In the Community Tech team, we're constantly striving to make the world
better by creating helpful things and fixing unhelpful things. We're
basically superheroes, and we wear capes at all times. Here's what we've
been up to this month.
* We built a new Special:GadgetUsage report that's live on all wikis; it
lists gadgets used on the wiki, ordered by the number of users. Not to be
clickbait or anything, but THE RESULTS WILL SHOCK YOU. Check it out at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:GadgetUsage or your own favorite
wiki.
* HotCat is one of the most popular gadgets -- see: GadgetUsage report
above -- which helps people remove, change and add categories. We fixed
HotCat on over 100 wikis where it was broken, including Wikipedias in
Egyptian Arabic, Ripuarian, Buginese and Navajo, and five projects in Farsi
-- Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikivoyage and Wiktionary. You're
welcome, Farsi! (More info on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:HotCat
)
* CitationBot is a combination tool/on-wiki gadget that helps to expand
incomplete citations. We got it running again after the https change,
updated it, and fixed some outstanding bugs, including handling multiple
author names. (See
http://tools.wmflabs.org/citations/doibot.html for more
info.)
* We also built a prototype of a new tool called RevisionSlider, which
helps editors navigate through diff pages without having to go back and
forth to the history page. The prototype is live now on test.wp, and we'd
love to get your feedback -- visit
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/RevisionSlider
Coming up in November:
* We're starting a big cross-project Community Wishlist Survey on November
9th, inviting contributors from any wiki to propose and vote on the
features and fixes they'd like our team to work on. The survey page is on
Meta, at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey --
please join us there on Monday to add your proposals.
* While that's going on, we're currently considering work in a few
different areas, including completing Gadgets 2.0 and building some modules
to help WikiProjects.
You can keep track of what we're working on by watching Community Tech/News
on Meta:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/News -- and feel
free to leave questions or comments on the talk page. Thanks!
DannyH (WMF)
Community Tech