Wikimedia Features engineering
From MediaWiki.org
The Wikimedia Foundation Features Engineering team is responsible for developing new features for MediaWiki. The group is managed by Terry Chay and is part of the larger Wikimedia Engineering team.
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Current projects [edit]
| Project | Description | Project lead & team | Status | ||
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| Editor Retention: Editing Tools | |||||
| VisualEditor |
[edit]
Creating a visual editor for MediaWiki, other platforms and the Web at large |
[edit]
James Forrester, Trevor Parscal, Roan Kattouw, Rob Moen, Ed Sanders, Inez Korczyński (Wikia), Christian Williams (Wikia), Timo Tijhof |
Status: (2013-05-13 (MW 1.22wmf4)) | ||
| Parsoid |
[edit]
A bidirectional wikitext parser and runtime. Converts back and forth between wikitext and HTML/XML DOM with RDFa. |
[edit]
James Forrester, Gabriel Wicke, Subramanya Sastry, Mark Holmquist |
Status: (2013-04-monthly)
In April, the Parsoid team successfully deployed the cumulative work done over the last four months. This includes support for non-English wiki configurations, a rewritten serialization subsystem based on server-side DOM diffs, category link and basic template parameter editing support and a long list of fixes and improvements.
Several other features for the July release are on track. The specification for extensions containing templates and templates containing extensions were fleshed out and are currently being implemented. Similarly, our specs for images and thumbnails were vastly improved so that we will soon support full editing for all parameters. We also improved our code quality and testing infrastructure. In preparation for the July release, we did more benchmarking and capacity planning. A caching strategy that avoids overwhelming the API with requests was developed, hardware to run Parsoid was ordered and work on the implementation started. |
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| Editor Engagement | |||||
| Notifications |
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Project hub for the Notifications infrastructure and UI (code-name: Echo) |
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Fabrice Florin, Terry Chay, Howie Fung, Ryan Kaldari, Benny Situ, Luke Welling, Vibha Bamba, Brandon Harris, Oliver Keyes, James Forrester, Andrew Garrett, Matthias Mullie |
Status: (2013-04-monthly)
In April, we deployed Notifications on the English Wikipedia and mediawiki.org. This first release aims to inform users about new activity that affects them on Wikipedia, such as talk page messages, page reviews, mentions, edit reverts or thanks. Ryan Kaldari developed a new feature that lets users mark all notifications as read, and updated the fly-out and archive page, based on designs from Vibha Bamba. Benny Situ completed the bundling feature and developed some of the first metrics dashboards, in collaboration with Dario Taraborelli. Luke Welling continued to develop HTML email notifications and a notifications mailbox. Fabrice Florin managed the product development and release of this notification system, and coordinated its socialization on the English Wikipedia with Oliver Keyes. We're also grateful to Steven Walling and Matt Flaschen from our E3 team for developing the Welcome and Getting started notifications. To learn more, visit the project portal, read the FAQ page and join the discussion on the talk page.
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| Flow |
[edit]
Initial ideas for the user "home page" feed system, including modules. |
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Terry Chay, Brandon Harris, Andrew Garrett, James Forrester |
Status: (2013-04-monthly)
Design work continues and several discussions were had about what constitutes a minimum viable product for the first iteration of Flow. Brandon Harris is now building an interactive prototype to help describe multiple functions.
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| Article feedback |
[edit]
A new tool to engage readers to improve articles on Wikipedia. |
[edit]
Fabrice Florin, Matthias Mullie, Reha Sterbin, Yoni Shostak, Mike Jackson, Pau Giner, Roan Kattouw, Andrew Garrett, Oliver Keyes, Dario Taraborelli, Brandon Harris, Howie Fung, Erik Möller |
Status: (2013-04-monthly)
This month, we deployed the final release version of Article Feedback v5 on the English, French and German Wikipedias. Developer Matthias Mullie updated the back-end software in order to re-enable the tool on the English Wikipedia, and fixed a number of bugs reported on the German Wikipedia. Fabrice Florin worked with Pau Giner, Oliver Keyes and community members to simplify the feedback page, as well as finalize feedback links, auto-archive and opt-in features. Learn more in this project update. To enable feedback on articles you watch on the English Wikipedia, simply add the 'Article Feedback 5' category to these pages. For more tips on how to use this version, visit the testing page, and let us know what you think on the Article Feedback Talk page. We are now wrapping up development for this project, and will collect community suggestions for the next few months to prepare for upcoming votes on the French and German Wikipedias later this year.
