Wikitech-ambassadors September 2013

wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org

23 participants
18 discussions

New search backend live on mediawiki.org
by Nikolas Everett 13 Sep '13

13 Sep '13

Today we threw the big lever and turned on our new search backend at mediawiki.org. It isn't the default yet but it is just about ready for you to try. Here is what is we think we've improved: 1. Templates are now expanded during search so: 1a. You can search for text included in templates 1b. You can search for categories included in templates 2. The search engine is updated very quickly after articles change. 3. A few funky things around intitle and incategory: 3a. You can combine them with a regular query (incategory:kings peaceful) 3b. You can use prefix searches with them (incategory:norma*) 3c. You can use them everywhere in the query (roger incategory:normans) What we think we've made worse and we're working on fixing: 1. Because we're expanding templates some things that probably shouldn't be searched are being searched. We've fixed a few of these issues but I wouldn't be surprised if more come up. We opened Bug 53426 regarding audio tags. 2. The relative weighting of matches is going to be different. We're still fine tuning this and we'd appreciate any anecdotes describing search results that seem out of order. 3. We don't currently index headings beyond the article title in any special way. We'll be fixing that soon. (Bug 53481) 4. Searching for file names or clusters of punctuation characters doesn't work as well as it used to. It still works reasonably well if you surround your query in quotes but it isn't as good as it was. (Bugs 53013 and 52948) 5. "Did you mean" suggestions currently aren't highlighted at all and sometimes we'll suggest things that aren't actually better. (Bugs 52286 and 52860) 6. incategory:"category with spaces" isn't working. (Bug 53415) What we've changed that you probably don't care about: 1. Updating search in bulk is much more slow then before. This is the cost of expanding templates. 2. Search is now backed by a horizontally scalable search backend that is being actively developed (Elasticsearch) so we're in a much better place to expand on the new solution as time goes on. Neat stuff if you run your own MediaWiki: CirrusSearch is much easier to install than our current search infrastructure. So what will you notice? Nothing! That is because while the new search backend (CirrusSearch) is indexing we've left the current search infrastructure as the default while we work on our list of bugs. You can see the results from CirrusSearch by performing your search as normal and adding "&srbackend=CirrusSearch" to the url parameters. If you notice any problems with CirrusSearch please file bugs directly for it: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=MediaWiki%20extensions… Nik Everett

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HTTPS by default beta program
by Erik Moeller 12 Sep '13

12 Sep '13

Ambassadors, If the Wikimedia community you're active in is interested in participating in continued testing of HTTPS-by-default (beyond logged-in users), and there's consensus to do so, you can sign up for the beta program: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/10/https-by-default-beta-program/ You can see more about the roadmap to HTTPS-by-default in Ryan's earlier blog post here: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/01/future-https-wikimedia-projects/ Signing up for the beta will mean at minimum that, at some point in the future, pages will be advertised to search engines with the HTTPS prefix (via the canonical link element [1]), so while the HTTP prefix will continue to work at that point, users visiting from search referrals will be directed to HTTPS, provided the search engine respects rel="canonical". We call this "soft-enabling". We have not made a final decision as to whether HTTPS will also be hard-enabled at some point in the future. In any case, these improvements will eventually be applied consistently across our wikis (with possible continued exemptions for regions like mainland China and Iran where HTTPS traffic is blocked); the point of the beta program is to get early technical feedback. All best, Erik [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_link_element -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

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Updates to guided tours: new languages and a new "first edit" tour.
by Steven Walling 09 Sep '13

09 Sep '13

Hi everyone, Here's this week's software updates from the Editor Engagement Experiments team. Today, we deployed some changes to the Guided Tour extension,[1] including... New languages! Guided Tours are now available to use or create on the following Wikipedias: Catalan, Hebrew, Hungarian, Malay, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian. Look on your local Village Pump for an announcement. Particularly exciting is that Hebrew is our first real test of use on a RTL language wiki. A new tour! In support of our work onboarding new Wikipedians,[2] we've launched a general "make your first edit" tour. Try it by appending ?tour=firstedit to an article URL.[3] This tour is brand new, and probably needs translation for non-English speakers. Note that this tour is for wikitext editing only, regardless of whether VisualEditor is deployed to your wiki or not. Soon (likely next week), we'll have an equivalent first edit tour that guides you through the basics of using VE. In the onboarding experience, we're going to point to VisualEditor if it exists for that user, but we'll have this wikitext tour as a backup. Please speak up if you have any questions about how to use guided tours, or create your own. 1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GuidedTour 2. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Onboarding_new_Wikipedians#Proposed 3. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michikawa_Station?tour=firstedit -- Steven Walling https://wikimediafoundation.org/

