This survey will help the Release Engineering team measure developer
satisfaction and determine where to invest resources. The topics covered
will include the following:
* Local Development Environment
* Beta Cluster / Staging Environment
* Testing / CI
* Code Review
* Deployments
* Production Systems
* Development and Productivity Tools
* Developer Documentation
* General Feedback
We are soliciting feedback from all Wikimedia developers, including Staff,
3rd party contributors and volunteer developers. The survey will be open
for 2 weeks, closing on November 14th.
This survey will be conducted via a third-party service, which may subject
it to additional terms. For more information on privacy and data-handling,
see the survey privacy statement
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Developer_Satisfaction_Survey_Privacy…
To participate in this survey, please start here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfXGpjUIO3ARqxPHOYPwI2Dw-jEg1xMeLi…
The Search Platform Team
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Search_Platform> holds office
hours the first Wednesday of each month. Come ask us anything about
Wikimedia search!
We’re particularly interested in:
* Opportunities for collaboration—internally or externally to the Wikimedia
Foundation
* Challenges you have with on-wiki search, in any of the languages we
support
But we're happy to talk about anything search-related. Feel free to add
your items to the Etherpad Agenda for the next meeting.
Details for our next meeting:
Date: Wednesday, December 5th, 2018
Time: 16:00-17:00 GMT / 08:00-9:00 PST / 11:00-12:00 EST / 17:00-18:00 CET
Etherpad: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Search_Platform_Office_Hours
Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/vyc-jvgq-dww
*N.B.:* Google Meet System Requirements
<https://support.google.com/meet/answer/7317473>
—Trey
Trey Jones
Sr. Software Engineer, Search Platform
Wikimedia Foundation
Good day,
This is the weekly update from the Search Platform team for the week
starting 2018-11-12
Programming note: Given the upcoming US holiday the next update will
be for the week starting 2018-11-26.
As always, feedback and questions welcome.
== Discussions ==
=== Search ===
* David and Trey have resolved the problems with 32-bit Chinese
characters (like 𨨏—[0]), which were returning irrelevant results, and
showing lots of unicode replacement characters (�) in the results. The
highlighter fix was deployed [1] first so there aren't any more �
characters in the results. The re-indexing [2] to improve the
relevance of results is now also done for Chinese-language wikis.
== Did you know? ==
* Letters are encoded internally by computers as numbers—for example,
“A” is 65 and “a” is 97.[3] Years ago, programs and even websites
would use different encodings[4] to represent text, often leading to
unreadable gibberish on screen. Unicode[5] was intended to be a single
encoding for most of the world’s writing systems. The most-used parts
of it fit into a 16-bit representation,[6] which can handle about 65
thousand characters. But that's not enough for the very large number
of rare and historical Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) characters,
which are represented in 16-bit Unicode using “surrogate pairs”.[7]
1,024 Unicode characters are set aside to be “high surrogates”—the
first half of a 32-bit character—and 1,024 characters are set aside to
be “low surrogates”—the second half. By themselves, the surrogates
aren’t valid and don’t represent anything, but in pairs they can
represent over a million additional characters. Since these characters
are usually rare, software can sometimes treat them incorrectly split
them up, which can result in you seeing the Unicode replacement
character �,[8] which is used when something has gone wrong processing
Unicode text. (When the character is fine, but you don’t have a font
to show it, you sometimes get little squares instead. Since the most
common source of these squares for English speakers is unrepresented
CJK characters, a slang term for the squares is “tofu”.[9])
[0] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T168427
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T209293
[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T209156
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#Printable_characters
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding#Common_character_encodings
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Character_Set_characters#Surrogates
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specials_(Unicode_block)#Replacement_character
[9] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tofu#Noun
----
Subscribe to receive on-wiki (or opt-in email) notifications of the
Discovery weekly update.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Newsletter:Discovery_Weekly
The archive of all past updates can be found on MediaWiki.org:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Discovery/Status_updates
Interested in getting involved? See tasks marked as "Easy" or
"Volunteer needed" in Phabricator.
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/qW51XhCCd8.7/#R
[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/5KEPuEJh9TPS/#R
Many thanks,
Chris Koerner
Community Relations Specialist
Wikimedia Foundation
Dear all,
Here at DBpedia, we are about to apply for a Wikimedia grant under the code name GlobalFactSyncRE. The ultimate goal of the project is to extract all infobox facts and their references found in over 120 Wikipedia language editions and produce a tool for Wikipedia editors that detects and displays differences across infobox facts in an intelligent way to help sync infoboxes between languages and/or Wikidata. The extracted references will also be used to enhance Wikidata.
This is our third, and hopefully a successful, application for a Wikimedia grant, which is only available at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/DBpedia/GlobalFactSyncRE
The evaluation review from the previous application was already quite good and the reviewers were interested in supporting the project, however, the quality of the project idea had to be improved in order to reach better scoring and receive the funding. In this direction, we did following updates to the proposal:
i) Updates regarding technological capabilities: created prototypes for some core ideas in the previous proposal, switched to a monthly release cycle of all extractions.
ii) Changes to the proposal itself: updated the template mapping statistics, elaborated more on the Freebase inclusion in Wikidata.
iii) New prototype and new ideas: the UI is updated, sync symbols can be shown with a gadget, new tests and included data from the Dutch and German National library, live version - on request extracting data from Wikipedia and its comparison to Wikidata.
A complete summary of all the updates can be found at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:Project/DBpedia/GlobalFactSyncRE
We are happy to hear your opinion and discuss particular aspects of the project idea.
We are looking forward to a fruitful collaboration with you and we thank you for your feedback!
Thank you and all the best,
Milan
===================================
Project grant: GlobalFactSyncRE
Grantee: Sebastian Hellmann (hellmann(a)informatik.uni-leipzig.de<mailto:hellmann@informatik.uni-leipzig.de>)
===================================
--
Milan Dojchinovski
http://www.dojchinovski.mk/
Institute for Applied Informatics (InfAI) @ Leipzig University
Knowledge Integration and Linked Data Technologies (KILT) / AKSW
Goerdelerring 9, Leipzig, Germany
Hi All,
Here are the minutes from this week's TechCom meeting:
* Hosting IRC discussion: Proposal for partial opt-out method for
Content security policy <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T208188> on
Wednesday December 5th 11pm PST(December 6th 07:00 UTC, 08:00 CET) in
#wikimedia-office
* Reviewed: Introduce a new namespace for collaborative judgments
about wiki entities <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T200297>
determined need further review from DBAs to determine if more
discussion is needed due to updates on the proposal to add filtering
which changes the scope.
* On Last Call: RfC: Session storage service interface:
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T206010> last call ends Wednesday
December 12th 1pm PST(21:00 UTC, 22:00 CET)
* On Last Call: RFC: Modern Event Platform: Schema Registry
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T201643> last call ends Wednesday
December 5th 10pm PST(December 6th 06:00 UTC, 07:00 CET)
* On Last Call: RFC: Modern Event Platform: Stream Intake Service
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T201963> : last call ends Wednesday
December 5th 10pm PST(December 6th 06:00 UTC, 07:00 CET)
You can also find our meeting minutes at
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Committee/Minutes>
See also the TechCom RFC board
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/mediawiki-rfcs/>.
If you prefer you can subscribe to our newsletter here
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Newsletter:TechCom_Radar>
Thanks,
Kate
--
Kate Chapman
Senior Program Manager, Core Platform
Wikimedia Foundation
kchapman(a)wikimedia.org
Hello,
One update regarding this.
We enabled using the new table for Special:Tags in several large wikis
which caused a massive improvement in the performance of the page. For
example loading Special:Tags on Wikidata used to take around a minute and
now it takes less than a second. English Wikipedia is down from ten seconds
to less than one and so on.
There is a lot of work needs to be done and maintenance scripts is being
ran to backpopulate the ct_tag_id column in change_tag table (If you want
to follow the progress, see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193873) and
then we need start reading from the new table in mediawiki and finally we
can drop ct_tag column entirely. If you want to help in review, writing
code or anything, just let me know.
Best
On Wed, 27 Jun 2018 at 15:15, Léa Lacroix <lea.lacroix(a)wikimedia.de> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Our team is refactoring some code around the change tags on Recent
> Changes. This can impact people using the database on ToolForge.
>
> Currently, the tags are stored in the table change_tag in the column
> ct_tag.
>
> In the next days, we will add a column ct_tag_id with a unique identifier
> for these tags. A new table change_tag_def that will store the tag id,
> the message, and more information like how many times this tag is used on
> the local wiki.
>
> On the long term, we plan to drop the column ct_tag since the tag will be
> identified with ct_tag_id.
