Dear Wiki Tech Ambassadors,
The Collaboration team[1] is working on various products: Notifications[2],
Flow[3] and the new Edit Review improvements project[4]. We have a lot of
news concerning these products that may interest people, but that are not
fitting Tech News inclusion criteria.[5] We want people to be aware of
that's new about our products and I'm questioning various people about the
best option we should consider to have.
As tech ambassadors, you have an interesting experience. That's why I'm
collecting your feedback.
*Is a newsletter format relevant?* By newsletter, I mean a message
distributed on wiki, like Tech News or the visual editor newsletter[6]. Do
you have ideas of a different formats? We may consider to try other things.
*What would be the best message design?* Is short sentences like in Tech
News good? Or would you prefer to have longer messages with more details?
(Longer messages may be more complicated to translate.)
*How often would you like to receive news?* Tech News has a weekly
distribution, VE's newsletter a quarterly one. As one of the main writers
of that news publication, I would prefer to have a monthly distribution,
but your feedback may be different. Note that we now have a(n experimental)
page with most important changes with products we maintain.[7]
Feel free to answer me privately, or by commenting the dedicated
Phabricator task.[8] I'm gathering all answers until next Friday (August
5th).
Thanks *a lot*!
Benoît
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Collaboration
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Notifications
[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow
[4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Edit_Review_Improvements
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/For_contributors
[6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Newsletter/Archive
[7] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Collaboration/Deployment_planning
[8] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T123538#2505381
--
Benoît Evellin (Trizek)
Community Liaison
Wikimedia Foundation
(sorry for cross posting)
Hi all,
on July 21 23:00-00:00 (UTC) RevisionSlider got deployed as a beta feature
on German Wikipedia, Arabic Wikipedia and Hebrew Wikipedia.
The RevisionSlider extension adds a slider interface to the diff view, so
that you can easily move between revisions. It helps users to view edit
summaries and other meta data of all revisions while hovering over the
slider interface. At the current state, the last 500 revisions can be
loaded. [1]
The RevisionSlider extension was developed by Wikimedia Deutschland's TCB
team and fulfills a wish from the German-speaking community's Technical
Wishlist. [2] It is based on a rough prototype by the Community Tech Team
who we love collaborating with. [3]
The feature already was presented at WMF's last metrics meeting, so if you
are interested to hear more about it, you can also have a look into the
video record. [4]
Why German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia in the first round?
As a first step, we want to see if RevisionSlider works well on both, LTR
and RTL Wikipedias. The decision for German Wikipedia is probably obvious,
as the RevisionSlider addresses a wish from the German-speaking community.
But the team spent also some work in optimizing the feature for RTL
languages, and we were talking to people from Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia
at Wikimania. Both communities created a site request ticket to deploy
RevisionSlider as a Beta feature on their projects. [5] [6]
So far everything went well and we also got our first really nicely written
bug report from Hebrew Wikipedia - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T141071
;).
We are really happy about the constructive and appreciative collaboration
style around RevisionSlider, it's so much fun working like this! Thanks a
lot to everyone who was/is involved in the work around the feature! This
includes people from German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia and people from
the WMF, who did the security review and helped with other important stuff.
A special thanks goes to Moriel Schottlaender, who gave us valuable advice
on how to RTLize the feature and who even contributed code!
Next steps: We want to see how RevisionSlider works on dewiki, hewiki and
arwiki and then we can think about providing the feature also for other
language communities.
It would be great if you find time to test the feature and give us
feedback! If you're usually not a user of German, Arabic or Hebrew
Wikipedia, you can also go to Beta Labs and try RevisionSlider with an
English-speaking article set. [7]
Thanks,
Birgit
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:RevisionSlider
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes
[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/RevisionSlider
[4]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMF_Metrics_and_Activities_Meeting_-_J…
[5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T140551
[6] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T140545
[7]
http://simple.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefse…
--
Birgit Müller
Community Communications Manager
Software Development and Engineering
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.
-------- Messaggio inoltrato --------
Oggetto: [discovery] Better search results on wiki via TextCat
Data: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 19:42:27 -0600
Mittente: Deborah Tankersley
A: A public mailing list about Wikimedia Search and Discovery projects
<discovery(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
We're happy to announce that after numerous tests and analyses[1] and a
fully operational demo[2], the Discovery Team is ready to release
TextCat[3] into production on wiki.
