Hi,
The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in July 2013 is now
available.
Wiki version:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/July
Blog version:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/05/engineering-july-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/July/summa…
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.
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VisualEditor<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/VisualEdi…
In July we enabled the new editing interface on several
Wikipedias<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/07/01/visualeditor-beta-rollo…
the default editor, first for logged-in editors and then for anonymous
users as well. This resulted in a great deal of feedback and the team
responded with several hundred improvements to fix urgent issues. In
addition, the team deployed user interface improvements, most notably to
the references insertion dialog. Currently, users are making approximately
800 edits per hour using the VisualEditor on Wikimedia sites.
There are continuing discussions with different language communities about
the positioning of the VisualEditor beta in the user interface and
appropriate notices indicating its beta status. The Wikimedia Foundation is
using the beta period to collect and analyze bug reports, feature
enhancements, and data and to observe actual user behavior, and to improve
the editing experience continuously. Our eventual objective is for
VisualEditor to be the default editor for all Wikipedia users, capable of
letting them edit the majority of content without needing to use the
wikitext editor.
Please help translate
it<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/07/31/translate-ui-wikipedias-visual-…
.
Editor engagement <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_editor_engagement>
*Notifications*: In July we released our final features for
Notifications<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_%28Notifications%29>…
the English Wikipedia,
mediawiki.org and
meta.wikimedia.org. Benny Situ completed development of HTML
email
notifications<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#H…ns>,
as well as improved
notifications<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#I…re>,
based on designs by Vibha Bamba. Fabrice Florin managed the release of
these final features, and prepared a release
plan<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Release_Plan_2013>to deploy
Notifications on more Wikimedia projects, starting with French
and Polish Wikipedias in August. Dario Taraborelli and Matthias Mullie
updated our new metrics
dashboards<http://ee-dashboard.wmflabs.org/dashboards/enwiki-features>es>,
while Aaron Halfaker completed his report on our "A/B test" of new user
activity<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Notifications/Experime…ts>.
An A/B test gives randomly sampled users different experiences and measures
the differences in how they respond. To learn more, visit the project
portal<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notifications>ns>,
read the FAQ
page<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notifications/FAQ>and
join the discussion on the talk
page <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notifications>.
*Article Feedback Tool*: In July, we delivered a few last features and bug
fixes for the Article Feedback
Tool<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5>(AFT5)
on the
English <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ArticleFeedbackv5> and
French<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fr:Sp%C3%A9cial:ArticleFeedbackv5&g…pedias.
Matthias Mullie released the
auto-archive<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/F…eature,
as well as this list
of articles with feedback enabled on English
Wikipedia<http://ee-prototype.wmflabs.org/metrics/aftv5_enabled_pages.ph…
on French
Wikipedia<http://ee-prototype.wmflabs.org/metrics/aftv5_enabled_pages.ph…ki>.
At the request of the French Wikipedia community, Mullie also
developed new feedback
notifications<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#W…
let users know when feedback is marked as useful for a page they watch
(or for a comment they posted). The team plans to make the AFT5 tool
available to other wiki projects interested in testing this tool, provided
that no new development is required to support their needs, as outlined in
the release
plan<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Release_P…
.
Mobile <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering>
*Wikipedia Zero and Aircel*: The first Wikipedia Zero launch in
India<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/07/25/aircel-partnership-brings-wik…
60 million mobile phone subscribers free-of-charge access to
Wikipedia on their mobile phones. Aircel customers now have free access to
Wikipedia in English, as well as to the 19 Indic language Wikipedias.
The Wikipedia Zero engineering team also completed our first automated
testing testing work, started implementing the Wikipedia Zero software
re-architecture, and fixed problems. During July, we planned for the
upcoming year in Wikipedia Zero. Our engineers are first focusing on
automating the testing of our infrastructure and re-architecting our
systems, and will then focus on making Wikipedia Zero easier to use for
both the telecom carriers and for the people reading articles via Zero, so
as to support the continued growth of the program.
*Editing on tablets and phones*: This month, the mobile web team released
new contributory
navigation<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/07/25/edit-wikipedia-on-the-g…
all Wikimedia mobile sites, including the existing upload and
watchlist
star features, as well as an edit button. This means that editing (in the
form of section-level markup editing) is now enabled on all mobile
Wikimedia sites for logged-in users. The users of our "beta" channel will
soon see mobile notifications restyling, as well as guiders for first-time
editors and uploaders. (Read more about the beta
channel<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/01/11/mobile-beta-a-sandbox-for-…
how
you can opt
in.<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/10/27/wikimedia-mobile-opt-in-beta/&…
)
Additional highlights
*Git migration complete*: Now that we've helped move the pywikipediabot
codebase<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/07/23/pywikipediabot-moving-to-…
our old Subversion repository to our new Git repository, we have been
able to switch
svn.wikimedia.org to read-only mode. This ends a migration
that began in
2012<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/02/15/wikimedia-engineering-moving-…t/>,
motivated by a desire to enable more participation by volunteers and to get
improvements to users faster.
--
Guillaume Paumier