For those wanting to know more about HHVM do drop by. This is one of
the foundations highest priorities for the quarter as noted on
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals#Top_depa…
Do make sure to monitor your changes on beta labs extra close while
this is going out.
--tomasz
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Quim Gil <qgil(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 5:54 AM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] [Tech Talk] HHVM in production: what that means
for Wikimedia developers
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
You are all invited to our next Tech Talk:
HHVM in production: what that means for Wikimedia developers
Tuesday, July 29 at 19:00 UTC
Video stream: https://plus.google.com/events/cp5mjf6jrihevtdje8lmu5hvm1k
Questions: wikimedia-dev IRC
Wikimedia engineers are quickly approaching the point where we are ready to
replace our current PHP interpreter with the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM),
which is a complete re-implementation of PHP that will offer much faster
execution speeds than our current implementation. We're pleased to have
Paul Tarjan and Brett Simmers from the Facebook HHVM team to talk about
HHVM generally. We've had talks in the past to discuss why we should move
to HHVM; this talk will focus on "how?", such as the things that developers
should know about compatibility (e.g. "can I keep using eval in my regular
expressions?") or things you can do to make your code more efficient in the
brave new HHVM world.
--
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Hi everyone,
Yesterday, we pushed an updated version of the Android app to production.
Notably, that update included a screen which is shown once upon first
starting the app, then never shown again, asking the user to sign up. For
those of you who don't know, the screen looks like this (MASSIVE IMAGE
WARNING): http://imgur.com/yOY4Iub
I've taken a preliminary look at our EventLogging data and, as you might
expect, there's been a massive upsurge in Android account registrations. *Right
now, the rate of Android app account registrations has increased by over
500%.* In fact, so far today, there have been more account registrations on
the Android app than on desktop!
The onboarding screen is being shown to everyone who downloads the app now,
including everyone who previously had the app and updated to the new
version. As mentioned above, the screen is only shown once, so I expect
this rate to decline rather dramatically over the next few days.
As we suspected, the actual beneficial effects of the onboarding screen on
our active editor numbers are pretty doubtful; my preliminary analysis
shows no increase in the number of edits that have been successfully saved
after the launch of the onboarding screen. This comes as no surprise to us,
as we knew that a big weakness of the onboarding screen is that it doesn't
mention editing or even say why you should sign up. We already were aware
of this and working to fix it.
I'll continue to keep you posted.
Thanks,
Dan
--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager for Platform and Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi all,
We've been looking for ways to speed up m.wikipedia.org and
zero.wikipedia.org landing page experiences on Wikipedia Zero. Currently,
when users hit m.wikipedia.org/ or zero.wikipedia.org/ on a Wikipedia Zero
partner network connection, there are two types of experiences.
1) If there's one popular language for the Wikipedia Zero partner network,
the user is redirected to the Main Page for that popular language.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxJX28FKLm78SDBBSUJIbkNxRkE/edit?usp=shari…
or
2) If there are multiple popular languages for the partner network, the
user is sent to a page in the most popular language on the partner network
and presented with a community-generated quote or generic lead-in text plus
hyperlinks to the Main Page for each popular language and an HTML-heavy
dropdown list for all languages.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxJX28FKLm78OGZNc3FiZmo3bmc/edit?usp=shari…
We've observed that these pages can take a while to load on slow
connections like 2G. Naturally, part of the slowness is due to the
connection itself. Additionally, part of it seems to be related to
additional (sometimes, network, sometimes DOM compositing blocking) page
resources, despite ubiquitous HTTP 1.1 connections. Although some of the
resources loaded from these pages are nice to get into the device cache,
for a landing page there's a higher risk that the user will give up before
actually seeing anything, and unfortunately many of the devices on the
Wikipedia Zero networks may not be able to take full advantage of some of
the features such as the core JavaScript (and by implication, extended
JavaScript, which in fairness won't be pulled) and even the CSS - much of
it is out of scope or unsupported.
For the Wikipedia Zero users unfamiliar with Wikipedia, the Main Page
content sometimes also is targeted at one geo, but not so much at the
user's geo despite a shared language. It's worth thinking through ways to
encourage local content curation in partnership with community members, and
so that's an area for additional exploration down the road perhaps.
Anyhow, I wrote a small patch to make the Wikipedia Zero landing page
experience relatively faster plus give the Wikipedia Zero user clear access
to fulltext search while also giving the user a means of hitting the Main
Page in the most popular languages.
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/147138/https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxJX28FKLm78VnR5SHJWQ1JCXzQ/edit?usp=shari…
We were wondering if this sort of thing might be of interest for the mobile
web in general, as well as if there was a way to sort of bake in the
strictly essential CSS and JS for this landing experience to achieve this
small footprint and faster page loading and search emphasis while relying
upon existing components.
I'd like to get this thing running for users on "zerodot" (
zero.wikipedia.org) for the #2 experience, followed by mdot on the #2
experience. And if that goes well, I think it be worth trying this strategy
on #1 as well (zerodot, then mdot).
A few notes:
* The patch has code for the license and ToS in the footer, it's just that
the devwiki screenshot is with fewer messages filled.
