Growth/Growth 2014/status

Last update on: 2012-06-monthly

2012-04-monthly
Karyn Gladstone, Steven Walling, Maryana Pinchuk and Ryan Faulkner conducted the Necromancy experiment, [//blog.wikimedia.org/2012/05/02/enticing-wikipedians-back/ emailing lapsed editors] to encourage them to edit Wikipedia again. Work on the Template A/B testing project is wrapping up; a full report is expected in May. The E3 team will also be publishing details on each experiment on meta and the English Wikipedia. The technical specifications for each implementation will be posted on mediawiki.org. The team also began recruiting for its open positions; the first software engineer for the team will be joining mid May.

2012-05-monthly
The team started the development of the Timestamp Modification experimental feature, which was deployed then disabled due to a conflict between the ClickTracking feature and the MediaWiki API. Further testing and tuning continues, as well as analysis, redesign and development of the ClickTracking extension. We are gathering requirements for the next experiment on analyzing post-edit feedback, and we continue to hire software engineers.

2012-06-monthly
Ori had been learning about the architecture of MediaWiki extensions and decided to codify what he had learned into an extension skeleton, Extension:SkelJS, which automates some good practices when developing JavaScript-centric MediaWiki extensions.

Debug hooks were added to the clicktracking extension with the goal of improving QA for experiments. Ori wrote a clicktracking dashboard that intercepts event logging calls and displays them on-screen, shows which experiments are currently active, and to which bucket (if any) the current user has been assigned.

Work is ongoing on a re-write of the clicktracking extension, which is taking shape as at Extension:E3_Experiments. The code for simple random sampling has been re-written using Murmurhash as a hashing algorithm. Ori wrote a MySQL plugin implementation of Murmurhash that allows it to be used for server-side data analysis.