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
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
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/
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 |
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
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
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…
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.