(sorry for cross posting)

Hi all,

on July 21 23:00-00:00 (UTC) RevisionSlider got deployed as a beta feature on German Wikipedia, Arabic Wikipedia and Hebrew Wikipedia.

The RevisionSlider extension adds a slider interface to the diff view, so that you can easily move between revisions. It helps users to view edit summaries and other meta data of all revisions while hovering over the slider interface. At the current state, the last 500 revisions can be loaded. [1]

The RevisionSlider extension was developed by Wikimedia Deutschland's TCB team and fulfills a wish from the German-speaking community's Technical Wishlist. [2] It is based on a rough prototype by the Community Tech Team who we love collaborating with. [3]

The feature already was presented at WMF's last metrics meeting, so if you are interested to hear more about it, you can also have a look into the video record. [4]

Why German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia in the first round?

As a first step, we want to see if RevisionSlider works well on both, LTR and RTL Wikipedias. The decision for German Wikipedia is probably obvious, as the RevisionSlider addresses a wish from the German-speaking community. But the team spent also some work in optimizing the feature for RTL languages, and we were talking to people from Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia at Wikimania. Both communities created a site request ticket to deploy RevisionSlider as a Beta feature on their projects. [5] [6]

So far everything went well and we also got our first really nicely written bug report from Hebrew Wikipedia - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T141071 ;).

We are really happy about the constructive and appreciative collaboration style around RevisionSlider, it's so much fun working like this! Thanks a lot to everyone who was/is involved in the work around the feature! This includes people from German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia and people from the WMF, who did the security review and helped with other important stuff. A special thanks goes to Moriel Schottlaender, who gave us valuable advice on how to RTLize the feature and who even contributed code!

Next steps: We want to see how RevisionSlider works on dewiki, hewiki and arwiki and then we can think about providing the feature also for other language communities.

It would be great if you find time to test the feature and give us feedback! If you're usually not a user of German, Arabic or Hebrew Wikipedia, you can also go to Beta Labs and try RevisionSlider with an English-speaking article set. [7]

Thanks, Birgit

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:RevisionSlider [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/RevisionSlider [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMF_Metrics_and_Activities_Meeting_-_Ju... [5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T140551 [6] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T140545 [7] http://simple.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsec...