Hello again, Here is the Discovery department's weekly status update for the week starting 15 August.
== Discussions == * Search team met for a couple hours on Aug 17th to talk about how we can search across wiki projects (backend) and how to display them to end users (frontend). This will involve community involvement for A/B tests and user testing for how satisfied they are with the presentation and ordering/weighting of the results * Trey finished an analysis of the potential effects of adding ascii-folding to French Wikipedia (similar to the earlier analysis for English Wikipedia). The French case turns out to be much more complex, with a bigger impact, and more surprises. [1] * Analysis discussions have been plentiful this week around how to show portal pageviews more accurately [2] and how to show what languages visitors clickthrough to from the portal. [3] More to come!
== Events and News == * We deployed an update to the Wikipedia portal [4] - there was also a blog post about it [5], as well as some social media posts on Facebook [6] and on Twitter [7] while also sent to a few mailing lists (wikitech-l, wikitech-ambassadors, discovery). Based on feedback from the blog post, we've added in 4 new tickets for (mostly) small updates to the portal: ** update 'read in your language' phrase [8] ** update the meta description for the portal page [9] ** update the phrase to be centered under Wikipedia on mobile devices [10] ** request additional translations to be done for the remaining (currently English only) text on the portal page [11] * We also found a way to optimize the images on the portal even mo' better [12] * We've been fixing various Elasticsearch instablities and keeping everything up and running as best we can. [13] * Requested additional translations from the community for the new search language detection and results returned (phrase: showing results from) [14]
== Other Noteworthy Stuff == * We've been onboarding our newest Discovery team member, Chelsy (on our Analysis team), and she's making great progress so far!
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:TJones_(WMF)/Notes/Adding_Ascii-Folding_... [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T143045 [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T140816 [4] https://www.wikipedia.org/ [5] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/08/16/wikipedia-portal-update/ [6] https://www.facebook.com/wikipedia/posts/10154326175038346 [7] https://twitter.com/Wikimedia/status/765598299063627776 [8] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T143244 [9] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T143239 [10] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T143241 [11] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T143338 [12] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T143208 [13] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T142506 [14] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T143355
----
The full update, and archive of 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