Hey all,
I'm pleased to announce a proposed followup for WikiProject X, a project
previously funded by an Individual Engagement Grant. I have now
submitted a Project Grant, according to the new system, with which I
intend to complete and fully assess the development of CollaborationKit,
the extension James Hare, Brian Wolff, and I created in 2016 in the
renewal round of the original grant to facilitate the creation,
management, and usage of WikiProjects on the English Wikipedia.
While the CollaborationKit extension is largely complete as a
functioning prototype, it has yet to be deployed to the target wiki, the
English Wikipedia (while technically in production, at present it's only
enabled on testwiki). Subsequent to that deployment, actual testing can
begin, and only then will it be possible to iterate on the extension's
layout and functionality to effectively address the needs and pitfalls
that come up in practice. Only then, too, will we be able to effectively
assess the overall project: how successful has WikiProject X, as both
IEG and Project Grant, been at meeting the outcomes originally
described? How effective is this kind of design and software project as
a whole? What can we learn, and how can others learn from this approach?
I would like to invite anyone interested in the project to check out the
new proposal, and to comment or ask any questions you might have:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Isarra/WikiProject_X
For more information on the original grant:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/WikiProject_X
WikiProject X on the English Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_X
CollaborationKit: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CollaborationKit
Thanks!
Isarra
I liked the interview (link below) of Cindy Cicalese by Yaron Koren. I
learned
information about Enterprise MediaWiki and about government use of
MediaWiki that was new to me. Also, given Cindy's extensive experience
with MediaWiki, I'm glad that WMF hired her to be the product manager for
MediaWiki Core.
What's making you happy this week?
Pine <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine>
P.S. For those who are unfamiliar with the history of "What's making you
happy
this week?", I believe that the concept of these threads in the Wikimedia
ecosystem started in the *Wikipedia Weekly* Facebook group, and the concept
was copied from there to Wikimedia-l. I'm being bold by expanding the
distribution of this thread to Wikitech-l, which I hope will be accepted by
Wikitech-l subscribers since there are often mentions of technical
developments in these threads. If someone feels strongly that these threads
shouldn't be shared on Wikitech-l, they're welcome to email me (on list or
off
list) or comment on my talk page. I feel that technical contributors are
welcome to comment in these threads about what is making them happy
this week, and I hope that WIkitech-l subscribers will generally like the
concept.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Yaron Koren <yaron(a)wikiworks.com>
Date: Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 7:51 AM
Subject: [MediaWiki-l] New MediaWiki podcast: "Between the Brackets"
To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list <
mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi everyone,
I decided to start a podcast in which I interview developers and users from
the MediaWiki community - it's called "Between the Brackets". The first
episode was just published today - it's an interview with Cindy Cicalese,
who worked with MediaWiki for a long time at MITRE and is now the Product
Manager for the MediaWiki Platform at the Wikimedia Foundation.
Here it is:
http://betweenthebrackets.libsyn.com/
I hope you like it!
-Yaron
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CatherineMunro/Bright_Places>
Sorry for cross-posting!
Reminder: Technical Advice IRC meeting again **tomorrow, Wednesday 4-5 pm
UTC** on #wikimedia-tech.
The Technical Advice IRC meeting is open for all volunteer developers,
topics and questions. This can be anything from "how to get started" over
"who would be the best contact for X" to specific questions on your project.
If you know already what you would like to discuss or ask, please add your
topic to the next meeting: https://www.mediawiki.org/
wiki/Technical_Advice_IRC_Meeting
Hope to see you there!
Michi (for WMDE’s tech team)
--
Michael F. Schönitzer
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 27/681/51985.
Greetings,
Some improvements to viewing and managing user settings on the mobile
website (Extension:MobileFrontend) will be available this week. Here
is a short update on what is changing.
== User Features ==
* Font changer - This is an accessibility feature to increase font
size of articles to read. A lot of mobile browsers do not include this
feature. Accessibility is important to our readers and the feature has
been in Beta mode for a while. The team improved the way to change the
font size and promoted it to stable. [0]
* Expand sections by default - For avid readers and editors, opening
up sections every time on articles can be taxing. Now there is a
setting that will expand all sections by default. [1]
* Showing what changes are applied if a user enables Beta mode - Beta
mode on mobile did not communicate to users what changes were getting
applied to their experience. [2] This was a transparency issue in what
was happening to user's experiences. It also helps to encourage more
people sign up for beta features by showing which features are
available to test. This will help us collect feedback from more people
about our experiments.
== Technical features ==
* Use of modern UI library - Wikimedia Design has developed a style
guide and UI library under the OOUI framework. MobileFrontend will use
these components which are standard across other Wikimedia products.
The components use accessible color palettes and UI states.
For more information and feedback, check out the project page on
MediaWiki.org [3]
[0] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T109363
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T169257
[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T67079
[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Settings
Yours,
Chris Koerner
Community Liaison
Wikimedia Foundation
Hey all,
As many of you know, the Timeless skin was deployed for testing across
all Wikimedia projects in late November last year. I submitted a Project
Grant proposal at the time seeking funding to more actively support for
this deployment as well as enable further development based on user
feedback and the bugs that have been coming up in practice, but the
proposal was ultimately vetoed in the late stages due to objections from
WMF staff.
It is my understanding that these objections have since been withdrawn,
and based on what happened, I have been recommended by relevant WMF
staff to resubmit the proposal in the subsequent, now current, round of
Project Grants. I have done this, and would like to invite anyone
interested in this project to comment (again, even) on the current
proposal, or ask any questions you might have on the talkpage. The
current proposal can be found here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Isarra/Timeless:_Post-deploy…
As for some general background:
If you don't know me, I'm Isarra, a volunteer MediaWiki developer and
designer, and a previous WMF grantee on another project, WikiProject X.
