Hi,
The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in August 2013 is now
available.
Wiki version:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/August
Blog version:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/06/engineering-august-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/August/sum…
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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Major news in August include:
- A discussion about using the secure HTTP
protocol<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/01/future-https-wikimedia-pr…
Wikimedia sites, followed by a switch
to that protocol for all registered
users<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/28/https-default-logged-in-user…
;
- The launch of the Notifications
feature<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/30/notifications-launch-on-mo…
the mobile site;
- A discussion about how security issues are
handled<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/30/team-wikimedia-security-ha…
our community;
- The Wikimania conference, which was notably an opportunity for the
Language engineering
team<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/02/join-the-language-engineer-te…
meet with users and improve language support, particularly for
the Javanese
language<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/23/restoring-the-forgotten-j…
;
- A much-anticipated upgrade of the software used by our volunteer
e-mail response
team<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/09/wikimedias-email-response-upg…e/>,
OTRS.
VisualEditor<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/VisualEdi…
In August, the VisualEditor team continued to work on this visual interface
to edit wiki pages without markup, and met with the Wikimedia
community at Wikimania
in Hong Kong <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2013> to discuss
how to best improve it. The software saw three major updates this month,
with other smaller updates to fix urgent issues. The focus of this work was
on improving the stability and performance of the system, fixing a number
of bugs uncovered by the community, and making some usability improvements.
Work also continued on Parsoid <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid>,
the software that converts wikitext to annotated HTML behind the scenes of
VisualEditor. The team continued to improve the compatibility with existing
wiki markup, thanks to the feedback provided by users after VisualEditor
was released in July. The infrastructure used for the conversion between
formats received a much-needed overhaul, notably to improve performance by
changing the storage back-end. Performance statistics are now recorded,
which will make it easier to identify performance bottlenecks and catch
regressions.
Editor engagement <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_editor_engagement>
In August, the
Notifications<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_%28Notifications%29>…
was added to Wikipedia in French, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese and
Swedish. It was well received, particularly the ability to notify people by
mentioning them in a discussion, and the ability to thank users for an
edit. Notifications should be added to all Wikimedia sites in the coming
months.
Development continued on the upcoming discussion system
("Flow<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal>").
New features were added to the prototype, notably the revision history and
a moderation tool.
A few changes were made to the Article Feedback
Tool<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5>on the
English and French Wikipedias, like improvements to the opt-out
tool. Feedback notifications have also been added, to let users know when
useful feedback is given for a page they monitor. The article feedback tool
will be made available to other wiki projects interested in testing it
later this year.
This month, the Editor Engagement
Experiments<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editor_engagement_experiments…
(E3) primarily focused on development for its next and final test of
the Getting
Started<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GettingStarted>task
suggestion system, a part of a project aimed at onboarding new
Wikipedians. The team also worked on enhancements and bug fixes for the
GuidedTour feature, such as adding the ability to customize default tour
actions and better integration with VisualEditor.
Mobile <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering>
In August, the Mobile Apps team released a new version of the Commons photo
uploader app <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Commons> for
iOS and Android. The interface of the iOS version was improved, while the
Android version received incremental updates, such as better support for
upload campaigns (like Wiki Loves Monuments). The team also started making
plans for the next generation of the Wikipedia reader app, which will be
more closely integrated with the mobile web site, to ensure that new
features are always available through a web view, even where there isn't
specific native support.
The team continued to plan the re-architecture of Wikipedia Zero, the
program that allows free mobile access to Wikipedia on select carriers.
They also analyzed HTTPS requirements in support of a push for greater
usage of HTTPS across Wikimedia projects.
Last, the mobile editing feature on the mobile
site<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_web_projects>continued to
be improved. Bugs were fixed, and the feature show at the
section level of articles was expanded. The first iteration of mobile
notifications was also activated on wikis projects where Notifications are
enabled.
--
Guillaume Paumier
Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation
https://donate.wikimedia.org