FYI
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 6:24 PM
Subject: First _draft_ goals for WMF engineering/product
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, Wikimedia
Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi all,
We've got the first DRAFT (sorry for shouting, but can't hurt to
emphasize :)) of the annual goals for the engineering/product
department up on mediawiki.org. We're now mid-point in the process,
and will finalize through June.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals
Note that at this point in the process, teams have flagged
inter-dependencies, but they've not necessarily been taken into
account across the board, i.e. team A may say "We depend on X from
team B" and team B may not have sufficiently accounted for X in its
goals. :P Identifying common themes, shared dependencies, and
counteracting silo tendencies is the main focus of the coming weeks.
We may also add whole new sections for cross-functional efforts not
currently reflected (e.g. UX standardization). Site performance will
likely get its own section as well.
My own focus will be on fleshing out the overall narrative, aligning
around organization-wide objectives, and helping to manage scope.
As far as quantitative targets are concerned, we will aim to set them
where we have solid baselines and some prior experience to work with
(a good example is Wikipedia Zero, where we now have lots of data to
build targets from). Otherwise, though, our goal should be to _obtain_
metrics that we want to track and build targets from. This, in itself,
is a goal that needs to be reflected, including expectations e.g. from
Analytics.
Like last year, these goals won't be set in stone. At least on a
quarterly basis, we'll update them to reflect what we're learning.
Some areas (e.g. scary new features like Flow) are more likely to be
significantly revised than others.
With this in mind: Please leave any comments/questions on the talk
page (not here). Collectively we're smarter than on our own, so we do
appreciate honest feedback:
- What are our blind spots? Obvious, really high priority things we're
not paying sufficient attention to?
- Where are we taking on too much? Which projects/goals make no sense
to you and require a stronger rationale, if they're to be undertaken at all?
- Which projects are a Big Deal from a community perspective, or from
an architecture perspective, and need to be carefully coordinated?
These are all conversations we'll have in coming weeks, but public
feedback is very helpful and may trigger conversations that otherwise
wouldn't happen.
Please also help to carry this conversation into the wikis in coming
weeks. Again, this won't be the only opportunity to influence, and
I'll be thinking more about how the quarterly review process can also
account for community feedback.
Warmly,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
I had a look at Ukrainian captchas. Fine and funny, I'm eager to know what
is the source for the words :)
Nota bene:
* usage of proper nouns may cause difficulties;
* letters Л and П in cyrillic look very simmilar
*Vira Motorko*
Help save natural resources - please think twice before printing this
e-mail or any attachments.
Hi all,
This is just a heads up that there are some design changes to the
look-and-feel of guided tours,[1] as well as some backend changes relevant
to people who've written their own tours.
Design aspects that are changing, in no particular order...
- Animations! Guiders that point at something will now animate using
CSS. We really hope this will make guiders more pleasurable and easy to
use. Tour authors will be able to turn this off if they want, and it will
not animate if the guider is not above the fold already.
- Button styles: we removed deprecated button classes and now use the
mw.ui "progressive" class by default. We also added styles for a "quiet"
button.[2]
- The pokey, i.e. the triangle shape which points at stuff: this is now
made in HTML/CSS instead of using images, and is smaller.
- Border styles and shadows: we're making these less bold. Now that
guiders animate they should stand out more, so heavy shadows/borders are
less necessary.
GuidedTour's backend has also undergone a major refactor, which is close to
being merged. This is described in full at the commit, which is just
waiting on us to update logging: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/116228/
The TL;DR is that you will not have to rewrite your tours for
compatibility. However, for new tours, we now support non-linear
progressions and other features. This means that we can do things like wait
to trigger tour steps based on user actions (like asking to Save after a
user types in VisualEditor).
As far as I know,[3] the following wikis have local guided tours which
could be updated:
- Commons
- English Wikipedia
- Farsi Wikipedia
- German Wikipedia
- Portuguese Wikipedia
- Wikidata
I'm going to reach out to some tour writers personally to make sure they
know about this, but any help you can provide would be good.
1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GuidedTour
2. Example is "no thanks" in:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Screenshot_2014-04-16_of_anonymous_…
3. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:GuidedTour_usage
--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the WMF Engineering Roadmap
and Deployment update.
