Hi,

The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in September 2013 is now available.

Wiki version: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/September Blog version: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/02/engineering-report-september-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/September/s...

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 September include:

- A recap on how our engineers worked with volunteershttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/03/language-support-at-wikimania-2013-in-hong-kong/to improve language tools at Wikimania; - A call for wikis willing to experiment with using HTTPS for all usershttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/10/https-by-default-beta-program/ ; - A recap on how our new image scaling systemhttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/12/vipsscaler-implementation-wikimedia-sites/was implemented by a volunteer developer; - A call for technical projectshttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/16/call-for-wikimedia-tech-projects-needing-contributors/that could for instance be completed as part of our mentorship programs; - Design experiments to show the community behind Wikipedia articleshttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/25/humanizing-wikipedia-editing-mobile-experiments/on mobile devices; - Another release of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundlehttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/26/get-introduced-to-internationalization-engineering-through-the-mediawiki-language-extension-bundle/, with an explanation of how it's put together; - The completion of the sixth round of the Outreach Program for Womenhttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/30/foss-outreach-program-for-women-success-and-new-round/ ; - A recap of the launch of Notificationshttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/01/notifications-launch-on-more-wikipedias/to more language versions of Wikipedia, and their impact.

VisualEditorhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/VisualEditor/Portal

In September, the VisualEditor team continued their work to improve this visual tool to edit wiki pages, and enabled it on more wikis. The focus in the team's work this month was to continue to improve the stability and performance of the system, fix a number of bugs uncovered by the community, and make some usability improvements.

Improvements were also made to Parsoidhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid, the program that converts wikitext to annotated HTML, and vice-versa. Bugs were fixed, performance statistics were added, and the code base was cleaned up. We planned out an implementation strategy for language variant support, and started researching and experimenting with HTML storage options, which is required for a number of projects in our roadmap. Editor engagement https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_editor_engagement

In September, we released Notifications on more Wikipediashttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/01/notifications-launch-on-more-wikipedias/, such as the Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Notifications allow users to stay informed of changes and discussion that affect them. Community response has been very positive so far, across languages and regions. For each release, we reached out to community members weeks in advance, inviting them to translate and discuss the tool with their peers. As a result, we have now formed productive relationships with volunteer groups in each project, and are very grateful for their generous support.

This month, we continued architecture work on Flowhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal, the new discussion system, to integrate it with watchlists, recent changes, mentions and notifications. We also started experimenting with VisualEditor-enabled posting. We began a sprint to create a new interfacehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal/Design#Visual_design_iterationsfor the board and discussions that will work across desktop and mobile platforms. We are aiming to implement this design next month, in preparation for several rounds of new user and experienced user feedback before the first release.

In September, the Growth https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth team (formerly known as Editor Engagement Experiments, or E3), primarily worked on the onboarding new Wikipedianshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Onboarding_new_Wikipediansproject. In particular, this included the creation and deployment of two new guided tours https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Guided_tours to teach any new user how to make their first edit, using wikitext or VisualEditor. The guided tours feature was also enabled to the following language editions of Wikipedia: Catalan, Hebrew, Hungarian, Malay, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian. Along with the renaming, the team held its third quarterly review (minuteshttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_reviews/Editor_engagement_experiments/September_2013are available) and published its 2013–2014 product goalshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2013-14_Goals#Editor_Engagement_-_Growth_Team. Last, in accordance with the 2013-14 goals, the Growth team began research into modeling newcomer retentionhttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newcomer_survival_modelson Wikipedia, anonymous editor acquisitionhttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anonymous_editor_acquisition, and article creation improvementhttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Article_creation . Mobile https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering

This month, the Wikipedia Zerohttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zeroteam made a lot of improvement to the Zero platform, which provides free access to Wikipedia on select mobile carriers. They released enhanced URL rewriting and debug flag-only Edge Side Includeshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_Side_Includes(ESI) banner inclusion to production, supported the Ops implementation of dynamic MCC/MNC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_country_code carrier tagging, identified web access log and user agent anomalies, further analyzed and recommended load balancer IP address-related changes in support of HTTPS requirements, and tested JavaScript-based Wikipedia Zero user interface enhancements.

The Mobile web https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_web_projects team mostly focused on Tutorial A/B testing, Notifications overlay in Beta, and adding campaign tracking to MobileFrontend.