User:Jdforrester (WMF)

James Forrester Product Manager, VisualEditor team, Wikimedia Foundation

About me I've been a Wikipedia editor since 2002 on the English Wikipedia and a few other Wikimedia projects (see my personal account). In May 2012 I joined the Wikimedia Foundation as the "Product Manager" for the VisualEditor team.

My work My job is to help make sure the VisualEditor team understands what the community wants and needs, is focussed on the things that matter, and is engaging with and understood by the community. Disclaimer: Although I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, contributions under this account do not necessarily represent the actions or views of the Foundation unless expressly stated otherwise. For example, edits to articles or uploads of other media are done in my individual, personal capacity unless otherwise stated.

Contact me E-mail: jforresterwikimedia.org IRC: "James_F" on freenode Skype: jdforrester GTalk IM: jforresterwikimedia.org

Current projects

VisualEditor

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  2013-06-13 (MW 1.22wmf7):

VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf7 branch deployment on Thursday 13 June. In the week since 1.22wmf6, the team worked on finishing the new features ahead of VisualEditor's launch as the default way users will edit our wikis in beta.

The most noticeable change for users is that you can now insert images and other media items from the local wiki and Commons - they default to right-floated thumbnailed images with no caption set. Images will also now appear "correctly", positioned in the normal places when editing. We will make it possible to set the caption, as well as convert images from thumbnails to inline or floating on the other side, in the coming week. We also changed the "Save page" workflow to no longer require users to view a wikitext diff before saving (bug 49258), and removed the 'alpha' notice, replacing it with a more subtle beta label (bug 48428). Work continued on ​inserting and editing Templates and References​, ​the other two critical areas ahead of the release ​, which we hope to​ ​​make available in the next week or so.

We fixed some bugs relating to support for multi-byte Unicode characters used by some languages (bug 49246 and 48630) and some tweaks to the category setting interface released last week (bug 48555, bug 48555 and bug 48565). HTML comments and elements that have no contents like some <span>s will now not be silently dropped when editing (bug 48605). You can now use the forwards and back buttons on your browser with VisualEditor as you would expect (bug 43844).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf7 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.

Parsoid

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  2013-05-monthly:
  In May, the Parsoid team implemented several new features, as well as important performance optimizations in preparation for the July VisualEditor release.

A major image handling overhaul enabled rendering and editing of all image-related parameters with a relatively simple DOM structure. Template and extension editing was improved to support editing of templates within extensions. This lets editors modify and add templated citations in VisualEditor, an important feature to improve the quality of articles in Wikipedia.

On the performance front, we are now reusing expensive template, extension and image expansions from our own previous output to avoid most API queries after an edit. This is necessary to avoid overloading the API when tracking all edits on Wikimedia projects. A cache infrastructure with appropriate purging was set up and will be tested at full load through June.

At the Amsterdam hackathon, we helped developers leverage our rich HTML+RDFa DOM output for projects like a Wikipedia-to-SMS service or the Kiwix offline Wikipedia reader.

Admin tools development

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  2013-05-monthly:
  This month the team worked on Single User Login finalisation, which will mean that all user accounts will be global across all of Wikimedia's public wikis, and so allowing for cross-wiki notifications and better tools for editors. This will require all user accounts to be uniquely named and not conflict with other accounts. Some more work was done on the global account renaming tool. The team attended the Wikimedia Hackathon 2013 in Amsterdam where we discussed issues with admin tools and plans for the future with a number of volunteer developers.

Auth systems

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  2013-04-monthly:
  During April, the team primarily focused on implementing SUL v2, which will fix issues that users are having with new security features in recent browser releases. SUL v2 is ready for testing and deployment is targeted for early May. In addition, the team worked toward a final design specification for OAuth and will begin working on that pending the successful deployment of SUL v2.

Lua scripting

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  2013-04-monthly:
  Some bugs were fixed and internationalization changes merged this month; no major changes were made. The community continues to develop Lua-based templates, such as the citation templates on the English Wikipedia.

ResourceLoader (maintenance-only)

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  2012-12-24:
  Per Wikimedia Engineering/2012-13 Goals the Wikimedia Foundation is not working on ResourceLoader (including Gadgets 2.0) until after the current fiscal year ends, in mid-2013.

FlaggedRevs (maintenance-only)

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  2012-11-monthly:
  No update this month.

LiquidThreads re-write (paused)

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  2012-07-14:
  "Further deployments of LiquidThreads are indefinitely on hold because we don't have the resources to support it." – Andrew Garrett (2012-03-19) there is no further development expected.