The full log of planned deployments next week can be found at:
<https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments#Week_of_June_9th>
A quick list of notable items...
== Monday ==
* ElasticSearch
** There will be an upgrade of the backend/server software of the new
search system (to ElasticSearch 1.2.1). This should not have any user
facing impact.
== Tuesday ==
* MediaWiki deploy
** group1 to 1.24wmf6: All non-Wikipedia sites (Wiktionary, Wikisource,
Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikiversity, and a few other sites)
** <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.24/wmf8>
* WikiQuote/WikiData: WikiQuote will now have access to data in
WikiData.
== Thursday ==
* MediaWiki deploy
** group2 to 1.24wmf8 (all Wikipedias)
** group0 to 1.24wmf9 (test/test2/testwikidata/mediawiki)
* MediaViewer
** Will be enabled on by default on all Wikis
** <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Release_Plan#Timeline>
Thanks and as always, questions and comments welcome,
Greg
--
| Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E |
| identi.ca: @greg A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |
Hi everyone,
This is just a heads up that today we released GuidedTour on some
additional Wikipedias, including Arabic, Bengali, and Norwegian.
I already added this to the next edition of Tech News, at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/2014/24
On Arabic there are some small styling issues because of a clash with local
code (Tabs.js, if you're curious). We're working on a fix, but for now
nothing is broken per se.
--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
Hi folks,
please spread the word! From July 1, tools which haven't been migrated from
toolserver to tool labs yet, will stop working.
Further informations:
About one year ago, we, Wikimedia Deutschland e. V., announced June 30th as
the deadline of the Toolserver migration (Roadmap at [1]). This deadline is
approaching. The Toolserver will stop working on June 30th. What will
happen afterwards?
Background information
The Toolserver is a community based infrastructure that hosts software
supporting Wikipedia and its sister projects. Over the years many active
volunteers have developed helpful and great software tools that are running
on several Wikimedia projects.
The Toolserver is operated by Wikimedia Deutschland with assistance from
the Wikimedia Foundation and several chapters. For many reasons, the
Toolserver will be discontinued and replaced by Tool Labs [2], a platform
operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Please see the reasons at [3]. For
more than one year Wikimedia Deutschland has been coordinating the
migration of software tools from Toolserver to Tool Labs.
What editors should know
The toolserver is a community-driven project. The tools shall be migrated
by the developers resp. maintainers themselves. Many of them have already
migrated their tools or have indicated that they will do so before the end
of this month. We have a special agreement with the OpenStreetMap projects
and with the developer of Merlbot [4] to ensure these tools don’t stop
working. All other tools will stop working by July 1st.
What editors can do
On Tool Labs [2], you can look up if the tools that you use and need have
already moved there.
Talk to the developers of your favourite tools: It is important to let
them know how much you appreciate their tools and that you need them to do
your work.
Contact us if you don’t know who these developers are or if you have any
questions or if you want us to forward wishes or requests to tool
developers. Contact information is given at the end of this text.
Information for tool developers
If you are still facing the migration of your tools, please keep in mind
that lots of people use your tools. They are a great support for their
daily work and will be missed when they fail. Please take the time to
migrate them or poke us: WMDE can still support you during migration - what
we can’t do is maintain abandoned tools in the long run.
>From July 1st on, the toolserver admins will still hand you over your
backups upon request and create redirects to Tool Labs for you. You won’t
be able to log in to the toolserver anymore though.
If anyone wants to have and reuse other people’s code, we recommend to seek
approval from them directly, even if from a legal point of view there is no
problem. Don’t hesitate to talk to us if you need a contact person.
Here is a collection of the relevant links for you again:
Tool Labs: http://tools.wmflabs.org
Tool Labs help pages:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Nova_Resource:Tools/Help
How to create redirects to Tool Labs:
https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/.htaccess#.htaccess
Magnus Manske’s migration manual:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/Migrating_from_tools…
Scripts to clean up your toolserver account]] after migration:
https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Main_Page
Mailing list Labs-l: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/labs-l
IRC channel #wikimedia-labs:
http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#wikimedia-labs
Marc-André Pelletier (Coren) and Andrew Bogott (andrewbogott) are the WMF
Tool Labs ops. Petr Bena (petan) and Tim Landscheidt (scfc_de) are
voluntary Tool Labs admins.
We invite you to join our IRC office hour in #wikimedia-office on
Wednesday, June 11th, at 5 p.m. UTC.
Contact:
The migration is coordinated by Silke Meyer (WMDE). Birgit Müller supports
her in communications. The two toolserver admins Marlen Caemmerer und
Alexander Mette are glad to help you with advice. Marc-André Pelletier can
answer all questions concerning Tool Labs. Contact us at
Silke: silke.meyer(a)wikimedia.de, Talk page at [5], IRC: Silke_WMDE
Birgit: birgit.mueller(a)wikimedia.de, Talk page at [6], IRC: Birgit_WMDE
We hope that the transition will happen as smoothly as possible!
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Tool_Labs/Roadmap_en
[2] http://tools.wmflabs.org
[3] https://toolserver.org/
[4] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:MerlBot
[5] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer_Diskussion:Silke_WMDE
[6] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer_Diskussion:Birgit_Müller_(WMDE)
--
Birgit Müller
Team Communitys
Community Liaison
Volunteer Support Department
E-Mail: birgit.mueller(a)wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 26-0
http://wikimedia.de
Stellen Sie sich eine Welt vor, in der jeder Mensch an der Menge allen
Wissens frei teilhaben kann. Helfen Sie uns dabei!
http://spenden.wikimedia.de/
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
*TL;DR:*
** We have upgraded the version of jQuery in MediaWiki from 1.8.x to
1.11.x.*
** For a few months, a hack will keep old users scripts, gadgets etc.
working.*
** The hack will be removed around September when MediaWiki 1.24 is
released.*
** Before it is removed, make sure your wiki reviews any scripts and
gadgets.*
After a long time, we are finally upgrading the jQuery package that ships
with
MediaWiki, and so is used by many extensions, gadgets and site and user
scripts.
This upgrade fixes a lot of bugs, but also cleans up a lot of deprecated and
dubious functionality from early versions of jQuery.
Code which uses the removed functionality is currently working due to a
short-
term hack, jQuery Migrate, that provides the removed functionality and
outputs
a warning to the console log whenever it is activated.
The jQuery Migrate hack will be removed in the (Northern Hemisphere's)
Autumn of
2014. This means all extensions, gadgets, and user & site scripts on your
wikis
that still make use of jQuery legacy APIs will need to be upgraded before
then
or they will break.
== What can I do? ==
If you are a developer, please follow the instructions in the posts to
wikitech-l
about how to check and upgrade your wiki's gadgets, site and user scripts
[0] [1].
If your wiki uses copies of other wikis' gadgets, please make sure that
your wiki
is using the latest version. There is also a tracking bug for all the
extensions
deployed on Wikimedia wikis which use the old code, which will be fixed
before
the support hack is switched off. [2]
If you are not a developer, you can check your browser's console log to see
if
there are any warnings tagged "JQMIGRATE". If you find any, please raise
them in
your community so you can work together to make sure they are addressed in
time.
If you are a wikiambassador, please make sure your community is aware of
this
change and that any developers, gadget authors or script experts who write
code
for your wiki know that this is coming and are working to fix any issues.
If your
community is unable to fix any issues you have, please ask for help on this
list
so that we can assist you.
[0] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014-May/076340.html
[1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014-June/076842.html
[2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65399
Yours,
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
Ambassadors,
Sorry for being silent for so long. I have a (maybe) important update for
CirrusSearch. I'm currently in the process of pushing unicode
normalization [0] to many languages [1]. In some languages this will
(hopefully!) be great and in others it won't change anything. If this has
broken anything please let me know. Reply or file a bug or whatever is
easiest for you.
Thanks for reading!
Nik
[0]: NFKC with case folding <http://unicode.org/reports/tr15/#Norm_Forms>
for those who want to read more/already know and love unicode normalization.
[1]: All languages _but_ these: arabic, armenian, basque, brazilian,
bulgarian, catalan, chinese, czech, danish, dutch, finnish, french,
galician, german, greek, hindi, hungarian, indonesian, italian, norwegian,
persian, portuguese, romanian, russian, spanish, swedish, turkish, thai.
Its a long story why they aren't getting it, but they will in time if
everything goes well....
