Global Collaboration/Reports/2017-October

Monthly updates from the Wikimedia Foundation's Global Collaboration team about technical development of the software they maintain. Names of people assumed to contribute as volunteers are in bold text.

You can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, which includes the most important points. Please help us translate it.

Helpful links:
 * Team page (on mediawiki.org)
 * Team talk page
 * FAQ page

Content Translation
Content Translation allows people to translate Wikipedia articles. Following improvements were done on Content Translation dashboard:
 * List items (suggested items and in-progress/published translations) layout restyled to prevent overflows on small screen sizes.
 * Search results for new translation dialog are now embedded, instead of being displayed in floating menu. Search results remain displayed when tabbed out and can be closed using ESC key.
 * Missing pages are no longer shown when there is no match for search query. Message informing that there are no results is displayed instead.
 * Embedded search results enabled to provide users with more translation opportunities. Articles user recently edited (in currently selected source language wiki) are surfaced when there is no input in search bar, with additional info if article is missing in user's currently selected target language.
 * Long suggestion descriptions are limited to three lines, and the rest is truncated, which is indicated by ellipsis.
 * Chart data representing user translation statistics in now showing all the months since user's first published translation. Months that went without translation are now displayed in chart as well.
 * Loading indicator is shown while suggestions are loading.
 * Button to discard dialog is now shown through the whole process of selecting article to translate.

CXServer
 * CXServer can now automatically adapt templates from a source language to a target language with the help of templatedata
 * Support for accepting the parsoid html with tags were added. CXServer will remove these tags and place the sections for each translatable sections.

Edit Review Improvements
Edit Review Improvements are a set of improvements done to ease new changes review by making it more easily, and less harmful for newcomers.

Deployments Improvements Ongoing work
 * Wikis using Flagged Revisions get the new filters by default on Recent Changes. When done, all wikis will have the new filters as the default system on Recent Changes.
 * Filters for Watchlists are still on Beta. Please try them and give feedback before we release it for all users!
 * Shortcuts to filter Namespaces and Tags are now more visible. T178539
 * Discovery of the search bar has been improved. T178069
 * If the Recent Changes page or the Watchlist fails to load or is time-outed, a message is now displayed. T177413 T175776
 * Some users have suggested to have a more compact toolbar on watchlist. We are exploring that possibility.
 * Extension:Translate filters for RecentChanges are going to be integrated to the new filters. T159795
 * Automatic edit summaries will be filtered as tags. T167656

Structured Discussions
Structured discussions were formerly known as Flow. The Flow project has been re-scoped and renamed to reflect what it is now.

Some ongoing work is about setting the system to slowly migrate over from HTML to wikitext storage (T174374).

Most changes this month were cosmetic ones, like fix a some unstyled contents around navigation widget (T175682), set highlight border to exact pixel value to avoid scrollbar flicker (T178685)...

Notifications

 * Edit-user-talk notifications are now expandable (T162299)

Deployments and site updates
Compact Language Links was deployed on German Wikipedia. (T177836)

News about the team
The Global Collaboration team met for a week long offsite in Bengaluru, India from 23rd October to 27th October, 2017. We had 4 days of structured sessions during which the team members talked about the projects they have previously worked on, ongoing projects, their pet projects, and new ideas that they would like to explore together. We also had unstructured hours of quiet work time. The team also discussed about operational logistics and the impact of the merger. Read more details in the offsite report.