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. 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. Reminder: the
PHP version has been available for a while.
* Analysis has
been completed 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.
* 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.
----
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