Hello,
A quick reminder that the Wikimedia Language Engineering team will be
hosting an IRC office hour from 1500 to 1600UTC later today on
#wikimedia-office (FreeNode). Please see below for the event details.
Thanks
Runa
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Runa Bhattacharjee <rbhattacharjee(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 11:40 AM
Subject: Language Engineering IRC Office Hour on November 13, 2013 at 1500
UTC
To: MediaWiki internationalisation <mediawiki-i18n(a)lists.wikimedia.org>,
Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, Wikimedia
developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>,
wikitech-ambassadors(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[x-posted]
Hello,
The Wikimedia Language Engineering team will be hosting an IRC office
hour on Wednesday, November 13, 2013 between 15:00 - 16:00 UTC on
#wikimedia-office. (See below for timezone conversion and other details.)
We will be talking about some of our recent and upcoming projects and then
taking questions for the remaining time.
We also look forward to hear about anything that needs our attention.
Questions and other concerns can also be sent to me directly before the
event. See you there!
Thanks
Runa
=== Event Details ===
What: WMF Language Engineering Office hour
When: November 13, 2013 (Wednesday). 1500-1600 UTC
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20131113T1500
Where: IRC Channel #wikimedia-office on FreeNode
--
Language Engineering - Outreach and QA Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi,
The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in October 2013 is now
available.
Wiki version:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/October
Blog version:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/11/12/engineering-report-october-2013/
We're also proposing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this
report that does not assume specialized technical knowledge:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/October/su…
Below is the HTML text of the report's summary.
As always, feedback is appreciated on the usefulness of the report and its
summary, and on how to improve them.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Major news in October include:
- A report on the Open Access Media
Importer<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/21/scientific-multimedia-files-get-a-sec…>,
a tool that transfers multimedia files from scientific publications to
Wikimedia Commons;
- A request for proposals for a new datacenter in the continental
US<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/21/rfp-new-datacenter-continental-us/>,
published by the Operations team;
- The creation of the Autonym
Font<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/28/the-autonym-font-for-language-names/>,
which allows language names to be displayed properly without degrading page
loading time.
*Note: We're also providing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of
this report
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/October/su…>
that does not assume specialized technical knowledge.*
VisualEditor<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/VisualEditor/Portal>
In October, the
VisualEditor<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Portal>team
continued to improve the stability and performance of the system, and
add new features. The version of the software present on Wikimedia sites
was updated five times. Beyond fixing bugs, the focus of the team's work
this month was to make the system more reliable and easier to extend.
They also continued to improve usability. For example, you now need to
press the "delete" key twice to delete a template, reference or image; the
first time, they only become selected, to avoid accidental deletion of
infoboxes and similar content. A new feature, allowing users to switch from
editing in VisualEditor to editing wikitext directly without having to save
the page, was also added.
In October, the Parsoid <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid> team
continued to work on the conversion between wikitext and annotated HTML for
unusual cases. Speed was improved by making the software run more requests
at the same time. The speed of the testing
server<http://parsoid.wmflabs.org:8001/>used to check for conversion
errors was also improved: we can now run tests
on 160,000 pages overnight. Support for private wikis was also added this
month.
Editor engagement <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_editor_engagement>
In October, we enabled Notifications
worldwide<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Release_Plan_2013#Completed>on
about 800 Wikimedia sites, including most of the remaining Wikipedia
wikis and 'sister projects'. Community members we've spoken to generally
find this tool helpful, across languages and world regions. Notifications
are also available on mobile devices, and seem to be adding value on these
platforms as well. We now plan a final release of Notifications on the
German and Italian editions of Wikipedia at the end of November.
In October, the Flow <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal> team
redesigned the prototype<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal/Interactive_Prototype>of
this new discussion system. We also continued to add basic features.
We
held a User Experience
workshop<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal/Team/Meetings/2013-10-15_Flow_wo…>,
primarily with users new to Wikipedia, to get feedback on the usability of
the new design. We're planning to demo the basic Flow product to interested
WikiProjects in November to get more feedback on what's needed for a first
trial on Wikipedia.
In October, the Growth <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth> team
completed its sixth and final major A/B test of the
GettingStarted<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GettingStarted>and
GuidedTour <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GuidedTour> extensions
for the onboarding new
Wikipedians<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Onboarding_new_Wikipedians>project.
Data
analysis results <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/R:OB6> for this test were
also published, making way for rolling out the winning version on
non-English Wikipedias in November. This month, the team also completed
background research and early designs for its upcoming work on anonymous
editor acquisition<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anonymous_editor_acquisition>and
Wikipedia
article creation <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_article_creation>
.
Mobile <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering>
Many changes were made to the iOS Commons
app<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Commons>in October.
Users can now select the license among the most common ones,
and swipe to delete categories on yet-to-be-uploaded images. A number of
visual and interface improvements have been made, notably for iOS 7
compatibility. Icon consistency has been improved throughout the app. The
app now also has better internationalization support, as well as better
landscape and iPad support.
The Wikipedia Zero <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero> team,
supporting the program to give Wikipedia access to mobile users at no cost,
worked on many features and enhancements as well. Part of their work
focused on reducing accidental data charges, for example by adding warnings
for users who don't benefit from the Zero program. They also made
improvements to the settings system that allows the configuration of
parameters for different mobile companies.
The mobile web <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_web_projects> team
has been focusing on many new features, as well as running tests about new
mobile editors. They've improved the general design for a better user
experience, and started to try to integrate VisualEditor to tablets. In
beta, user profiles are now available, as well as 'Keep Going', a series of
calls to action for new editors.
--
Guillaume Paumier
Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation
https://donate.wikimedia.org
Hi folks,
this is a quick note that Universal Language Selector's automatic font
loading kicks in for any fonts required to render language name in
lists of languages which are _not_ standard interlanguage links in the
sidebar. So these are typically things like templates at the top or
bottom of pages. Sometimes these can be found on the Main Pages of
monolingual wikis, and often on pages in multilingual wikis.
The ULS team developed the autonym font, which only has a 50K payload,
to reduce font loading for these cases:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/28/the-autonym-font-for-language-names/
However, the CSS class "autonym" needs to be explicitly added to
relevant templates to enforce usage of the font. Community help is
appreciated in this process. Here's an example of a change to use the
autonym font for a list of language links on the English Wikipedia
Main Page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Wikipedia_languages/cor…
Changing language link templates to use the autonym font will make
pages load faster, so your help is much appreciated.
All best,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
[x-posted]
Hello,
The Wikimedia Language Engineering team will be hosting an IRC office
hour on Wednesday, November 13, 2013 between 15:00 - 16:00 UTC on
#wikimedia-office. (See below for timezone conversion and other details.)
We will be talking about some of our recent and upcoming projects and then
taking questions for the remaining time.
We also look forward to hear about anything that needs our attention.
Questions and other concerns can also be sent to me directly before the
event. See you there!
Thanks
Runa
=== Event Details ===
What: WMF Language Engineering Office hour
When: November 13, 2013 (Wednesday). 1500-1600 UTC
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20131113T1500
Where: IRC Channel #wikimedia-office on FreeNode
--
Language Engineering - Outreach and QA Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
Hello Dan!
I only described what some reactions were. It has an origin, the background: For some years people on nl-wiki have been very enthusiastic about the idea of a Visual Editor, the community liked it very much and wanted it very much. When the Visual Editor came live on the Dutch Wikipedia, users were very enthusiastic about it and wanted to try it, but very soon after bugs after bugs after bugs after bugs appeared. On request of the team of the Visual Editor we had before the deployment already a feedback page, it is still loaded with bugs, all reported to the team, but still none have been fixed. The Visual Editor makes a really mess of too many pages. The developers of VE planned some time later to deploy the next step of the Visual Editor and making the VE not opt-in but the standard editor for everyone. Besides having promised an opt-out, which other projects did not get and the trust in the VE team was harmed a lot, almost all the bugs that we have
reported are still not fixed, even just before the scheduled deployment. The Dutch community got much demotivated and lost even more trust because of this and held a voting about this situation which made clear that the existing VE was absolutely not ready to be made available for everyone, and that on a project were people would welcome a good Visual Editor very very much. This was a huge disappointment. What this disappointment made even worse was that the bugs weren't fixed, and the community got some kind of car salesman from WMF which tried to sell a broken product, which annoyed even more and gave the feeling the community is the idiot, while with the feedback which was given nobody has done anything. The Dutch community is used to changes and some normal annoyance that they have to change habits or fix broken things again and again, but the situation with VE is considered the worst implementation ever on Wikipedia of the past decade. It gave
users the feeling that WMF doesn't care for the needs of users who daily do the actual work which makes Wikipedia a success, gave the feeling that WMF things that sticking to a plan is more important than really solving the issues the local users met, and made users feel WMF/developers as unreliable and untrustworthy. This is still in peoples minds after months like a nightmare and still is frustrating.
Earlier this year the community of nl-wiki adopted very quick Wikidata as new way of working and also the Notifications tool (Flow) was adopted rapidly with much excitement in September (even while both are not the most optimal and still have bugs).
So yes, it is illogical that some users want the VE first ready, but that is the result of a long desired wish to have a fully working VE which apparently is considered a larger need than a better search. I constantly keep trying to inform the community about why, how, when, etc to get a better picture of technical changes. Lucky most users understand that both pieces of software are independent of each other and really like to move on and have the software improved, including the search.
Romaine
---
tech ambassador for nl-wiki
Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 17:21:50 +0000
From: Dan Garry <dgarry(a)wikimedia.org>
To: "Coordination of technology deployments across
languages/projects"
<wikitech-ambassadors(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-ambassadors] Would any other wikis
like to try
out a new search?
