Hi,
The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in December 2013 is
now available.
Wiki version:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/December
Blog version:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/01/21/engineering-report-december-2013/
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/December/s…
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 December include:
- a retrospective on Language Engineering
events<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/12/10/language-engineering-events…3/>,
including the language summit in Pune, India;
- the launch of a draft
feature<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/12/20/new-draft-feature/>on
the English Wikipedia, to provide a gentler start for Wikipedia
articles.
VisualEditor<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/VisualEdi…
In December, the VisualEditor team worked to continue the improvements to
the stability and performance of this interface that allows users to edit
wiki pages visually rather than using wiki markup. Most of the team's focus
was on major new features and fixing bugs. There is now basic support for
rich copy-and-paste from external sources into VisualEditor, and a basic
tool to insert characters not otherwise available on users' keyboards. Work
also continued on a dialog for quickly adding references using citation
templates.
The Parsoid <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid> team, who is
developing the parsing program that converts wiki markup to annotated HTML
(and back) behind the scenes of VisualEditor, continued their relentless
work to eliminate bugs and incompatibilities. Problems arose during the
migration to node 0.10, the platform that runs Parsoid. The team rolled
back the upgrade, investigated and fixed the issue. Testing has also been
improved so that similar issues are caught in the future. Last, the team
created several requests for
comment<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment>concerning
architectural components of the MediaWiki platform.
Editor engagement <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_editor_engagement>
In December, we enabled Flow <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow> to a few
selected pages on
mediawiki.org
(
Talk:Flow<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Flow>and
Talk:Sandbox <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Sandbox>) and collected
feedback about the features and design to date from the community (read the
summary <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow/Research#Experienced_Users>).
Throughout the feedback period, we worked on implementing design changes,
such as a more compact view of the board and a different interface for
topic and post actions, as well as different visualizations of history
information, based on the comments of users testing the software.
We also began a straw poll about launching Flow as a beta trial in the
discussion spaces of WikiProject Breakfast, WikiProject Hampshire, and
WikiProject Video Games on the English Wikipedia. Based on the outcome of
these polls, we hope to deploy Flow to those pages in January.
The Growth <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth> team spent time working
on product development and research for upcoming Wikipedia article
creation<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_article_creation>im…ements.
First and foremost, the team fulfilled a request from the
English Wikipedia community to launch the new Draft
namespace<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Draft_namespace>there;there. Pau
Giner and others on the team simultaneously began design work on
future
improvements to drafts
functionality<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/12/20/new-draft-feature/&g…e/>,
including recruiting for usability testing sessions.
Mobile <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering>
During the last month, the Wikipedia
Zero<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero>team continued to
make it easier to configure partnerships with
telecommunications carriers that offer access to Wikipedia at no data cost
to their mobile subscribers. They also implemented a global landing page
redirector for mobile Wikipedia website access. Last, the team started
working on an HTML5 webapp proof of concept as an option for rebooting the
Firefox OS app.
The Mobile web projects
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_web_projects>team has been
working on finishing the redesign of the overlays and mobile
on-boarding. The "Keep going" feature has been changed to a workflow that
asks users to add blue links and includes a tutorial. This is consistent
with what we've learned about how guiding users helps accomplish more
edits, and it fits into more of micro contributory workflow that we want to
experiment with. We've also worked on an A/B test displaying an edit guider
for users signing up from the left nav menu. This is mirroring the edit
guider that displays for users signing up through the edit call to action.
It also is consistent with the behavior that the desktop site will be
displaying to users as a result of the OB6 A/B
test<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Onboarding_new_Wikipedians…
.
The mobile apps <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps> team added
saved pages, article navigation, and language support to the mobile
Wikipedia app. During the quarterly planning meeting, it was decided to
postpone photo uploads from our market release plan in favor of text
editing.
--
Guillaume Paumier
Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation
https://donate.wikimedia.org