Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2013/February/summary


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

Major news in February include:

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. -->