>
> This change will happen on:
> - French Wikipedia: Monday July 2nd
> - All other wikis: from July 9th
>
> If there is any problem (trouble with saving edits, slow down of recent
> changes…) please create a subtask of T185355
> <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T185355> or contact Ladsgroup
> <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Ladsgroup>.
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Léa Lacroix
> Project Manager Community Communication for Wikidata
>
> Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
> Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
> 10963 Berlin
> www.wikimedia.de
>
> Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
>
> Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
> unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt
> für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikidata-tech mailing list
> Wikidata-tech(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-tech
>
--
Amir Sarabadani
Software Engineer
Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 26-0
http://wikimedia.de
Stellen Sie sich eine Welt vor, in der jeder Mensch an der Menge allen
Wissens frei teilhaben kann. Helfen Sie uns dabei!
http://spenden.wikimedia.de/
Wikimedia Deutschland – Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Scrum_of_scrums/2018-11-28
*=2018-11-28=*
== Callouts ==
* Fundraising campaigns
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Calendar
* Please avoid significant updates to any systems used by Fundraising
(Geolocation, core facilities used by CentralNotice). Pls. ping on
#wikimedia-fundraising by saying 'fr-tech' if you have quesitons. Thanks!!!
* Release Engineering
** Train Health:
*** Last week: No train due to the Thanksgiving Holiday
*** This week: 1.33.0-wmf.6 deployment blockers
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T206660
**** Wikidata rolled back to 1.33.0-wmf.4, all other group1 and all group0
on 1.33.0-wmf.6 see https://tools.wmflabs.org/versions/
**** T210608 (EventBus, Analytics) EventBus::createEvent Call to a member
function format() on a non-object (boolean)
**** T210610 (ORES - Ladsgroup) PHP Fatal Error: Argument 2 passed to
ORES\Hooks\ApiHooksHandler::addScoresForAPI() must be an instance of array,
null given
**** T210617 (Wikidata, Maps - hoo)BadMethodCallException on Wikidata item
pages containing coordinates with non-Earth globes
**** T210618 (Wikidata, CirrusSearch) Wikidata entity search sometimes
case-sensitive, uses wb_terms instead of CirrusSearch
*** Next week: No train due to the Release Engineering team offsite
== Audiences ==
=== Contributors ===
==== Community Tech ====
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates:
**
==== Anti-Harassment Tools ====
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates:
**
==== Editing ====
* Blocked by: **Working with Reading/Web to discuss loading overlay
improvements
* Blocking: **Language - working with them to prioritize adding inspector
functionality to VE read mode
** Updates:
** Improved unit testing of ve.ce T206138
==== Growth ====
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates:
**
==== Language ====
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates:
**
=== Readers ===
==== iOS native app ====
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates:
**6.1.2 released last week (crash fixes)
**Working on 6.2 (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/ios-app-v6.2-beluga-on-a-pogo-stick/) -
large release that contains editing (syntax highlighting, editing tools).
Planning to release to beta before holiday break
==== Android native app ====
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates:
**
==== Readers Web ====
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates:
** Summary: SEO A/B test staged rollout is complete, we're continuing the
MobileFrontend architecture project, and planning for advanced mobile
contributions.
** Mobile website (MinervaNeue / MobileFrontend):
*** Invest in the MobileFrontend & MinervaNeue frontend architecture
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Projects/Invest_in_the_MobileFro…
**** Reduce View inheritance and improve composition support T209007 T209647
**** Replace mobile.startup/user with mw.user T204866
**** Webpackify references T207805
**** Webpackify watchstar T208921
*** Page issues
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Projects/Mobile_Page_Issues
**** Standardize parsing T206177
**** Distinct issues should not be grouped T202349
*** Advanced mobile contributions
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Advanced_mobile_contributions
**** Design added a few more pages to the prototype and some mocks for
enable / disabling https://mobile-contributions.firebaseapp.com/nav4.htmlhttps://wikimedia.invisionapp.com/share/RNO2HHBPK7M#/screens/331909359_Enab…
**** Started team planning
*** Maintenance and bug fixes T86210 T205008 T208808 T210191 T193505
** Desktop website (Popups) https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Previews
*** Reproduce Popups memory leak T208634
** PDF rendering (Proton)
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/PDF_Functionality
*** Remaining work tracked in deploy Proton T181084
==== Readers Infrastructure ====
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates:
** English Wiki fundraising on apps starting Nov 29 (T209801).
==== Multimedia ====
* Updates
** SDoC - still working on beta release, have made progress but not there
yet
** Also work continues on the next release (statements/depicts)
==== Parsing ====
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates:
==== UI Standardization ====
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates:
** Preparing v0.29.6 release of OOUI
** a11y measurments on portals finished
== Technology ==
=== Analytics ===
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates:
**
=== Cloud Services ===
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates:
**
=== Fundraising Tech ===
* Blocked by: -
* Blocking: Please avoid significant updates to any systems used by
Fundraising (Geolocation, core facilities used by CentralNotice). Thanks!!!
* Updates:
** Year-end fundraising campaigns in English-speaking countries started
yesterday (2018-11-27). E-mail campaign ongoing.
** Currently facing payment processor issues and sophisticated credit-card
fraud attempts. Donations are pouring in, nonetheless.
** Various minor improvements to CiviCRM (donor database), payment
processors.
** Follow-ups from CentralNotice security and permissions improvements.
=== MediaWiki Core Platform ===
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates:
** Finishing up review of TechConf materials by end of week. Then starting
to clean up for publication on wiki.
** Revised Session Service RFC, getting ready for final call. (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T206010)
** Met with Security to review potential PE Security projects for Q3/Q4 -
refining list and getting ready to reach out potential contractors.
** Excimer will be done before end of year, which is the primary blocker on
our team for PHP7.
** Continuing to work on extension blockers to PHP7.
=== Performance ===
* Blocked by:
**
* Blocking:
**
* Updates:
**
=== Release Engineering ===
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
** Scoring Platform: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T210260 and
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T210267
* Updates:
** Blog post Incident Documentation: An Unexpected Journey
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/128
*** Željko will be contacting several teams about creating the first
Selenium test for some repositories (Editing, Language engineering,
Contributors, Growth, Fundraising tech, Reading and WMDE)
** Train Health:
*** Last week: No train due to the Thanksgiving Holiday
*** This week: 1.33.0-wmf.6 deployment blockers
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T206660
**** Wikidata rolled back to 1.33.0-wmf.4, all other group1 and all group0
on 1.33.0-wmf.6
**** T210608 (EventBus, Analytics) EventBus::createEvent Call to a member
function format() on a non-object (boolean)
**** T210610 (ORES - Ladsgroup) PHP Fatal Error: Argument 2 passed to
ORES\Hooks\ApiHooksHandler::addScoresForAPI() must be an instance of array,
null given
**** T210617 (Wikidata, Maps - hoo)BadMethodCallException on Wikidata item
pages containing coordinates with non-Earth globes
**** T210618 (Wikidata, CirrusSearch) Wikidata entity search sometimes
case-sensitive, uses wb_terms instead of CirrusSearch
*** Next week: No train due to the Release Engineering team offsite
=== Research ===
* Blocked by: None
* Blocking: None
* Updates:
*** Deploying the Reader Trust survey via QuickSurveys:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T209882
*** Working with SRE to import recommendation API data to MySQL:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T208622
=== Scoring Platform ===
* Blocked by:
** SRE: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T210582
** RelEng: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T210260 and
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T210267
* Blocking:
** RelEng on train blocker. The patch is waiting for review and will get
merged soon
* Updates:
**Picking up blubber and Sentinel (releng & SRE support needed)
***Releng for UTF8 support (blubber)
***SRE for another redis node (sentinel)
**Jade RFC on track to pass TechCom review, only minor changes remaining.
=== Search Platform ===
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates:
**
=== Security ===
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates: Analysts are on track to complete Review by deadlines.
**
=== Services ===
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates:
**
=== Site Reliability Engineering ===
* Blocked by:
None
* Blocking:
None
* Updates:
** no updates
== Wikidata ==
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates:
** wb_terms table should not be used for search.
== German Technical Wishlist ==
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates:
**
== Multi-Content Revisions ==
* Blocked by:
* Blocking:
* Updates:
** AbuseFilter testing by multimedia team going well
* Initial MCR SlotRoleHandler work should be completed by end of week which
will enable part of the UI support needed for SDC
== SoS Meeting Bookkeeping ==
* Updates:
**
📘 Read this post on Phabricator at
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/live/1/post/125/
-------
How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to
find out!
- Month in numbers.
- Highlighted stories.
- Current problems.
## 📊 Month in numbers
* 7 documented incident since from 24 September to 31 October. [1]
* 79 Wikimedia-prod-error tasks closed from 24 September to 31 October. [2]
* 69 Wikimedia-prod-error tasks created from 24 September to 31 October. [3]
* 175 currently open Wikimedia-prod-error tasks (as of 25 November 2018).
October had a relatively high number of incidents – compared to prior
months and compared to the same month last year. Details at [1].
Terminology:
* An Exception (or fatal) causes user actions to be prevented. For example,
a page would display "Exception: Unable to render page", instead the
article content.
* A Warning (or non-fatal, or error) can produce page views that are
technically unaware of a problem, but may show corrupt, incorrect, or
incomplete information. Examples – an article would display the code word
“null” instead of the actual content, a user looking for Vegetables may be
taken to an article about Vegetarians, a user may receive a notification
that says “You have (null) new messages.”
I’ve highlighted a few of last moth’s resolved tasks below.
## *️⃣ Send your thanks for talk contributions
Fixed by volunteer @Mh-3110 (Mahuton).
The Thanks functionality for MediaWiki (created in 2013) wasn’t working in
some cases. This problem was first reported in April, with four more
reports since then. Mahuton investigated together with @SBisson. They found
that the issue was specific to talk pages with structured discussions.
It turned out to be caused by an outdated array access key in
SpecialThanks.php. Once adjusted, the functionality was restored to its
former glory. The error existed for about eight months, since internal
refactoring in March for T186920 changed the internal array.
This was Mahuton’s first Gerrit contribution. Thank you @Mh-3110, and
welcome!
– https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T191442
## *️⃣ One space led to Fatal exception
Fixed by volunteer @D3r1ck01 (Derick Alangi).
Administrators use the Special:DeletedContributions page to search for
edits that are hidden from public view. When an admin typed a space at the
end of their search, the MediaWiki application would throw a fatal
exception. The user would see a generic error page, suggesting that the
website may be unavailable.
Derick went in and updated the input handler to automatically correct these
inputs for the user.
– https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T187619
## *️⃣ Fatal exception from translation draft access
Accessing the private link for ContentTranslation when logged-out isn’t
meant to work. But, the code didn’t account for this fact. When users
attempted to open such url when not logged in, the ContentTranslation code
performed an invalid operation. This caused a fatal error from the
MediaWiki application. The user would see a system error page without
further details.
This could happen when opening the link from your bookmarks before logging
in, or after restarting the browser, or after clearing one’s cookies.
Fixed by @santhosh (Santhosh Thottingal, WMF Language Engineering team).
– https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T205433
## 🎉 Thanks!
Thank you to everyone who helped by reporting or investigating problems in
Wikimedia production; and for devising, coding or reviewing the corrective
measures. Including: Addshore, Aklapper, Anomie, ArielGlenn, Catrope,
D3r1ck01, Daimona, Fomafix, Ladsgroup, Legoktm, MSantos, Mainframe98,
Melos, Mh-3110, SBisson, Tgr, Umherirrender, Vort, aaron, aezell, cscott,
dcausse, jcrespo, kostajh, matmarex, mmodell, mobrovac, santhosh,
thcipriani, and thiemowmde.
## 📉 Current problems
Take a look at the workboard and look for tasks that might need your help.
The workboard lists known issues, grouped by the week in which they were
first observed.
→ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikimedia-production-error/
💡ProTip: Cross-reference one workboard with another via “Open Tasks” >
“Advanced Filter” and enter Tag(s) to apply as a filter.
Thanks!
Until next time,
– Timo Tijhof
-------
Further reading:
* September 2018 edition.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/live/1/post/119/
Footnotes:
[1] Incidents. –
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:AllPages?from=Incident+document…
[2] Tasks closed. –
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/2FueDFF3G9zU/#R
[3] Tasks opened. –
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/Ifhw.G3VvBMJ/#R
Hi folks,
Hope you've all been well! :) We (the Commons app team) are applying for a
Project Grant[1] to fund the development of v3.0 of the Commons Android
app[2]. At the moment, we're approaching completion of our 2nd Individual
Engagement Grant, having implemented several major new features, e.g. a
revamped map of "nearby places that need photos" with direct uploads and
Wikidata integration, user talk notifications, browsing of other Commons
pictures with focus on featured images, and 2FA logins. We currently have
4000+ active installs, and 15,000+ distinct images uploaded via our app
have been used in Wikimedia articles. In the last 6 months alone, 21,241
files were uploaded via our app, and only 1738 (8.2%) of those files
required deletion. We are also proud to report that we have a vibrant,
diverse community of volunteers on our GitHub repository[3], and that we
have increased our global user coverage since our first grant.