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Deployment schedule for the week of Sept 9th, 2013
by Greg Grossmeier 06 Sep '13

06 Sep '13

Hello and welcome to the latest update of the deployment schedule for the WMF server cluster. Full schedule available on the wiki, and is the place to look for any changes: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments#Week_of_September_9th Of special note: Next week all WMF staff will be in San Francisco for the "Tech Days" on Tues/Wed and the "All Hands" on Thurs/Friday. As such, some changes have been made to the normal deploy calendar (most notably, no deploys on Thursday due to All Hands). == Monday == * MediaWiki deploy of 1.22wmf16 to all non-wikipedia project sites (Commons, Witionary, etc) * The Language team will be rolling out some EventLogging work. * Probably a deploy of a fix to CentralNotice to accommodate multiple needs (by eg WLM). == Tuesday == * Nothing as of yet == Wednesday == * Wikipedia Zero updates * MediaWiki deploy of 1.22wmf17 to test wikis, and 1.22wmf16 everywhere else * E3 deploy of some GettingStarted changes. == Thursday == no deploys == Friday == no deploys As always, questions/comments welcome. Greg -- | Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E | | identi.ca: @greg A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |

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Wikimedia engineering August 2013 report
by Guillaume Paumier 06 Sep '13

06 Sep '13

Hi, The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in August 2013 is now available. Wiki version: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/August Blog version: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/06/engineering-august-2013-report/ 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/August/sum… Below is the full 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 August include: - A discussion about using the secure HTTP protocol<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/01/future-https-wikimedia-projects/>on Wikimedia sites, followed by a switch to that protocol for all registered users<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/28/https-default-logged-in-users-wikimed…> ; - The launch of the Notifications feature<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/30/notifications-launch-on-mobile/>on the mobile site; - A discussion about how security issues are handled<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/30/team-wikimedia-security-has-a-spot-fo…>in our community; - The Wikimania conference, which was notably an opportunity for the Language engineering team<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/02/join-the-language-engineer-team-at-wi…>to meet with users and improve language support, particularly for the Javanese language<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/23/restoring-the-forgotten-javanese-scri…> ; - A much-anticipated upgrade of the software used by our volunteer e-mail response team<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/09/wikimedias-email-response-upgrade/>, OTRS. VisualEditor<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/VisualEditor/Portal> In August, the VisualEditor team continued to work on this visual interface to edit wiki pages without markup, and met with the Wikimedia community at Wikimania in Hong Kong <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2013> to discuss how to best improve it. The software saw three major updates this month, with other smaller updates to fix urgent issues. The focus of this work was on improving the stability and performance of the system, fixing a number of bugs uncovered by the community, and making some usability improvements. Work also continued on Parsoid <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid>, the software that converts wikitext to annotated HTML behind the scenes of VisualEditor. The team continued to improve the compatibility with existing wiki markup, thanks to the feedback provided by users after VisualEditor was released in July. The infrastructure used for the conversion between formats received a much-needed overhaul, notably to improve performance by changing the storage back-end. Performance statistics are now recorded, which will make it easier to identify performance bottlenecks and catch regressions. Editor engagement <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_editor_engagement> In August, the Notifications<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_%28Notifications%29>feature was added to Wikipedia in French, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese and Swedish. It was well received, particularly the ability to notify people by mentioning them in a discussion, and the ability to thank users for an edit. Notifications should be added to all Wikimedia sites in the coming months. Development continued on the upcoming discussion system ("Flow<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal>"). New features were added to the prototype, notably the revision history and a moderation tool. A few changes were made to the Article Feedback Tool<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5>on the English and French Wikipedias, like improvements to the opt-out tool. Feedback notifications have also been added, to let users know when useful feedback is given for a page they monitor. The article feedback tool will be made available to other wiki projects interested in testing it later this year. This month, the Editor Engagement Experiments<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editor_engagement_experiments>team (E3) primarily focused on development for its next and final test of the Getting Started<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GettingStarted>task suggestion system, a part of a project aimed at onboarding new Wikipedians. The team also worked on enhancements and bug fixes for the GuidedTour feature, such as adding the ability to customize default tour actions and better integration with VisualEditor. Mobile <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering> In August, the Mobile Apps team released a new version of the Commons photo uploader app <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Commons> for iOS and Android. The interface of the iOS version was improved, while the Android version received incremental updates, such as better support for upload campaigns (like Wiki Loves Monuments). The team also started making plans for the next generation of the Wikipedia reader app, which will be more closely integrated with the mobile web site, to ensure that new features are always available through a web view, even where there isn't specific native support. The team continued to plan the re-architecture of Wikipedia Zero, the program that allows free mobile access to Wikipedia on select carriers. They also analyzed HTTPS requirements in support of a push for greater usage of HTTPS across Wikimedia projects. Last, the mobile editing feature on the mobile site<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_web_projects>continued to be improved. Bugs were fixed, and the feature show at the section level of articles was expanded. The first iteration of mobile notifications was also activated on wikis projects where Notifications are enabled. -- Guillaume Paumier Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation https://donate.wikimedia.org