I originally created the Timeless skin itself as a volunteer project for
a Wikimedia Tech Talk in 2015; after that the skin just sort of sat
there being ignored for the better part of 2016, and then Paladox found
it, filed a bug saying it should be deployed to Wikimedia, and it turned
out a lot of people agreed with him and we spent most of 2017 pushing it
through various processes, reviews, and fixes to be deployed
(https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T154371).
If you haven't and would like to try out Timeless, you can enable it in
your preferences under Appearance > Skin, or just add ?useskin=timeless
to the end of most page URLs to see what that page looks like in Timeless.
Thanks,
Isarra
Hi Wikitech-l,
This email is directed primarily to the engineering and technical staff.
On February 1st, I was in a conversation with a few non-WMF engineers. To
my surprise, none of them said that they felt that their work was
personally meaningful to them, with one exception of an engineer who said
that he feels proud when people that he mentors become accomplished.
My guess is that when we are deeply involved in work, trying to fix a
frustrating problem, that we may sometimes feel detached from the big
picture and wonder why we are spending hours or days of our lives trying to
improve software or other technical tools. Perhaps we think something like,
"I have been studying this problem for ten hours, I have a meeting tomorrow
in which I will need to tell my supervisor that I have not fixed this bug,
and while I have been working on this problem my inbox has grown by 42
emails."
I hope that when we are in this situation that we can remind ourselves that
our purposes in life are probably not solely to fix bugs, to make our
supervisor happy, and to achieve "inbox zero".
Wikipedia and its sister projects are here to educate humanity, and our
individual activities contribute to the success of the larger whole. I like
the analogy of an ecosystem in which no one individual is essential, and in
which each of us as individuals, in all of our diversity, choose to
participate.
I hope that you feel that your work is personally meaningful to you.
If you feel frustrated or empty in regards to your work, and you need some
emotional nourishment -- I think that everyone does from time to time -- I
suggest that you communicate to your colleagues that you are taking a
break, that you silence your phone, and that you go for a walk outside for
an hour. While you're outside, you might practice some of Julian Treasure's
suggestions for how to listen to the environment
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSohjlYQI2A> (I'm not endorsing the
entirety of his presentation, but I think that some of his advice is very
good.) When you come back, instead of attacking the same issue that was
frustrating you before you left, browse the Featured Pictures archives on
Commons <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Featured_pictures>, English
Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_pictures>, or
another wiki of your choice. Then listen for a few minutes to one of La
Pianista <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:La_Pianista>'s piano
performances (I'm especially fond of this performance
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chopin_-_Scherzo_No._3_(re-recorded…>
of Chopin's Scherzo No. 3 in C sharp minor). Then go to Wikistats 2
<https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-projects> and try to get a feel for
how many people are learning about our universe through us. We had
approximately 189 billion page views in 2017, so we are probably doing
something well, and many of our readers and content contributors around the
world are probably grateful for our work in the big picture; WMF has received
comments from donors
<https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-November/085602.html>
which you may find to be encouraging.
After you've re-oriented yourself in the grand design, then you can return
to your work, hopefully with a renewed sense of meaning and purpose.
Regards,
Pine <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine>
Hello,
The feedback collection phase of this quarter's code stewardship reviews
has closed. Thank you to all those that provided feedback about the items
under review[0] and the process[1] itself. The next step in this
process[1] will be to summarize the feedback and review it with the WMF CPO
and CTO. Additional updates to follow.
There's been some discussion regarding this process and its purpose, I
wanted to take a moment to help clarify. Although the genesis of this
process was the Sunsetting Working Group[2], the process itself isn't
focused on sunsetting as the primary outcome. The primary objective of the
process is to help bring to light areas of code that currently lack
stewardship and define a course of action.
This is a process that we hope will give the both the Foundation and
broader community an avenue to raise stewardship concerns which could
in-turn affect the Foundation's planning.
As this is a new process, I'm sure there will be adjustments as we go
through it the first few times.
Cheers,
JR
[0]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_stewardship_reviews/Feedback_solicitati…
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_stewardship_reviews#Process
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Sunsetting_Working_Group
Hello -
The email below has a link to the feedback survey for the Wikimedia
Developer Summit 2018.
We welcome feedback from both those who attended and those who did not.
The feedback collected will have direct impact on next year's event.
Thank you for helping us to improve. :)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rachel Farrand <rfarrand(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 5:25 PM
Subject: Wikimedia Developer Summit: Feedback / Suggest Process Improvements
To:
Cc: Victoria Coleman <vcoleman(a)wikimedia.org>
Hello -
Please take a moment to fill out the feedback survey for the Wikimedia
Developer Summit 2018.
Many of the questions are fill-in-the-blank so you can choose to answer all
of them or only the ones related to areas where you would like to give
feedback.
You do not need to have attended the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2018 to
fill out the feedback survey, we welcome input from anyone.
Survey deadline: 20 February, 2018.
A summary of the survey results will eventually be posted here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Developer_
Summit/2018/Lessons_Learned
*FEEDBACK SURVEY LINK:* https://goo.gl/forms/XvFRXSRVEaSxjhe52
Thank you very much in advance for taking the time to help us improve.
--
Rachel Farrand
Events Program Manager
Technical Collaboration Team
Wikimedia Foundation
--
Rachel Farrand
Events Program Manager
Technical Collaboration Team
Wikimedia Foundation