[Translators-l] New translation editor + Fwd: summary of WMF engineering in March: Visual editor, notifications, mobile, & more

Tue Apr 9 14:14:22 UTC 2013

Translations needed!
<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Translate&group=page-Wikimedia+engineering+report%2F2013%2FMarch%2Fsummary&task=view>
After you translate it, you may also want to link it from the wikis in 
that language.

Among the news: the new translation interface was enabled by default 
last wednesday. 
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/25/redesigning-the-translation-experience-an-overview/>
There are some bugs being worked on, but more reports of specific 
problems or things you're unhappy with are very welcome, see 
<https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Thread:Support/So_called_"new"_interface_completely_unusable/reply_(7)>.
Bugzilla is quickest way to get a response, but translatewiki.net is 
also quite safe, see that thread. :)

Nemo

-------- Messaggio originale --------
Oggetto: [Wikitech-ambassadors] summary of WMF engineering in March: 
Visual editor, notifications, mobile, & more
Data: Mon, 08 Apr 2013 23:53:13 -0400
Hi,

The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in March 2013 is
now available. Thanks to Guillaume Paumier and Tilman Bayer and the
engineers who helped me put this together.

Wiki version:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/March
Blog version:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/04/engineering-march-2013-report/

We're also providing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this
report that does not assume specialized technical knowledge.  It's
onwiki at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/March/summary
and I thought you might like to have it in an email.

As always, feedback is appreciated about the usefulness of the report
and its summary, and on how to improve them.

-- 
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation

*This content is prepared for inclusion in the March 2013 Wikimedia
Foundation
report<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_March_2013>.
It is a shorter and simpler version of the full (and English-only)
Wikimedia engineering report for March
2013<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/March>that
does not assume specialized technical knowledge.*

VisualEditor <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor>

*(Accessible introduction to what the Visual Editor
is<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/12/07/inventing-as-we-go-building-a-visual-editor-for-mediawiki/>)*

In March, part of the team worked on infrastructure for the major new
features that they'll be adding in the coming months. We aim for
VisualEditor to be the default way all users edit our sites by July
2013, so it needs to let everyone edit the majority of content without
needing to use the usual "wikitext" editor. This will mean adding
support for references, (at least) basic templates, categories and
images, each of which is a very large piece of work. This month the team
primarily worked on draft designs and initial code to ensure users can
edit categories and templates.

The Visual Editor team undertook its first ever "Quarterly
Review<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_reviews>",
whose
slides<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:VisualEditor-Parsoid_-_2012-13_Q3_quarterly_review_deck.pdf>detail
these designs, the work done to date and expectations for the near
future. The alpha version of VisualEditor on mediawiki.org and the
English Wikipedia was updated twice, adding better input and selection
support, fixing a number of bugs, and restructuring the back-end so that
the new features will be simpler to create.

The Parsoid <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid> team (who are
creating the parsing program <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing>
that translates plain wikitext into HTML annotated for easy editing, and
*vice-versa*) continued writing specifications, fixing bugs, and
improving how Parsoid deals with different human languages, newlines and
whitespace, and transclusion. And late in March, C. Scott Ananian joined
us as a contractor. Welcome!

Editor engagement <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_editor_engagement>

In March, the editor engagement features team worked on three projects:
Notifications <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_%28Notifications%29>,
Article Feedback
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5> and Flow
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow>.

For Notifications
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_%28Notifications%29>(formerly
called 'Echo'), we developed a range of new features, including:
the
'thanks<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Thank_you_notification>'
and 'user
rights<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#User_rights>'
notifications, as well as HTML email
notifications<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#HTML_email_digests>.
We also started to collect our first
metrics<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Metrics>and prepared a
socialization plan for our upcoming release on the English
Wikipedia later this month. You are welcome to test our work-in-progress
here on MediaWiki.org <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Testing>.

For Article
Feedback<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5>, we
deployed a new version of the tool on the and, for evaluation by their
communities. Final features include 'discuss on talk
page<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Feature_Requirements#Discuss_on_talk_page>'
and
'auto-archive<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Feature_Requirements#Auto-archive_comments>'.
The tool was temporarily turned off on the English Wikipedia, where we
expect to re-deploy it on an opt-in basis as soon as practical, as
described on this talk
page<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Article_Feedback_Tool/Version_5#New_version_of_Article_Feedback>.

Design work continued on Flow <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow>, the
upcoming user-to-user discussion system. We continued creating a
'Portal' that will engage discussion about Flow at three locations
(mediawiki.org<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/FlowPortal>,
meta, and the English Wikipedia), and performing
research<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal/Research>.

The Editor Engagement
Experiments<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editor_Engagement_Experiments>team
largely placed other projects – such as guided tours
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Guided_tours>,
EventLogging<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/EventLogging>,
and others – on hold to focus on two key initiatives: the "Getting
Started<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GettingStarted>"
process for onboarding new
Wikipedians<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Onboarding_new_Wikipedians>,
and on making the redesign of account creation and
login<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Account_creation_user_experience>a
permanent, internationalized part of MediaWiki core.

For the Getting Started project, the team launched a new version on
English Wikipedia, which included a new landing page with additional
types of tasks suggested for brand new editors to try. The list of tasks
is now generated by a basic recommender
system<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Onboarding_new_Wikipedians/Recommender_system>built
by Ori Livneh, which gathers, filters, and delivered a fresh list of
tasks automatically for every editor. This new backend paves the way for
releasing the "getting started" feature on other projects, after we've
completed data analysis and testing to understand which kinds of tasks
are ideal for first time editors. Additionally, Matt Flaschen
collaborated with the Editor Engagement Features team to build
notifications<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo>to welcome new editors
and invite them to contribute via the Getting Started.

For the account creation and login work, S Page, Munaf Assaf, and the
rest of the team rebuilt our design to work with MediaWiki core, and
solicited reviews from outside the team. We currently plan to launch
both interface redesigns on an opt-in basis in April, to have editors
test the localization and other functional aspects of the forms via a
URL parameter, before we enable them as default.

  Mobile <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering>

We have a stable version of the mobile-optimized website, which everyone
on a smartphone uses by default, and we have a beta version that
logged-in Wikimedia users can opt to use to see features we're still
building. When functionality is polished enough, we promote it from the
beta site to the stable site. In March, we added the ability to easily
upload<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/11/putting-commons-contributions-in-your-hand-mobile-app-uploads/>a
lead
image<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/28/add-an-image-to-this-article-uploads-now-live-on-mobile-wikipedia/>to
articles that lack one in the stable version of the mobile site. We
also helped users by giving them a temporary fix to an issue we
discovered that made logging in hard or impossible for some users of
newer mobile web browsers; that problem had prevented a number of users
from being able to upload photos via the mobile site. We are now well on
our way to reach our goal of 1000 unique uploaders/month by the end of
June 2013. Check out the mobile app dashboard
<http://mobile-reportcard.wmflabs.org/> to see mobile contributions via
the website and via apps.

Also: we've added thumbnails of lead images from articles in the mobile
watchlist view, as well as a "last modified" timestamp on articles in
the stable version of the mobile site. We are currently focusing on some
performance enhancements for the mobile site. In April we will graduate
the "uploads dashboard" feature from beta to stable, will further refine
our photo upload features, and will let beta site users see and use a
feature to identify articles on subjects near your current location.

The Mobile team that makes dedicated Wikimedia mobile apps have created
an initial version of the Commons photo uploader app for Android; it is
available for download in Google Play. The iOS version is still in beta,
but should be available in the Apple app store next month.

In March, Wikipedia Zero
(explanation<https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mobile_partnerships>)
added new telecom partners (such as Axiata Group
Berhad<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/19/axiata-wikipedia-zero-partnership/>),
fixed some technical problems, and helped teach new staff how we do
things. We also won an SXSW Interactive "Activism" award for Wikipedia
Zero<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/13/wikipedia-zero-wins-2013-sxsw-interactive-activism-award/>
.

Max Semenik, Arthur Richards and Faidon Liambotis held an OpenStreetMaps
mini-hackathon at Open Source Days 2013 in
Copenhagen<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Events/Wikimedia_Mapping_Event_2013>.
During the event, they agreed on an implementation strategy for a future
WMF mapping cluster. The cluster would serve OSM "tiles" and thus help
integrate OSM functionality better into Wikimedia sites, and help with
our mobile apps which already make use of OSM data.

  Other useful engineering news

    - Lua
scripting<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/11/lua-templates-faster-more-flexible-pages/>has
launched on all WMF wikis, making templates faster and making pages more
flexible. You can read that post to understand what to do on your wiki
to take advantage of this, and you can also read about the implications
for Wikimedia's
future<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/14/what-lua-scripting-means-wikimedia-open-source/>.
    - We redesigned the Translate
interface<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/25/redesigning-the-translation-experience-an-overview/>and
made other
progress<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/12/new-release-of-the-mediawiki-language-extension-bundle-and-other-updates/>on
translation and language-related tools.
    - We have fresh, friendly instructions on reporting a technical
problem<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/18/how-to-create-a-good-first-bug-report/>and
invite you to help prioritize problems to
fix<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/19/help-wikimedia-squash-software-bugs/>.
    - Our designers are collaborating with the Noun
Project<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/13/the-noun-project-and-the-wikimedia-foundation-host-an-iconathon-to-create-an-encyclopedia-collection-of-free-icons/>towards
creating an "Encyclopedia Collection" of free icons.
    - Our Operations group (the systems administrators who keep our
servers running) has started a twice-monthly meeting with other
engineering teams, to keep communication flowing about requirements and
possible upcoming problems or server needs.
    - The User Metrics API
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_Metrics>launched; it's a service
that allows researchers to perform cohort analysis
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohort_study> on various data sets,
making it easier to measure the effects of programs and platform
experiments among discrete sets of users. The Analytics
group<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics>, which works on
software to make statistics about Wikimedia available, is currently
working on improving the web-based user interface, to make it available
for use outside of Wikimedia Foundation staff in the coming months.

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