Global Collaboration/Reports/2017-September

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

What's new

 * New filters for edit review have been released on Recent Changes for (almost) all wikis. New filters for edit review have been released on Watchlists as a Beta feature.

Content Translation
Content Translation allows people to translate Wikipedia articles. Improvements and styling changes done to:
 * the new translation dialog to make the selected article look smaller and compact, display week view numbers for selected article, and display appropriate information when the article exists in only one language. An icon has also been added next to a selected item title to indicate that it can be opened in a new tab.


 * language selectors on headers of translation lists to change the style and to shorten the label when all languages are selected.


 * various elements, including
 * adding shadows to elements that missed it.
 * prevent dashboard from stretching too far on wide screens,
 * translation graphs displayed to users about their activity,
 * list items on the dashboard,
 * display compact sidebars and language selector on small screens,
 * filter languages to display for in-progress and published translations

A new api: /translate is being added to cxserver. It will do machine translation and adaptation of a whole paragraph to another language. Earlier this was done in the frontend (i.e. in the code currently used in production). Moving it to the backend will make the client side code simpler and faster. Adaptation of links, references, and images is done. Template adaptation is more complicated than other types of adaptation. It is being done now. cxserver is also undergoing maintenance work to modernize it to use new JavaScript features, updating our API endpoints to address shortcomings and updating our configuration format for easier maintenance.

Immediate priorities for integration of VE into CX were largely completed. This includes completing the server side workflows for autosave, restoration and publishing, and adaptation of templates for a few important templates. Remainder of the work, particularly for the UI will happen after this. Work is tracked on phabricator ticket T150652.

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.

Overall

 * Important efforts have been put into performance, to have faster filters (T176250)
 * Design has been polished: a lot of fixes have been done, mostly by Moriel Shottlender (T168826, T164861). One of the most visible change is how loading time is presented. (T165286)
 * Links to help pages have been added on Tags filtering menu (T176661)
 * User registration" and "experience level" groups as now unified. (T165160)

Recent changes pages

 * New filters for edit review have been released on Recent Changes for (almost) all wikis. Missing wikis are the ones using FlaggedRevisions. That feature will get soon a fully integrated filter, made by Petar Petkovic. (T159791)
 * It is now possible to group results by page directly from the Recent Changes page interface. (T168513)

Watchlists

 * Wikis using ORES and the new filters on the Watchlists have experienced important slow downs. This has been fixed. (T176456)

Documentation

 * Central documentation on Meta page about Recent Changes has been updated. That page requires new translations. (T177968)

Structured Discussions
Structured discussions were formerly known as Flow. The Flow project has been re-scoped and renamed to reflect what it is now.
 * On wikis where Structures Discussions is used as a Beta feature or a default talk page system, sysops can create, move and delete Structured Discussions pages. How-to has been documented. (T175934, T176107)
 * Structured discussions are available as a Beta feature on wa.wikipedia.org and wa.wikionary.org. (T172947)
 * Structured discussions used to crash when a user post a message while having the browser inspector open. This is now fixed. (T166634)

Notifications
Mediawiki allows users to restrict who can send them notifications. Notifications icons were broken on some special pages (Special:GadgetUsage, Special:Upload, Special:Notifications), this has been fixed. (T173411)
 * How to use it has been documented by Trevor Bolliger with the assistance of Benoît Evellin (T169606)
 * Some changes have been done on the fording of the function to make it more clear. (T166626)

Community Engagement
Online round table was hosted by the Content Translation developers. Logs and recording of the session can be checked for more details.

News about the team
Petar Petković joins the Global Collaboration team as a full time software engineer on contract. He has been an intern since June 2017. Petar currently works on Content Translation and Edit Review Improvements.