Hello Ambassadors,

I wanted to send everyone an update on Phase V of the Usability Initiative Rollout. This is the final phase and we are planning on rolling out the usability features (Vector and enhanced editing features) to all remaining projects that have not yet been switched. The release date has been set for Sep 1, 2010 at 10am PDT / 5pm UTC.

In preparation for the release, we have been doing the following activities which mostly revolve around helping us identify bugs and encouraging translations on the remaining projects: * Central Notice: We are running a Central Notice [1] across all remaining projects. The notice informs users of the upcoming changes and asks for their help in translations and bug identification (see [1a] for landing page). We've asked people to complete the translations/bug reports by Aug 25, a week before release. * Bug Identification: We are driving people to Bugzilla [2] and our bug report page on meta [3] to log bugs. Users can test the new interface by clicking on the "Try Beta" link at the top of the page on their project. This link will turn on the Vector and the other new features. * Feedback: We're also monitoring the feedback page on meta [4] for general feedback on the features * Translators-l: Casey B. sent a message to the Translators-l mailing list, asking for help in translations. * Wiktionary and Wikisource: we posted to these projects as they are ones which have a heavy degree of customization and we wanted to alert them specifically of the upcoming changes. * Tech blog post: We'll be posting on the tech blog [5] over the next day or so.

We will also post updates on the release plan to the release page [6].

As we're two weeks away from the release date, I'd like to ask for as much help as possible from our Ambassadors to identify bugs. Reports from our community members are one of the main ways we find out about stuff not working, so any help would be very much appreciated.

We'll be sending out more communication as we get closer to the release date. Please feel free to direct questions to either me or Alolita Sharma (asharma at wikimedia dot org). I will be out of the office for a few weeks starting Aug 21, but Alolita will be available for questions.

Thanks again for being an Ambassador!

Howie Fung, Wikimedia Foundation

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Usability_Initiative [1a] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2010_Wikimedia_design_and_feature_change [2] http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org [3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2010_Wikimedia_design_and_feature_change/Bug_... [4] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2010_Wikimedia_design_and_feature_change/Feed... [5] http://techblog.wikimedia.org/ [6] http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Releases/Default_Switch#Phase_V_Deployme...