2018 Time: 16:00 GMT / 08:00 PST / 11:00 EST / 17:00 CET Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/vyc-jvgq-dww *N.B.:* Google Meet System Requirements <https://support.google.com/meet/answer/7317473> Hope to see you there! —Trey Trey Jones Sr. Software Engineer, Search Platform Wikimedia Foundation

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Discovery Weekly Update for the week starting 2018-10-22
by Chris Koerner 06 Nov '18

06 Nov '18

This is the weekly update from the Search Platform team for the week starting 2018-10-22. As always, feedback and questions welcome. == Discussions == === Search === * Mathew and Gehel worked on refactoring the WDQS updater while also increasing the restart interval of the WDQS updater [0] [1] *There were some known issues that the Search team helped in fixing where the Elasticsearch puppet config changes broke puppet in various instances [2] *Erik fixed an issue where the sister search / cross language search interaction with multi-datacenter was a bit off [3] *The team worked on getting Debian Stretch off of Ubuntu Trusty for all instances of the search project [4], as well as various other updates needed to get ElasticSearch ready for version 6: as well as investigating just how many number of servers we really need in the ElasticSearch cluster. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] *Gehel and Mathew also worked on |modifing scap::target to define sudo rules for multiple services [10] *Erik |fixed a failure where cirrusSearchIncomingLinkCount was getting a 'read timeout is reached' issue from title::getFirstRevision [11] *Erik finished up work to add autocomplete evaluation via MRR to relforge [12] == Other Noteworthy Stuff == * Oct 18-21 Trey went to WikiConferenceNA 2018. [13] Some highlights: ** He was interviewed [14] for the Wikijabber podcast. [15] ** He gave a lightning talk on homoglyphs. Slides are available online. [16] ** You can see the full conference schedule online [17] and find the slides for many of the presentations on Commons. [18] ** More detailed write up on MediaWiki. [19] == Did you know? == * Homoglyphs [20] are characters in different writing systems that look very similar or, in some fonts, even identical to each other. For example A/Α/А or M/Μ/М in Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic, respectively. Homoglyphs can be very hard to detect when reading, but they interfere with search because “Мoscow” and “Moscow” are completely different words from the point of view of search. The former starts with a Cyrillic M (as does Moscow’s name in Russian, “Москва”). There are often a few dozen examples of the mixed-script “Мoscow” [21] on English Wikipedia at any given time. (Trey cleans them up from time to time as a hobby, and hopes to create a plugin for Elasticsearch to automatically make them visible to search.) [0] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T208392 [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T207843 [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T205672 [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T205558 [4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T204686 [5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T206468 [6] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T206469 [7] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T206472 [8] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T206470 [9] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T207724 [10] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T206314 [11] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T206042 [12] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T205494 [13] https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2018/Main_Page [14] https://wikijabber.com/wikijab015-trey-jones/ [15] https://wikijabber.com/ [16] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nQQUJ8W4NK4vf7WbKFp2YZz3Bvej97zRFO4… [17] https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2018/Schedule [18] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiConference_North_America_20… [19] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:TJones_(WMF)/Notes/WikiConference_North… [20] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoglyph [21] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%D0%9Coscow&title=Special%3ASea… ---- Subscribe to receive on-wiki (or opt-in email) notifications of the Discovery weekly update. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Newsletter:Discovery_Weekly The archive of all past updates can be found on MediaWiki.org: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Discovery/Status_updates Interested in getting involved? See tasks marked as "Easy" or "Volunteer needed" in Phabricator. [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/qW51XhCCd8.7/#R [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/5KEPuEJh9TPS/#R Yours, Chris Koerner Community Relations Specialist Wikimedia Foundation

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