Hello,
This is the weekly update from the Search Platform team for the week starting 2018-01-08. 

== Highlights==
* Latvian and Arabic Wikipedia's enabled mapframe on their respective wiki's (completed by community volunteers) [0] [1]

== Discussions ==

=== Search ===
* David tuned the wikidata fulltext search similarity parameters [2]
* Stas fixed an issue with the IDs option in forceSearchIndex.php is broken [3]
* Trey finished his initial analysis of phonetic algorithms available in Elasticsearch. [4]

=== Portal ===
* The portal's stats and translations were updated on January 8, 2018 via our mostly automated process [5] [6] 
* Jan updated "liguru" to "lìgure" on the Wikipedia portal [7]

== Did you know? ==
* Last October, the President of Kazakhstan announced that the country would switch from the Cyrillic to Latin alphabet.[8] As a result, over the course of about 100 years, the writing system for Kazakh will have changed from Arabic to Latin to Cyrillic and back to Latin. Several Turkic languages[9] spoken in former Soviet Republics have gone through similar shifts, including Azerbaijani,[10] Turkmen,[11] and Uzbek [12]—with the most recent shift to Latin for some beginning in the 1990s. Thus some speakers of those languages lived through all three changes to their official writing system. 


== FY 2017-18 Q3 (Jan-Mar) goals == 
This status was last updated 2018-01-08. [13]

[0] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T183981
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T183764
[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T182293
[3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T183197
[4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:TJones_(WMF)/Notes/Overview_of_Phonetic_Algorithm_Performance
[5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T128546
[6] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T142582
[7] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T180772
[8] https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Kazakhstan:_President_Nazarbayev_signs_decree_to_change_Kazakh_characters_from_Cyrillic_to_Latin-based_script
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkic_languages
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijani_alphabet
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkmen_alphabet
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzbek_alphabet
[13] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Discovery/Status_updates/2018-01-08#FY_2017-18_Q3_(Jan-Mar)_goals
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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 Liaison
Wikimedia Foundation