What is TextCat? It detects the language that the search query was
written in which allows us to look for results on a different wiki.
TextCat is a language detection library based on n-grams[4]. During a
search, TextCat will only kick in when the following three things occur:
1. fewer than 3 results are returned from the query on the current
wiki
2. language detection is successful (meaning that TextCat is
reasonably certain what language the query is in, and that it is
different from the language of the current wiki)
3. the other wiki (in the detected language) has results
Our analysis of the A/B test[5] (for English, French, Spanish, Italian
and German Wikipedia's) showed that:
"...The test groups not only had a substantially lower zero results
rate (57% in control group vs 46% in the two test groups), but they
had a higher clickthrough rate (44% in the control group vs 49-50%
in the two test groups), indicating that we may be providing users
with relevant results that they would not have gotten otherwise."
This update will be scheduled for production release during the week of
July 25, 2016 on the following Wikipedia's:
* English [6]
* German [7]
* Spanish [8]
* Italian [9]
* French [10]
TextCat will then be added to this next group of Wikipedia's at a later
date:
* Portugese[11]
* Russian[12]
* Japanese[13]
This is a huge step forward in creating a search mechanism that is able
to detect - with a high level of accuracy - the language that was used
and produce results in that language. Another forward-looking aspect of
TextCat is investigating a confidence measuring algorithm[14], to ensure
that the language detection results are the best they can be.
We will also be doing more[15] A/B tests using TextCat on non Wikipedia
sites, such as Wikibooks and Wikivoyage. These new tests will give us
insight into whether applying the same language detection configuration
across projects would be helpful.
Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns, on the TextCat
discussion page[16]. Also, for screenshots of what this update will look
like, please see this one[17] showing an existing search typed in on
enwiki in Russian "первым экспериментом" and this one[18] for showing
what it will look like once TextCat is in production on enwiki.
Thanks!
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T118278
[2] https://tools.wmflabs.org/textcatdemo/
[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/TextCat
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-gram
[5]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Report_on_Cirrus_Search_TextCat_AB_…
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/
[7] https://de.wikipedia.org/
[8] https://es.wikipedia.org/
[9] https://it.wikipedia.org/
[10] https://fr.wikipedia.org/
[11] https://pt.wikipedia.org/
[12] https://ru.wikipedia.org/
[13] https://ja.wikipedia.org/
[14] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T140289
[15] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T140292
[16] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:TextCat
[17] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Existing-search_no-textcat.png
[18] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New-search_with-textcat.png
--
Deb Tankersley
Product Manager, Discovery
IRC: debt
Wikimedia Foundation
== tl;dr ==
On June 29th git.wikimedia.org (running Gitblit) will redirect all
requests to Phabricator. The vast majority of requests will be correctly
redirected.
== What is happening? ==
In an effort to reduce the maintenance burden of redudant services we
will be removing git.wikimedia.org. The software that has been serving
git.wikimedia.org, Gitblit, has given our Operations team many headaches
over the years[0] and now that we have all repositories hosted in
Phabricator[1] there is no reason to keep Gitblit around. Phabricator's
Diffusion (the name of the code browser) provides the needed
functionality that Gitblit served (mostly viewing/browsing repositories,
something which Gerrit does not do).
== When will it happen? ==
June 29th
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments#deploycal-item-20160629T1600
== How could this affect me? ==
Potentially, you use an unpopular (in the sense of not used often)
feature of Gitblit that is not supported in Diffusion. This should be
unlikely.
Potentially, a link you follow that pointed to somewhere on
git.wikimedia.org will not redirect correctly. This is also unlikely as
we (mostly @Danny_B and @Paladox) took great care to update many
mediawiki.org templates along with providing very robust redirect
rules[2]. If you find one that isn't working, please let us know (along
with the original url and, if possible, the desired target in
Diffusion).
One known issue to call out: Diffusion does not list commits by person.
However Differential (the code-review tool) does this (not just for new
commits). There is no easy/maintainable way to redirect those,
unfortunately.
Something else broken? Please file a task in Phabricator in the
#Diffusion project[3].
Thanks,
Greg, on behalf of WMF Release Engineering (and all the volunteers who
helped along the way (and Ops!))
[0] eg: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T73974
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/
[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T137224
[3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/53/
--
| Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E |
| identi.ca: @greg A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |
