Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2013/April/summary


 * This content is prepared for inclusion in the April 2013 Wikimedia Foundation report. It is a shorter and simpler version of the full Wikimedia engineering report for April 2013 that does not assume specialized technical knowledge.

Major news in April include:
 * the start of recruitment for a multimedia engineering team;
 * a better translation interface, a new home page for translators and a language outreach program;
 * the release of Kiwix of Android, an app to download and view Wikimedia content offline on mobile devices;
 * the migration of Wikidata, and the English and German Wikipedias, to the MariaDB database system;
 * the second phase of Wikidata, whose content can now be displayed in Wikipedia articles;
 * the deployment of VisualEditor's first version to 14 more language versions of Wikipedia;
 * a new login and account creation interface;
 * the ramp-up of technical mentorship programs;
 * the launch of an official Wikimedia Commons app for iOS and Android.

VisualEditor
In April, the VisualEditor team continued to work on major new features that will be added in the coming months. The goal is for VisualEditor to become the default editor for all Wikipedia users in July 2013, capable of letting them edit the majority of content without needing to use the legacy wikitext editor. The team has focused on four substantial areas of work: adding support for references, templates, categories and media items, all of which are currently disabled for editing in VisualEditor. Editing around images is now designed and partially implemented in our experimental code, and editing around categories is almost complete and nearly ready for activation.

The early ("alpha") version of VisualEditor currently enabled on a few select sites was updated three times in April, adding speed and interface improvements, fixing bugs and making deeper changes behind the scenes to better support the new features. We also were able to enable the alpha version of VisualEditor [//blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/25/visualeditor-alpha-in-15-languages/ on fourteen more Wikipedias as an opt-in]. This has encouraged feedback from the community on what works and is broken, and identifying language- and locale-specific issues that are now being fixed.

As for the Parsoid (the program that serves as translator between wikitext code and annotated HTML, behind the scenes of VisualEditor), the team successfully activated the cumulative work done over the last four months. This includes support for non-English wikis, a rewritten system to reduce artifacts when editing with VisualEditor, support for basic template parameter editing, and a long list of other fixes and improvements.

Several other features for the July target are on track. Specifications to support more features were written and are currently being implemented. This includes images and thumbnails, whose options for embedding in wiki pages will soon be ready. The team also continued to evaluate the performance of Parsoid. Caching was developed to minimize the server load, and new servers were ordered.

Editor engagement
<!-- This month, the Editor engagement team stepped up development on the Notifications project Echo, and updated the first experimental release on mediawiki.org. The user experience for core features was improved (such as the badge, fly-out, all-notifications page and email notifications) and development started on new features, like preferences. The team completed work on HTML emails and started development of a more robust job queue. A first release on the English Wikipedia is expected by the end of March; in the meantime, users can try the current version on mediawiki.org.

Flow, a feed-like interface to enable users to better interact with their projects, entered the product design phase in early January. It has several "modules", one of which is a design for a structured user-to-user communication system. User research began in order to learn how user-to-user talk pages are handled, and how to improve them. Engineering discussions started about potential back-end and performance difficulties, the possible use of Wikidata's ContentHandler, and the evaluation of Wikia's MessageWall. A consultation with the community is planned for early February, with experienced and newer users alike.

Regarding Article Feedback v5 (a quality assessment feature), its code was cleaned up in January, and new features (simpler moderation tools and better filters) were developed. An internal feedback evaluation study suggests that about 39% of the feedback collected can be used to improve articles. Discussions happened on the English and French Wikipedia regarding the future use of the tool, and the German pilot program is expected to continue until May.

The Editor Engagement Experiments team ("E3") launched guided tours on the English Wikipedia, a feature allowing contributors to build tours to guide newer users. Guided tours are planned as a permanent addition to Wikipedia, with each tour implementation considered to be experimental. While building guided tours, the team also tested the Getting Started landing page and task list, measuring the effect it had on driving new contributions. Analysis showed that the onboarding experience is leading to small but statistically significant increases in new English Wikipedians attempting to edit, as well as saving their first edit. In addition to measuring the effects of the guided tour associated with this project, immediate plans are to redesign the landing page and add additional task types, to entice more new contributors. Work also continued on refining the reliability and precision of the data collected from the EventLogging extension. In particular, it was migrated to a dedicated database, and the team began collecting data to measure, for example, account creations on desktop and mobile. -->