Contributors


 * For help on editing pages, see Help:Editing

The Editing department of Wikimedia Engineering works on extending and improving the editing tools used at Wikimedia – VisualEditor and other content tools, Collaboration tools, Multimedia support, Language tools for translation, content and communication, and Parsing. We exist to support new and existing editors alike across desktop, tablet and phone platforms.

Progress on annual plan, quarterly goals and other work
Below we provide brief narratives of our status on each of Editing's quarterly goals, and alongside them the department's teams do a lot of other work to support the annual plan, from support work for other departments to preparations for future quarterly goals.

Analysis
2016-12-06:
 * We're working to consolidate our various data sources into one place. We've worked with Analytics Engineering on documentation for the Dashiki dashboarding system, which is now published, and consulted with Research to understand the provenance and purpose of some of the historical measures. We're working on the historic "ee" dashboards, and we expect to migrate them to a new dashboard soon.
 * Our team members continue to spend a lot of time working to support other teams in Editing and more widely. We're currently working on providing numbers for Community Tech helping the English Wikipedia consider a configuration change, assisting Community Engagement with the forthcoming Insights survey work, and with teams to help them specify good team-level metrics for forthcoming quarterly goals.

Collaboration
2016-12-05:
 * Our quarterly goal, under the "Invest in new forms of curation and collaboration tools" banner, is to provide a Beta Feature of filters to recent changes that show ORES good-faith and damaging tests, and filters around new users. The work on this is slightly behind schedule; we expect to be able to deploy this Beta Feature early next quarter.
 * We finished redoing Flow's caching infrastructure in November, and this change was deployed without any issues. This addresses a major blocker for the Performance team's multi-data-center project. There are a few smaller multi-DC blockers remaining in Echo and Flow, which we are working on now, but this was by far the biggest one in our area.
 * We are doing code review for volunteer-submitted patches that implement English Wikipedia's accepted Deferred Changes RFC.

Design
2016-12-06:
 * Our quarterly goal is to provide and apply a style guide which all teams in Editing and more widely follow, as part of "Improve editing experience by reducing technical and product debt". We have implemented most of the changes into OOUI, and are now gathering feedback and considering documentation.
 * Our team members continue to spend most of their time embedded with other teams.

Language
2016-12-06:
 * Our quarterly goal, under "Invest in new types of content creation", is to add a personal "translations list" feature to ContentTranslation so translators can create and modify a list of articles to be translated on their dashboard. This is halted and instead we raised the priority of the ongoing work for templates which required more time from the development team.
 * Work on a system inside ContentTranslation to translate uses of templates to the target wiki, allowing experts to mark which bits of each template lines up with others, is now in production. We are fixing any critical bugs as that are surfacing when more templates are now being used on Wikipedia. The development team had to review the scope of the first version of this feature, after it was observed during research sessions that some gaps needed to be addressed urgently.
 * Our work on deploying Compact Language Links out of beta (T66793) is now paused; it is done for all Wikivoyages except Russian, and all Wikibookses, Wikiversities, Wikinewses, Wikiquotes, and Wiktionaries, and for all Wikipedias except English, Swedish, German, Dutch, and French, for which new schedules will be drawn up soon. (T136677)

Multimedia
2016-12-06:
 * Our quarterly goal, as part of "Improve editing experience by reducing technical and product debt", is to provide rich media file annotations, and to iterate their storage. The former is going well, and we hope to provide design options to the Commons community to decide before the end of the month. The latter is stalled on the Multi-Content Revisions Streams work, so we have paused consideration.
 * We're supporting the work of colleagues in shaping a plan to expedite the work on Structured data for Commons through a grant, considering the technical and product issues and advising on changes as necessary.
 * We've paused our work on the non-destructive image editing tool (Standalone demo, MediaWiki demo). because it relies on the Thumbor service that Performance are bringing to production. They believe it will be a small amount of work to modify the service so that we can use it, and should be available next quarter, when we hope to release this to users.

Parsing
2016-12-06:
 * Our quarterly goal within "2: Improve editing experience by reducing technical and product debt" is to replace the Tidy dependency from MediaWiki output. We're planning to provide an alternative to Tidy (disabled by default) and the tools for individual editors to assess the impact of switching on each page. We are currently talking with Operations to get their help for a pilot deployment this quarter.
 * We're working with Reading and others on support for multi-script wikis (like Chinese), initially just for reading but later for editing too. This work is now awaiting review and related additional fixes before we can declare it completed.
 * We've brought forwards work from earlier this year on reducing the bandwidth demands of read-mode pages by considering how to move  out of inline HTML; discussions on the best way forward continue between us, Services, VisualEditor, Language and Collaboration.
 * We're working on several improvements for better support of media in Parsoid. Our initial work on image galleries is now complete and ready for deployment. We updated our HTML spec for review by the Services team. The extension is also being reviewed by the VisualEditor team and might require additional fixes before being enabled for use inside VE. For video and audio files, the specification agreed but work is currently paused.
 * We have started working to finish up and provide to editors the output of the GSoC "linter" project to spot wikitext mistakes and issues for editors to fix. This should help improve the quality of the wikitext corpus and reduce errors for users. Database and Security reviews are complete and additional work is ongoing to ready this for deployment next quarter (Q3 2016-17). We might have a version deployed to the Beta cluster this quarter for testing and feedback.
 * We've paused our work on providing a system to balance templates, due to competing concerns.
 * We've paused our work on providing a system to isolate styles of templates, due to competing concerns.
 * Our work on implementing into MediaWiki generic shadow namespace support continues, albeit slowly, with a series of wide-ranging changes to MediaWiki planned.

VisualEditor
2016-12-06:
 * Our quarterly goal, as part of "Maintain and incrementally improve current content creation and curation interfaces", is to provide a unified, consistent editing interface between mobile and desktop Web, and between visual and wikitext editors. The initial version of the Beta Feature of the editor is complete, and undergoing final user testing before release, which we plan to do next week. Work on further features for this is underway. We will demonstrate the wikitext editing mode of the visual editor at the December Product showcase, alongside a demo of real-time collaborative editing.
 * We're working on visual diffing, which allow users who don't know wikitext to see the changes they're making as they edit, and will give a better way to spot some subtle changes in edits. The initial version is merged and we're working on the interaction design to support the richness of wikitext edits. Our principal quarterly goal for January–March 2017 will be to provide it inside the MediaWiki visual editor, and eventually we will provide it outside the editor too as an option when looking at diffs in any context.
 * Our work to release the visual editor to all Wikipedias is now almost complete. There are now outstanding only the eight multi-script Wikipedias (including Chinese) which are technologically blocked, on which we're working with Parsing. There are also three other Wikipedias in incomplete deployment states (English, Spanish and Dutch), for which work is paused pending the new wikitext editor release, and won't resume until some point in 2017.
 * Our work to release the visual editor to sister projects is now paused. Work on the blocker bugs to Wikisource working has stalled as we've put resources elsewhere. We hope to come back to this early in 2017.
 * We paused work on the single edit tab integration on other wikis in June 2016, pending the new wikitext editor release, and so won't resume until some point in 2017.

Contact
Discussion about major things happens on the ​wikitech-l mailing list. For specific IRC channels, see the team subpages linked above.