Message-ID:
<CAOW03ME9F_51DuXq0qy1ziJHRLkQfcocwmSc7ZP8d58gE9-Spw(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
It's a little illogical to say no to search on the basis
that VE should be
fixed first. The engineers involved in search are not
involved in VE at
all, and saying no to search does not mean that they'll be
reassigned to
the VE instead. Alas, people can be illogical sometimes.
Thanks very much for relaying the results of the straw poll
you ran,
Romaine!
Dan
On 27 October 2013 00:27, Romaine Wiki <romaine_wiki(a)yahoo.com>
wrote:
> Hello Nik,
>
> About a week ago I explained the nl-wikipedia community
on the central
> discussion page about your message and asked them the
question.
> The result of the short poll is 19 users say yes to
test, 4 say no, 2 say
> neutral.
> In general they experience the current search limited
and would like to
> see it improved. 2 of who say no have no problems with
the current search
> and say that something does not need to be fixed if it
isn't broken, while
> the visual editor should be fixed first as that one is
broken much more on
> nl-wiki (yes the VE is a huge problem with messing up
pages, but that is
> another subject). Apparently those two do not have the
experience that the
> search is limited. Two others say no as they have had
worse experiences
> with the visual editor (just as everyone else on
nl-wiki: we had a poll on
> VE which clearly stated that the VE was absolutely
working worse and hit a
> big gap in the trust in the developers), and would like
to be assured that
> the new search isn't having too big bugs that disrupt
searching normally.
>
> In general saying there is a large majority for
testing. Certainly for
> secondary testing at first, if it is stable enough also
for testing in
> primary modus.
>
> Romaine
>
> ---
> tech ambassador for nl-wiki
>
>
> [Wikitech-ambassadors] Would any other wikis like to
try out a new search?
> Nikolas Everett neverett at wikimedia.org
> Thu Oct 17 19:49:08 UTC 2013
>
> Dear Ambassadors,
>
> I'm looking for volunteer wikis to try out the new
search that Chad and
> I've been working on called CirrusSearch.
>
> <sales pitch>Be a part of the second wave of
wikis and influence new search
> features!</sales pitch>
>
> Reality:
> * We're reasonably sure CirrusSearch's language support
is better than the
> current search. [1]
> * CirrusSearch indexes expanded templates.
> * CirrusSearch indexes articles within a few seconds of
when they are
> changed. Articles that contain a changed template
take longer but they are
> also updated.
> * Most of the special search syntax is the same.
You can read the syntax
> here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Search/CirrusSearchFeatures
>
> What it means to volunteer:
> If you volunteer your wiki we'll turn CirrusSearch on
in "secondary" mode
> where it'll keep itself up to date but all queries will
still go through
> the old search. You'll be able to get search
results from the new search
> engine for comparison by adding a url parameter to the
search results
> page. If you and the community that you represent
aren't immediately blown
> away by how much better it works we'll work with you to
make it awesome.
>
> At some point, shortly after the new search has been
deemed awesome, we'll
> switch CirrusSearch to "primary" mode and all queries
will go through it.
> You'll be able to get at the old search results with a
url parameter
> similar to the one that you used to test
CirrusSearch. If anything goes
> wrong we'll switch you back to the old search.
We'll keep that option open
> for a few months.
>
> So who is ready to help make search better?
>
> Nik Everett
>
> [1]: Some languages (20ish) will see a huge improvement
because
> CirrusSearch understands their grammar and old search
doesn't. Many other
> languages will see an improvement because CirrusSearch
is happy to search
> all kinds of character sets while the current search
isn't. Esperanto is
> very well supported by the old search so would get
worse. eo wikis should
> probably wait until we've improved support.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list
> Wikitech-ambassadors(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors
>
--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager for Platform
Wikimedia Foundation
Here's your deploy highlights for next week:
Full schedule for the next two weeks here:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments#Next_2_weeks
== Monday ==
* MediaWiki 1.23wmf2 will be deployed to remaining test wikis
(mediawiki.org, loginwiki, and test.wikidata.org)
** If the above goes smoothly, 1.23wmf2 will be deployed to all
non-Wikipedia wikis
** This is due to an intial problematic deploy on Thursday Oct 31st of
1.22wmf2.
* Updates to CentralNotice (see above linked page for details)
== Tuesday ==
* CirrusSearch enabled on: se.wikimedia.org, ast.wikipedia.org,
gu.wikipedia.org, el.wikipedia.org, and fr.wikisource.orghttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Search#Timeline
== Thursday ==
* MediaWiki 1.23wmf2 to all Wikipedias
* MediaWiki 1.23wmf3 to all testwikis
** MassMessage update on test wikis (minus mediawiki.org)
** BetaFeatures with CommonsMetadata and MultimediaViewer to Commons and
MetaWiki
As always, let me know if you have any questions!
Greg
--
| Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E |
| identi.ca: @greg A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |
