Hi,
The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in June 2014 is now
available.
Wiki version:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/June
Blog version:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-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/June/summa…
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.
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Major news in June include:
- the release of the new Wikipedia for Android app
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/06/25/revamped-wikipedia-app-now-available-on-android/>,
preceded by its beta version
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/06/05/new-wikipedia-android-app-beta/>;
- the decision to move away from Bugzilla in favor of Phabricator
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/06/10/on-our-way-to-phabricator/>;
- A new tablet view for Wikimedia sites
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/06/17/wikimedia-sites-get-a-new-look-on-tablets/>
.
VisualEditor
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/VisualEditor/Portal>
<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=File:Editing_Team_-_2013-14_Q4_quarterly_review.pdf&page=15>
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Editing_Team_-_2013-14_Q4_quarterly_review.pdf?page=15>
Presentation slides about VisualEditor from the Editing team
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editing>'s quarterly review
<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=File:Parsoid_review_Q4,_June_2014.pdf&page=8>
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Parsoid_review_Q4,_June_2014.pdf?page=8>
Presentation slides from the Parsoid team's quarterly review
In June, the VisualEditor <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor> team
continued to improve this visual tool to edit wiki pages. They provided a
way to see the context of links and other items when you edit to make this
easier, worked on the performance and stability of the editor so that users
could more swiftly and reliably make changes to articles, and made some
improvements to features focused on increasing their simplicity and
understandability. The editor now shows with a highlight where
dragging-and-dropping content will put it, and works for any content, not
just for images. The citation and reference tools had some minor
adjustments to guide the user on how they operate, based on feedback and
user testing. A lot of fixes to issues with windows opening and closing,
and especially the link editing tool, were made, alongside the save dialog,
categories, the language editing tool, table styling, template display and
highlights on selected items. The mobile version of VisualEditor, currently
available for alpha testers, moved towards release, fixing a number of bugs
and improving performance. Work to support languages made some significant
gains, and work to support Internet Explorer continued. The new visual
interface for writing TemplateData (structured template documentation) was
enabled on the Catalan and Hebrew Wikipedias.
Work also continued on Parsoid <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid>,
the parsing system that works behind the scenes of VisualEditor to convert
wikitext to annotated HTML, and vice versa. The team continued with ongoing
bug fixes and bi-weekly deployments; they notably worked on improving the
parsing support for some table-handling edge cases, handling nowiki tags,
and making the parsing faster. They also began work on supporting language
converter markup.
The Parsoid team added CSS styling to the HTML code to bring Parsoid's HTML
closer to what is produced by the PHP parser (used in MediaWiki). They
continued to tweak the CSS based on rendering differences they found, and
started work on generating visual diffs between screenshots of content
rendered with the two methods. This initial proof-of-concept will serve as
the basis of larger scale automated testing and identification of rendering
diffs. Last, the LintTrap project (for the detection of broken wikitext)
saw good progress and a demo application
<http://lintbridge.wmflabs.org/_html/issues/> was made available.
Editor engagement <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_editor_engagement>
In June, the Flow <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow> team finished an
architectural rewrite for the interface, to make it easier to update it in
the future. The new feature in the latest release is the ability to sort
topics on a Flow board. There are now two options for the order that topics
appear on the board: you can see the most recently created threads at the
top (the default), or the most recently updated threads. This new sorting
option makes it easier to find the active conversations on the board.
We've also made a few changes to make Flow discussions easier to read,
including a font size now consistent with other pages, dropdown menus now
easier to read, and the use of the new button style and the WikiGlyphs
webfont.
The Growth <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth> team completed analysis
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anonymous_editor_acquisition/Signup_CTA_experiment>
of
its first round of A/B testing of signup invitations for anonymous editors
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anonymous_editor_acquisition/Signup_invites> on
English, French, German, and Italian Wikipedias. Based on these results,
the team prepared a second version
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anonymous_editor_acquisition/Signup_invites_v2>
to
be A/B tested. Additionally, the team released a major refactor of the
GuidedTour
extension <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GuidedTour>, as well as
design enhancements like animations, a new way of drawing guider elements,
updated button styles, and more. The team also launched GuidedTours on
three new Wikipedias: Arabic, Norwegian, and Bengali.
Mobile <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering>
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_Android_app_on_Main_Page.png>
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_Android_app_on_Main_Page.png>
Main Page of the English Wikipedia on the new Android app.
The Mobile Apps <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps> team
released the new Android Wikipedia app
<https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia> and it is now
available to be downloaded through the Google Play store on Android
devices. Core features of the app include the ability to save pages for
offline reading, a record of your browsing history, and the ability to edit
either as a logged in user or anonymously. The app is the first mobile
platform that allows anonymous editing. The app also supports Wikipedia
Zero for participating mobile carriers. Additional work done this month
includes the start of implementing night mode for the Android app (by
popular demand), creating an onboarding experience which is to be refined
and deployed in July, and numerous improvements to the edit workflow.
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_on_tablet.png>
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_on_tablet.png>
New appearance of the tablet-optimized mobile site.
The Mobile web <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_web_projects> team
finished work on styling the mobile site to provide a better experience for
tablet users. As of June 17, users on tablets are now redirected to the new
tablet-optimized mobile; They were previously being sent to the desktop
version of all Wikimedia projects. Early data suggests that this change had
a positive impact on new user signup and new editor activation numbers. The
team also continued work on VisualEditor features (the linking and citation
dialogs) in preparation for releasing the option to edit via VisualEditor
to tablet users in the next three months.
During the last month, the Wikipedia Zero
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero> team activated the new code
for Wikipedia Zero, by replacing replaces one monolithic piece of software
by multiple smaller tools. The JsonConfig extension, which allows a
wiki-driven configuration system with data validation, received significant
enhancements to make it more general for other use cases.
Additionally, the team enabled lower-quality thumbnails for a live in-house
Wikipedia Zero operator configuration, and finished a basic version of
Wikipedia Zero for the Android and iOS Wikipedia apps. The team also
supported the Wikipedia apps development by improving the network
connection management in Android and iOS, and with the *Find in page* feature
for Android.
Wikipedia Zero was launched with Airtel in Bangladesh; this is the third
Zero partner in Bangladesh, and the 34th launched partner overall. The team
participated in the Wiki Indaba conference, the first event of its kind to
be held in Africa. The event, organized by Wikimedia South Africa, brought
together community members from Tunisia, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia,
Nigeria, Ethiopia, Malawi and South Africa. The attendees shared
experiences and challenges to work in the region and formulated strategies
to support and strengthen the movement's efforts across the continent. The
team also met with local operators in South Africa, and operators and
handset manufacturers in India.
--
Guillaume Paumier
Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation