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.
----
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