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VisualEditor weekly update - 2013-09-05 (MW 1.22wmf16)
by James Forrester 06 Sep '13

06 Sep '13

All, My weekly update<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/status#2013-09-05_.28MW_1.22wmf…> about progress on VisualEditor: VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf16 branch deployment <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf16> on Thursday 5 September. In the week since 1.22wmf15, the team worked on some interface changes, fixing bugs, and stability & performance improvements to VisualEditor. In new features, we have changed the toolbar to be simpler, shorter, and to have the ability to have drop-down groups with descriptions. At least initially, we have moved all but the most basic tools into a single drop-down, including inserting media, templates and other transclusions, and references & reference lists. As part of this, the controls to add <u> (underline), <sub> (subscript), and <sup> (superscript), <s> (strikethrough) and <u> (underline) annotations to text will now be available to all users in the drop-down. We also added a set of keyboard shortcuts for setting the block formatting: Ctrl+0 sets a block as a paragraph; Ctrl+1 up to Ctrl+6 sets it as a Heading 1 ("Page title") to Heading 6 ("Sub-heading 4"); Ctrl+7 sets it as pre-formatted (bug 33512<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33512>). The help/'beta' menu now exposes the build number next to the "Leave feedback" link, so users can give better reports about issues they encounter (bug 53050 <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53050> ). When inserting a new link into a blank location, we now additionally suggest lower-case link anchors as well as the upper-case equivalent if you've typed that in, so typing in "iPhone" will prompt "iPhone" as well as "IPhone" (bug 50452 <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50452>). Inserting media files when some content is selected no longer replaces the content, but puts the media item at the end of the selection instead (bug 52460 <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52460>). Inserting a link, reference or media file will now put the cursor after the new content again (bug 53560 <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53560>). In the reference dialog, the 'Use existing reference' button is now disabled on pages which don't yet have a reference (bug 51848<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51848>). Newly-added references or reference groups no longer need the page to be saved before they can be re-used (bugs 51689<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51689> and 52000 <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52000>). The template parameter filter in the transclusion dialog now searches both parameter name and label (bug 51670<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51670> ). We fixed a few errors with copy and paste; copying over nodes (like references or templates) no longer inserts additional newlines on paste (bug 53364 <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53364>), and if you copied an item and then changed it, or pasted it and changed the copy, you would get the changed item (and not what you copied) on the next paste (bug 52271 <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52271>). The names of languages listed in the "languages" (langlinks) panel in the Page settings dialog now display as RTL when appropriate (bug 53503<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53503> ). Finally, our Google Summer of Code students neared completion of their work. The Math and SyntaxHighlight extension editors have both made excellent process, and the team hosted in San Francisco Moriel Schottlender<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Mooeypoo>, lead on the tool for setting text language details, for in-depth discussions of how we might improve the back-end to support the tool better. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf16 changelog<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf16/Changelog#VisualEditor>, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&bug_status=V…> . If you have any questions, please do ask. Yours, -- James D. Forrester Product Manager, VisualEditor Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester

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Help translate guided tours
by Steven Walling 04 Sep '13

04 Sep '13

Hey everyone, I periodically try to check in on extensions my team maintains, to see if there are newly complete translations which can help us deploy on non-English wikis. I noticed that for GuidedTour,[1] Hebrew and Malay are complete now, while Swedish, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic are very close to being done (96%). If someone can finish translations in these languages, we can add guided tours to zhwiki, svwiki, jawiki, and arwiki on Thursday during our normal deployment window. We'll definitely add it to hewiki and mswiki. For those not familiar with it, Extension:GuidedTour lets either software developers or local admins create tooltip-based interactive tours of any feature or process on a wiki. If you want, you can actually create tours just like gadgets. There's more documentation at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GuidedTour -- Steven Walling https://wikimediafoundation.org/ 1. https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special%3AMessageGroupStats&x=D&gro…

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Wikipedia Signpost Tech report
by Adam Cuerden 04 Sep '13

04 Sep '13

This isn't *quite* finished - it'll be quite obvious what I still need to research and write up - but this contains all the major new updates I'm currently aware of, either as a note or as a fully-written section. The last Signpost came out late, so a lot of things went into that one, limiting this report. As always, any comments are welcome.

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Wikitech-ambassadors September 2013