It has been a rocky road this year, however. One of the major issues we
faced was that a large portion of our codebase is based on
sparsely-documented legacy code from the very first incarnation of the app
5 years ago (a long time in the Android development world), leading to
unpredictable behavior and bugs. We eventually found ourselves in a
position where new features built on top of legacy code were causing other
features to not work correctly, and even fixes to those problems sometimes
had side effects that caused other problems. (My sincerest apologies to
users for the inconveniences that they were caused!)
In view of that, our Project Grant proposal focuses on these areas:
- Increasing app stability and code quality: We plan to overhaul our legacy
backend to adhere to modern best practices, reduce complexity and
dependencies in our codebase, and introduce test-driven development for the
first time.
- Targeted acquisition of photos for places that need them: The "Nearby
places that need photos" feature has come a long way, but there is still
plenty of room for improvement. We plan to introduce new quality-of-life
features (e.g. by implementing filters and bookmarks) and fix a few
outstanding bugs to make it more user-friendly and convenient to use. We
will also complete the final link in the chain of collecting photos for
Wikipedia articles that lack them by prompting users to add their
recently-uploaded photo to the relevant Wikipedia article.
- Increasing user acquisition in the Global South: We plan to implement a
"limited connectivity" mode, allow pausing and resuming of uploads, and put
more time and effort into outreach and socializing the app, especially to
underrepresented communities.
- We also wish to continue to assist the Commons community to reduce
vandalism and improve usability of images uploaded. This will be done by
implementing selfie detection, and a "to-do" system that reminds users if
an image lacks a description/categories.
Your feedback is important to us! Please do take a look at our proposal[1],
and feel free to let us know what you think on the Discussion page, and/or
endorse the proposal if you see fit. If you would like to be part of the
project, new volunteers and additions to our diverse team are always
welcome - please visit our GitHub repository[3] and say "Hi". :)
Also, we have just released v2.9 for beta testing on the Play Store! \o/
v2.9 features a new main screen UI, a new upload UI with multiple uploads
enabled, and major bugfixes for image dates and the Nearby map default zoom
level. More information and screenshots can be found on our blog[4]. If you
would like to help test the new release, you can sign up for beta testing
here[5].
Finally, we want to thank everyone who has cheered us on and supported us
throughout the years. As a community-maintained app, we wouldn't be here
without you.
Best regards,
Josephine (User:Misaochan), Commons app project maintainer
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Commons_app/Commons_Android_…
[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.free.nrw.commons
[3] https://github.com/commons-app/apps-android-commons
[4] https://cookiesandcodeblog.wordpress.com/2018/11/28/version-2-9-beta/
[5] https://play.google.com/apps/testing/fr.free.nrw.commons
// Sorry for cross-posting
Hi everyone,
the Advanced Search interface is now available as a default feature on all
wikis. That means you, logged-in or not, can carry out advanced searches
even if you don’t know any search syntax.
The new feature provides some existing advanced search options in a visual
interface. This can help you find pages that contain a particular template,
search in page titles, for a specific sequence of characters, and much
more. Plus, the way namespaces can be selected has been redesigned. Among
other things, you can now select several namespaces with one click, e.g. to
search in all talk namespaces. More detailed information is on the project
page. [1]
The feature was developed by Wikimedia Deutschland’s Technical Wishes Team.
[2] The idea for it was born in 2016 in workshops with editors, followed by
prototypes, several feedback rounds on dewiki and Meta, and finally the
beta function, which 43,000 people across all wikis used. During the beta
phase, bugs were fixed, the namespace selection was revised, and more
search options were added.
Many thanks to everyone who took the time to give feedback (onwiki, in
discussions, at the dev summit and more), to test or to translate. A big
thank you also goes to the Discovery team at the WMF for their support, by
making backend adjustments and implementing a new search parameter for deep
category searches.
The development team hopes that the new feature will help you find what
you’re looking for more easily. People who prefer to keep the previous
search interface can deactivate the new feature in their user preferences.
[3]
As always, feedback is welcome on the central talk page. [4]
Johanna for the Technical Wishes team
-- Johanna Strodt Project Manager Community Communications Technical
Wishlist, Wikimedia Deutschland
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/AdvancedSearch
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes
[3]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-searchop…
[4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help_talk:Extension:AdvancedSearch