Wikimedia Language engineering/Reports/2016/April

Monthly updates from WMF Editing - Language team

Content Translation
Updates from the ongoing development and deployment for Content Translation. (Newsletter)

Development update

 * Content translation was in maintenance mode this month. No new features developed. Some minor bugs were fixed
 * cxserver's language configuration updated to facilitate faster deployments

Other projects
Updates from Translate, Universal Language Selector, MLEB and other projects.

MLEB
MLEB 2016.04 was released with many fixes. This release is the first one where the release tag was signed.

Extensions
Translate:
 * About 20 patches were merged
 * MtDu provided a fix to improve wording of a message.
 * Siebrand Mazeland contributed some clean-up patches.
 * Niklas Laxström converted the "recent groups" feature to use local storage.
 * Niklas Laxström provided some clean-up patches.
 * Glaisher contributed multiple patches to fix high priority issues in Translate.
 * Aaron Schulz contributed patches to use database slave server more.
 * Reedy fixed a technical debt issue around deprecated interfaces.

Universal Language Selector (part of MLEB):
 * About 25 patches were merged
 * Most of the patches were by Niklas Laxström and Santhosh Thottingal to address technical debt and prepare the Compact Interlanguage Links feature for stable form.
 * Siebrand Mazeland and Ed Sanders provided clean-up patches.

TwnMainPage:
 * Two clean-up patches by Siebrand Mazeland

jquery.i18n:
 * Ricordisamoa contributed many code quality patches.

jquery.uls:
 * Ricordisamoa contributed a code quality patch.
 * Both Niklas Laxström and Santhosh Thottingal did lots of clean-ups. For example compact mode has been removed completely and styling of the dialogs updated.

translatewiki.net

 * About 40 patches were merged
 * Raimond Spekking registered 4 new extensions (MolHandler, Google Geocode, Image Tweak, Template Styles) for translation and made updates to many others.
 * Siebrand Mazeland converted bunch of non-Gerrit hosted projects to RepoNG and added multiple new ones. This gives MediaWiki-related projects hosted on GitHub, such as Semantic MediaWiki, a level of support that is equal to the ones hosted on Gerrit.
 * Niklas Laxström added simple monitoring for MediaWiki JobQueue. Broken JobQueue caused severe problems with exporting translations.
 * There was a brief outage when service provided had to do critical maintenance to the servers. Uptime for the month was 99.83%.

Usage data

 * Translatable pages: Meta 2790 (+54); MediaWiki.org 2991 (+13); Commons 445 (+4)
 * Translate extension is installed on 215 wikis (-2), according to Wikiapiary
 * Stats from translatewiki.net
 * New users: 65 (-55)
 * About 325 (-65) translators made about 28.000 (-21.000) edits
 * About 85 (-35) translators reviewed about 8.000 (-12.000) translations

Deployments and other site related updates

 * cxserver registry (languages and MT settings) in Production will read registry configuration from cxserver repository instead of Puppet config. This allows easy deployment of new languages and MT. Other important configuration will remain in Puppet.

Cross team work/requirements

 * The database switch testing caused some unplanned work, mainly related to the TTMServer which uses ElasticSearch.
 * Discussions with Discovery team started about how to plan and handle ElasticSearch update, which requires major changes to TTMServer.
 * Discussions with Mobile started how to support Special:Translate better for mobile devices.
 * Discussion on Wikitech about future of page translation. The current status of the feature was clarified and initial plans where to go were made, but no immediate actions were taken.
 * With help and advice from Aaron Schulz and Jaime Crespo, Translate extension now uses the database more appropriately. This will give better availability and performance.

Team status

 * The team had one week long offsite in Bangalore, India. There were also some vacations.