* It would be possible to add a little extra <style>ing into the patch's
output HTML (including a CSS sprite for the Wikipedia wordmark, if it's
required, although it adds overhead and isn't guaranteed to be perfectly
supported), as well as link to the info screen from the "banner text" at
the top for the operator like with the existing landing page, but I wanted
to cut this code first before untangling some of the other code. Sometimes,
less is also more.
* Whether the user taps on a link for the Main Page from a list of
languages or is sent directly to the Main Page, it's sort of hard to avoid
some of the latency on slow connections. The theory with this patch is that
if we can get the user started quickly, the user may be more likely to
stick around and the in the case of fulltext search, even though the search
results page will pull down some additional resources, the user may be more
incentivized to wait because it's something she was specifically seeking
out. Although it's nice to cache things, in this case it seems that
deferring is worth it.
* Eventually, it would be cool to wire up interwiki CirrusSearch for
Wikipedias from the mobile fulltext search. In the interim, I've been
thinking about getting "Did you mean" in place for mistyped searches (e.g.,
purrng suggests Purna), as well as a little additional styling on the
search results (e.g., make title bigger, remove block bullet points).
Thanks.
-Adam
Hello all,
The latest version of the Wikipedia Android app is now available on the
Google Play Store[1]!
Some highlights in this release:
- Added a Dark theme, for more comfortable reading at night. (Switch
between the Light and Dark themes from the top-right menu)
- Increase or decrease font size when reading pages.
- Tapping on references pops up a discreet window, and does not jump away
from your place in the page.
- Added a one-time splash screen, asking if you would like to create an
account or log in.
- Improved compatibility with Android 2.3
- Fixed numerous miscellaneous bugs
Happy reading! (and equally importantly, happy editing!)
--
Dmitry Brant
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia
Hi everyone,
Today I did some data analysis of the last nine days of our EventLogging
data for the Android app, and I'd like to share some interesting results.
*1) Edit to preview conversion is massively different between registered
and anonymous users.* 49.4% of registered users that make it to edit move
on to the preview step. Only 7.42% of anonymous users that make it to edit
make it to preview.
*2) Preview to save conversion is basically identical for registered and
anonymous users. *59.2% of registered users that make it to preview then
save their edits, compared to the 56.7% of anonymous users.
*This evidence supports our hypothesis that new (i.e. anonymous) users have
a much higher bounce rate on edit as compared to more experienced (i.e.
registered) users. *So, in a nutshell, our plans for this quarter are well
targeted!
I also checked registrations, and Android app registrations continue to
make up around 11% of all registrations across all platforms, so the
'registered' proportion may also include many new editors. I'm going
to look into breaking that out by user newness to get a better sense of the
data.
I'd like to thank Yuvi for sanity checking the SQL queries I wrote to
generate this analysis. :-)
Thanks,
Dan
--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager for Platform and Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation
--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager for Platform and Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation
Adding mobile-l :)
On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 12:24 AM, Dmitry Brant <dbrant(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Hi designers,
>
> Quick question: there was a feature request from OTRS[1] asking to
> display the number of search results when finding text within a page. There
> was also a subsequent patch proposed by Alex Monk that implements this
> functionality, like so: [2]
>
> Do you have any objections to adding this feature? I think it's not too
> intrusive on the UI, and adds a useful bit of functionality.
>
>
> [1]
> https://ticket.wikimedia.org/otrs/index.pl?Action=AgentTicketZoom&TicketID=…
> [2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/nk5jyujjn61dqpp/device-2014-07-21-141321.png
>
>
>
Summary of Discussion with Dmitry who is implementing this feature.
-Verified: Next and previous are cyclic
-Verified: If highlighted content is off the page, this feature scrolls and
brings the content up
-Possibly provide icon updates for next and previous arrows
-Dmitry is checking if we can adjust the highlight color so its WCG AAA
compliant
----
Vibha Bamba
Senior Designer | WMF Design
Should make use of this!
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Chris McMahon" <cmcmahon(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: 18 Jul 2014 13:14
Subject: [QA] new shared method "protect" available for browser tests
To: "Software quality assurance for Wikimedia projects." <
qa(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc:
Example:
on(APIPage).protect "Title of page to be protected", "Reason for protection"
sets the level of protection to
edit=sysop|move=sysop
We have needed this in particular for a MobileFrontend test that was
jumping through some huge hoops to protect a page. It is now universally
available in mediawiki-selenium 2.26.
-Chris
_______________________________________________
QA mailing list
QA(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/qa
Today's update to the Beta app is a maintenance release that addresses a
few higher-priority bugs:
- Fixed crash when long-pressing (to select text) within a page.
- Fixed several crashes related to network errors while fetching pages.
...and a few minor enhancements:
- Improved appearance of external links in Dark mode.
- Added progress indicator when changing font size.
As usual, you can find the app on the Play Store[1], or download the app
manually[2]. And, as always, your feedback is welcome!
-Dmitry
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia.beta
[2]
https://releases.wikimedia.org/mobile/android/wikipedia/betas/wikipedia-2.0…
