Howdy,
A few updates on the work of the Discovery team this week. Thanks to those
who sent something in, and thank you for reading.
* David, Erik, and Trey had a discussion with JustinO about improving
recall and improving search in general. Semi-readable notes are in an
etherpad <https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Recall>. Additional thoughts and
comments are welcome.
* Deb and Moiz had discussions with Abbey, Daisy and Edward about upcoming
surveys planned for the Wikipedia portal; awaiting Legal approval.
* The updated Perl version of TextCat is now available on GitHub
<https://github.com/Trey314159/TextCat>. Reminder: the PHP version
<https://github.com/wikimedia/wikimedia-textcat> has been available for a
while.
* Analysis has been completed
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:TJones_(WMF)/Notes/TextCat_Optimization_for_frwiki_eswiki_itwiki_and_dewiki>
on low-performing [search] queries (< 3 results) on French, Spanish, and
Italian Wikipedias, to optimize performance on language identification with
TextCat on those wikis. German is coming up next.
* Analysis is complete on recent
Wikipedia.org portal page A/B test: Wikipedia
Portal Test of Language Detection and Primary Link Resorting
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_Portal_Test_of_Language_Detection_and_Primary_Link_Resorting.pdf>
* Maps servers now have 16 varnish servers instead of 2 in 4 different data
centers instead of 1.
* A new Wikipedia portal A/B test will be released next week - it will add
in descriptive text to the sister project links at the bottom of the page.
* Search for a new analyst (Oliver's replacement) is going along well. We
got 169 applicants and some of them have done or are scheduled to do the
take-home analysis task.
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Feedback and suggestions on this weekly update are welcome.
The full update, and archive of past updates, can be found on
Mediawiki.org:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Discovery/Status_updates
--
Yours,
Chris Koerner
Community Liaison - Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation