Hi,
The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in June 2013 is now
available.
Wiki version:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/June
Blog version:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/07/12/engineering-june-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/June/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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Major news in June include:
- The preparation for the activation of
VisualEditor<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/06/preparing-for-visuale…
most Wikipedia sites, and its
debut on the English
Wikipedia<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/07/01/visualeditor-beta-rollou…
;
- News around Language
engineering<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/03/language-engineering-d…s/>,
including the
preparation<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/06/universal-language-sel…
activation<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/07/01/universal-language-sele…
the Universal Language Selectors on many wikis;
- An explanation of how bugs are discovered and
fixed<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/04/volunteers-and-staffers-teac…
.
- A retrospective on the Amsterdam
hackathon<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/04/volunteers-and-staffers-…
.
VisualEditor<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/VisualEdi…
In June, the team completed major new features for VisualEditor (the visual
interface to edit wiki pages without markup) in preparation for making it
available to most Wikipedia users in July. The editor is now capable of
letting users edit the majority of content without needing to use wikitext:
it supports text, as well as adding and editing inclusions of references,
templates, categories and media items. We organized an A/B test for new
user accounts on the English Wikipedia, with half of them getting
VisualEditor ahead of the wider release. There were also a number of user
interface improvements, and many bugs uncovered by the community were
fixed. The team was expanded with four dedicated new members, who will help
community members use VisualEditor, and ensure that feedback will be
focused and lead to rapid improvements.
VisualEditor relies on Parsoid, the software that converts wikitext to
annotated HTML behind the scenes. This month, Parsoid was activated on a
new set of servers, and started to track all edits and template / image
updates from all Wikipedia sites. The goal was to test Parsoid's
performance in preparation for the activation of VisualEditor on almost all
Wikipedia sites. Optimization improvements made earlier (notably using
caching) proved effective, as servers seemed to handle the increased load
well. Good performance allowed the team to focus on improving the
conversion to wikitext, in order to avoid conversion errors and wikitext
corruption.
Editor engagement <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_editor_engagement>
In June, we released more features and bug fixes for
Notifications<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_%28Notifications%29>…
the English Wikipedia and
mediawiki.org. We added a confirmation button for the "Thanks" feature, and
added a link to the difference between versions of the page for talk page
and interactive notifications. Development of HTML Email
notifications<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#H…ns>,
as well as of new metrics
dashboards<http://ee-dashboard.wmflabs.org/dashboards/enwiki-features>es>,
continued. We ran a week-long A/B test of new user
activity<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Notifications/Experime…ts>,
and results show that new users who received Echo notifications made more
edits than those who did not, but their edits were reverted slightly more
often. Later this Summer, we plan to enable Notifications on more wikis,
starting with Meta and the French Wikipedia.
This month, we also activated features and fixed bugs for the Article
Feedback Tool <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5>(AFT5)
on the English, French and German Wikipedia. An opt-in feature now
allows to enable or disable feedback on a page. The metrics
dashboards<http://ee-dashboard.wmflabs.org/dashboards/enwiki-features#ar…
how the new moderation tools are being used: for example, about half
of moderated feedback is marked as 'no action needed', and about a tenth as
'useful'. The team supported a wider activation of AFT5 on over 40,000
articles on the French Wikipedia; as for the German community, they elected
not to adopt the tool. Feature development has now ended for this project,
and we plan to make AFT5 available to other wiki projects in the coming
weeks.
The Editor Engagement Experiments (E3) team continued work on its
experiments related to onboarding new
Wikipedians<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Onboarding_new_Wikipedians>ns>,
and launched several new tools to Wikimedia projects. The team began
running campaigns <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Campaigns> to
learn about how many editors sign up on the top 10 Wikipedias, and how many
sign up via the invitation to "Join Wikipedia" on the login page (see the list
of active
campaigns<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Account_creation_camp…
analysis). Another tool, the CoreEvents
extension <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CoreEvents>, now logs
MediaWiki core activity, like preference updates and page saves across all
projects. For the Getting
Started<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GettingStarted>proje…roject,
the team conducted usability
testing<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Onboarding_new_Wikipedians/user_t…
new designs. the E3 team also improved and refined the guided
tours <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Guided_tours> extension, including
adding usability enhancements like new interface animations, support for
community tours, and bug fixing. Work has begun on an experiment to deliver
guided tours <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Guided_tours> to all
first-time editors. After the VisualEditor launch on the English Wikipedia,
we started a micro-survey of newly-registered
users<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Gender_micro-survey>to
give us a first systematic look at the gender diversity of those
creating accounts.
Mobile <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering>
This month, the Mobile team launched a new Wikipedia
Zero<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero>partnership with
Dialog in Sri Lanka. On the technical side, we fixed user
interface bugs and enhanced the tool to configure partnerships. We also
improved logging and debugging for identification of anomalous access.
We also focused on improving education around mobile
uploads<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_design/Uploads>ds>,
including an interactive Commons tutorial and first-time user copyright and
scope check. The "Nearby" feature was activated on the mobile, allowing
users to find articles near them that are in need of images, take photos
and upload them via mobile.
In beta, we started working on an improved
navigation<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_design/Wikipedia_naviga…
the site and for articles. This includes design tweaks to the left
navigation menu, and a new in-article contributory navigation that combines
article actions (edit, upload, and watch) with a talk page link. We also
experimented with integration of user Notifications, which now work on the
English Wikipedia mobile site. We hope make this feature available to all
mobile users in July.
--
Guillaume Paumier
Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation
https://donate.wikimedia.org