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| Editor engagement experiments | |||||
| Editor engagement experiments |
[edit]
Experimentation around increasing participation in Wikimedia projects, especially Wikipedia |
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Terry Chay (EPM), Matt Flaschen, Dario Taraborelli, Ryan Faulkner, Ori Livneh, Steven Walling, Kirsten Menger-Anderson |
Status: (2013-04-monthly)
In April, the Editor Engagement Experiments (E3) team focused first and foremost on its account creation and login redesigns in MediaWiki core. The first phase of the launch invited editors and readers on all Wikimedia projects to test the new forms on an opt-in basis, to identify bugs and localization issues across our many wikis. We expect to release these as the default forms in May, pending any final blockers.
For the team's Onboarding new Wikipedians project, we completed quantitative analysis of the latest version of the GettingStarted landing page, and began prototyping a new landing page and navigation system for usability testing prior to further development and launch, which is expected in early May as well. On the analytics and infrastructure front, the team handed off the product roadmap for the User Metrics API to the Analytics team and colleagues in the Grantmaking and Programs department. Ori Livneh, in support of the data analysis needs on the team, began work supporting a Foundation instance of IPython Notebook. Last but not least, the E3 team held its second Quarterly Review session, and began work planning its next high-level goals for the April–June quarter. |
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| Support (Fundraising, Education…) | |||||
| 2012 Wikimedia fundraiser |
[edit]
Engineering support and development for the 2012 fundraiser of the Wikimedia Foundation |
[edit]
Katie Horn, Peter Gehres, Adam Wight, Matthew Walker, Jeff Green |
Status: (2013-04-monthly)
The fundraising team deployed a public reporting site, made of aggregate live and historical fundraising data, which were notably used by the webcomic xkcd to dynamically change the outcome in the last panel of their 2013 April 1st comic, 'Externalities'. We also upgraded the payments- and fundraising- wikis to MediaWiki 1.22, upgraded CiviCRM to 4.2.8 and Drupal to 7, and migrated the banner impression log pipeline to the Eqiad data center.
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Future and backburner projects [edit]
| Project | Description | Project lead & team | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Article Creation Workflow |
[edit]
A feature to improve the article creation workflow for new editors. |
[edit]
Fabrice Florin, Benny Situ, Ryan Kaldari, Ian Baker, Brandon Harris, Oliver Keyes, Howie Fung, Dario Taraborelli, Terry Chay |
Status: (2013-04-02)
Deployment
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| GlobalProfile |
[edit]
A set of features to help users provide information about themselves and associate by interests. |
[edit]
Alolita Sharma, Brandon Harris |
Status: (2011-09-30)
This project was on hold in September, because of a lack of development resources.
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| Community prototyping |
[edit]
Features development to support community research and community change experiments. |
[edit]
Alolita Sharma, Katie Horn |
Status: (2012-12-monthly)
In December, active development has begun on the user metrics API project in E3. The effort is threefold: to standardize user metrics [1], to build infrastructure to efficiently compute metrics for a large set of users [2,3], and finally to expose those results via an API. The technical portion of this project is written in Python and Flask, and the assigned resources are Dario Taraborelli and Ryan Faulkner. Development and documentation efforts will be continuing through January.
[2] https://github.com/rfaulkner/E3_analysis [3] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=analytics/E3Analysis.git;a=summary |
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| LiquidThreads 3.0 |
[edit]
A rewrite of the LiquidThreads extension to improve its back-end and UI |
[edit]
James Forrester, Andrew Garrett, Brandon Harris, |
Status: (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.
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| Etherpad lite integration | Create a project page for this activity (how-to) | |||
| MoodBar |
[edit]
A feature to encourage new users to provide feedback. |
[edit]
Alolita Sharma, Brandon Harris, Howie Fung, Ian Baker), Rob Moen, Benny Situ |
Status: (2011-11-30)
Benny Situ and Rob Moen familiarized themselves with the existing code, and the requirements for phase 2. Benny also added server-side validation for empty comment, and Rob fixed Internet Explorer bugs and added front end validation. On November 30th, there was a follow up deployment that added a preview mode to feedback response and also allowed the use of wikitext. Additionally, there was an update to the response template used in the user talk page. Dario Taraborelli uploaded a series of real-time dashboards for Moodbar data to the Toolserver.
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| Mobile/Athena | Create a project page for this activity (how-to) | |||
| ResourceLoader |
[edit]
A feature to improve the load times for JavaScript and CSS in MediaWiki. |
[edit]
James Forrester, Steven Walling, Roan Kattouw, Timo Tijhof, Terry Chay |
Status: (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.
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| FlaggedRevs maintenance |
[edit]
A feature to allow changes made by logged-out and new users to be reviewed before they appear as the primary version of an article. |
[edit]
James Forrester, Matthias Mullie, Aaron Schulz |
Status: (2012-11-monthly)
No update this month.
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| Wikipedia Education Program |
[edit]
A MediaWiki extension to support the Wikipedia Education Program |
[edit]
Terry Chay, Jeroen De Dauw |
Status: (2013-04-28)
Helping Students with definitions
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| MicroDesign |
[edit]
Low hanging fruit |
[edit]
Howie Fung, Oliver Keyes, Munaf Assaf, Vibha Bamba, Rob Moen, Benny Situ |
Status: (2013-01-monthly)
No update this month.
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| UploadWizard |
[edit]
A feature that provides an easier way of uploading files to Wikimedia Commons, the media library associated with Wikipedia. |
[edit]
Erik Möller, Ryan Kaldari, Mark Holmquist |
Status: (2013-01-monthly)
No update this month.
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Recently completed projects [edit]
| Project | Description | Project lead & team | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feedback Dashboard |
[edit]
A dashboard allowing experienced users to answer comments and concerns coming from MoodBar |
[edit]
Fabrice Florin, Brandon Harris, Ian Baker, Rob Moen, Benny Situ, Alolita Sharma |
Status: (2012-01-31)
We implemented a leaderboard of recent top responders on the feedback dashboard. New editor feedback is now added to a dedicated log. When feedback is marked as helpful, that fact is displayed on the feedback dashboard itself. Other than a few other smaller changes, we're now moving the project into maintenance mode to focus on article creation workflow and New Page Triage.
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| WikiLove |
[edit]
An extension to encourage expressions of appreciation between users. |
[edit]
Alolita Sharma, Ryan Kaldari, Jan Paul Posma, Roan Kattouw, Brandon Harris |
Status: (2011-08-01)
The code was completed, and the feature deployed to the English Wikipedia at the end of June. The Product research team published a basic analysis of its usage, and stories of its evolving usage and impact. This project is now considered to be completed.
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| Page Curation |
[edit]
Interface for reviewing new pages |
[edit]
Fabrice Florin, Ryan Kaldari, Benny Situ, Brandon Harris, Vibha Bamba, Howie Fung, Terry Chay |
Status: (2012-12-monthly)
Page Curation is now in 'maintenance mode', following its release on the English Wikipedia in September 2012. There was no significant development activity on this project this month. Oliver Keyes has completed a project to look at various ways of localizing Page Curation to any and all wikis that want it: it is currently being reviewed by Howie Fung to assess its feasibility.
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| Guided tours |
[edit]
Create infastructure for providing guided tours, as well as some initial tours |
[edit]
Terry Chay, Munaf Assaf, Terry Chay, Matt Flaschen, Ori Livneh, Maryana Pinchuk, Steven Walling, Luke Welling |
Status: (2013-02-07)
Matt Flaschen has created initial documentation for on-wiki tours.
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