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.
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the WMF Roadmap and
Deployments update.
See the full roadmap for next week and beyond here:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments#Week_of_March_3rd
Some important call outs:
== Monday ==
The migration of WMF Labs from pmtpa to eqiad begins
* new instance creation disabled in pmtpa, only available in eqiad
* See the emails from Andrew and Marc for more details:
** http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/labs-l/2014-February/002152.html
** http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/labs-l/2014-February/002153.html
We will be disabling ArticleFeedBack on all wikis.
* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61163
== Tuesday ==
MediaWiki upgrades
* group1 to 1.23wmf16: All non-Wikipedia sites (Wiktionary, Wikisource,
Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikiversity, and a few other sites)
* see also:
** https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.23/Roadmap#Schedule_for_the_depl…
** https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.23/wmf16
== Wednesday ==
The new search cluster will be upgraded (to ElasticSearch 1.0.1).
* This will begin at 0:00 UTC March 6th/4pm Pacific March 5th and will
take a few hours to complete.
* All wikis currently using the new search (CirrusSearch) will be
temporarily switched back to the old serach (lsearchd)
* You shouldn't see much of a change in search behavior (CirrusSearch is
mostly feature parity to lsearchd) if your wiki is on new search, but
to see a list of wikis that currently have CirrusSearch enabled (and
in what way: Beta Feature or Primary), see:
** https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Search#Wikis
== Thursday ==
MediaWiki upgrades
* group2 to 1.23wmf16 (all Wikipedias)
* group0 to 1.23wmf17 (test/test2/testwikidata/mediawiki)
As always, questions welcome,
Greg
--
| Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E |
| identi.ca: @greg A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |
Hi all,
This is just a heads up that we've added GuidedTour and GettingStarted
extensions to a few more wikis today.
* Per bug 60270, we enabled GuidedTour on Czech Wikipedia.
* We enabled GettingStarted and GuidedTour on Japanese Wikipedia, since
translation was complete.
* Per discussion with Swedish editors over IRC, we updated the
GettingStarted configuration for Swedish Wikipedia to include their
copyediting category for task suggestions.
* Per bug 61192, we added GuidedTour to se.wikimedia.org. This is the
Swedish chapter wiki.
--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
Hello and welcome to your weekly deployments and roadmap update email.
The full schedule for next week is at:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments#Week_of_February_24th
Highlights:
== Week of ==
We will be upgrading Varnish (caching servers) instances to a newer
version (previously deployed/tested at ulsfo) slowly over the week.
== Monday ==
We will be fixing doc.wikimedia.org and integration.wikimedia.org
http->https redirects
* https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/111917/
== Tuesday ==
MediaWiki deploy window, currently following the 1.23 schedule
* https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.23/Roadmap#Schedule_for_the_depl…
* group1 to 1.23wmf15: All non-Wikipedia sites (Wiktionary, Wikisource,
* Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikiversity, and a few other sites)
** includes the wikidata extension code updates (which includes a new
Lua interface) to Wikivoyage, Commons, Wikisource.
== Thursday ==
MediaWiki deploy window, currently following the 1.23 schedule)
* group2 to 1.23wmf15 (all Wikipedias)
** includes the wikidata extension code updates (which includes a new
Lua interface) to Wikipedias
* group0 to 1.23wmf16 (test/test2/testwikidata/mediawiki)
== Friday ==
New versions of the iOS and Android applications will be submitted to
their respective markets.
As always, questions welcome,
Greg
--
| Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E |
| identi.ca: @greg A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the weekly Deployments and
Roadmps update.
For the full (and most up to date) schedule of planned deployments, see:
<https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments>
For next week, the highlights include:
== Monday ==
NO DEPLOYS - US Holiday (Presidents' Day)
== Tuesday ==
MediaWiki deploy window, currently following the 1.23 schedule
* group1 to 1.23wmf14: All non-Wikipedia sites (Wiktionary, Wikisource,
* Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikiversity, and a few other sites)
** <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.23/Roadmap#Schedule_for_the_depl…>
** <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.23/wmf14>
== Thursday ==
MediaWiki deploy window, currently following the 1.23 schedule)
* group2 to 1.23wmf14 (all Wikipedias)
* group0 to 1.23wmf15 (test/test2/testwikidata/mediawiki)
** <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.23/wmf15>
* Wikidata Repository code updated on testwikidata
* Pending tests on testwikidata, Wikidata Repository code updated on
* wikidata.org
== Long term ==
You can see what is known to be upcoming here:
<https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments#Next_month>
As always, questions 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 January 2014 is now
available.
Wiki version:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2014/January
Blog version:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/02/13/engineering-report-january-2014/
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/2014/January/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 January include:
- the transition of our search
engines<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/01/06/wikimedia-moving-to-elasticsearch/>on
Wikimedia sites to ElasticSearch;
- a presentation of how the Tech newsletter
works<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/01/07/tech-news-fighting-technical-informat…>,
including a historical perspective;
- an invitation to comment on the 2-year
vision<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/01/09/multimedia-vision-2016/>of
the multimedia engineering team;
- a request for
comments<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/01/23/rfc-should-we-support-mp4-video-on-ou…>on
whether the MP4 video format should be supported on Wikimedia sites.
VisualEditor<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/VisualEditor/Portal>
In January, the VisualEditor
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor>team continued their work
on improving the stability and performance of
this visual editing interface to edit pages on Wikipedia and its sister
sites; they also added some new features. You can now edit page settings
like whether to display a table of contents or whether to show section edit
labels. You can also specify the size of a media file manually, see a list
of keyboard shortcuts, and create and edit media galleries using a very
basic stand-in editor whilst the final form is being designed. Work also
continued on a dialog for quickly adding "citation" references based on
templates, more media and page settings, setting content language and
right-to-left indicators, and equation editing.
The Parsoid <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid> team (developing the
program that converts wikitext to annotated HTML, behind the scenes of
VisualEditor) did a lot of bug fixing around images, links, references and
various other areas. We also mentored students, participated in discussions
relating to the architecture of MediaWiki, and started to work on
"packaging" Parsoid to make it easier to install.
Editor engagement <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_editor_engagement>
This month, the Core Features team worked on integrating MediaWiki tools
for dealing with spam and vandalism (AbuseFilter and Spam Blacklist) into
Flow <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow>, a new wiki discussion system.
We also launched an updated visual design and user interface for Flow,
based on the first round of experienced user feedback last month, as well
as ongoing user testing with new users. Lastly, we created a script to
disable Flow and convert its content, so that we can begin testing Flow on
two WikiProjects that volunteered on the English Wikipedia while being able
to revert to wikitext if needed.
The Growth <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth> team improved the
GettingStarted <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GettingStarted>extension,
in part to support local configuration for different Wikipedias.
The latest version of GettingStarted and GuidedTour will be released in
English and 23 other languages in early February. The team also completed
several iterations of design and data analysis in support of upcoming work
on Wikipedia article
creation<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_article_creation>.
We presented new designs for the Draft namespace, and completed a series of
remote usability
tests<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Draft_namespace/Usability_testing>.
We also finalized and published extensive quantitative
analysis<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_article_creation>of
trends in article creation across the largest Wikipedias.
Mobile <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering>
During the last month, the Wikipedia
Zero<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero>team worked on
supporting secure HTTPS connections for partners in the Zero
program, which allows mobile subscribers to access Wikipedia content at no
data cost. We also continued to work on a proof of concept HTML5 web app
for Firefox OS, fixed bugs in the legacy Firefox OS Wikipedia app, and
prepared alpha functionality for the integration of Wikipedia Zero with the
rebooted Android Wikipedia app. The team also met with the business
development team to plan for partners and Wikipedia Zero-related work at
large, and conducted tech facilitation to enable partner launches and align
approaches with current and future partners.
The Mobile web projects
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_web_projects>team has been
directing much of their attention over the last month at
delivering a tablet-friendly mobile experience. We've added support for
tables of contents, made some design improvements, and have worked towards
making VisualEditor work on tablets (in alpha for now). We have also
released our overlay UI improvements as well as an improved inline diff
view for MobileFrontend into stable. Finally, we have also been working to
expand our coverage of browser tests to facilitate quality assurance and
help prevent the introduction of bugs and regressions.
--
Guillaume Paumier
Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation
https://donate.wikimedia.org
