Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2013/June/summary


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

Major news in June include:


 * The preparation for the activation of VisualEditor to most Wikipedia sites, and its debut on the English Wikipedia;
 * News around Language engineering, including the preparation and activation of the Universal Language Selectors on many wikis;
 * An explanation of how bugs are discovered and fixed.
 * A retrospective on the Amsterdam hackathon.

VisualEditor
In June, the VisualEditor team completed the major new features that we prioritised over the past few months, in preparation for making VisualEditor available to most Wikipedia users in July. We have built an editor that is capable of letting users edit the majority of content without needing to use wikitext — text support, as well as adding and editing inclusions of references, templates, categories and media items. The deployed alpha of VisualEditor was updated four times as part of the transition to weekly deployments (1.22-wmf6, 1.22-wmf7, 1.22-wmf8 and 1.22-wmf9), with several mid-deployment releases as the code was developed to patch urgent issues. Part of this involved running an A/B test for new user accounts on the English Wikipedia, with half of the users getting opt-in to VisualEditor ahead of the wider release. Generally, there were a number of user interface improvements, and fixing a number of bugs uncovered by the community.

Early this month, we deployed Parsoid to the new cluster and started to track all edits and template / image updates from all Wikipedia sites, which is close to the full load we'll see when VE is deployed to all of them. Our earlier optimization work paid off as the Parsoid cluster and the associated Varnish caches are handling the load very well. The extra load we put on the API cluster is low enough to not cause a problem. As expected, the VisualEditor deployment to the English Wikipedia hardly showed up in the load graphs.

Despite being very short-staffed this month (only two full-time developers), the absence of performance issues left us enough time for a lot more polishing before the VisualEditor release on July 1. As a result, the release went very well with clean diffs on almost all pages.

While more work is left to do, it is now clear that we have fundamentally achieved our goal of a clean translation between WikiText and HTML + RDFa. This does not only enable visual HTML editing, but also makes Wikipedia's content easily accessible in a standardized format. It also opens up new opportunities for MediaWiki's core architecture, which we'll pursue this fiscal year.

Editor engagement
In June, we released more features and bug fixes for Notifications on the English Wikipedia and mediawiki.org. Ryan Kaldari added a confirmation button for the 'Thanks feature', and updated notification fly-outs to show diff links for talk page and interactive notifications, based on a design by Vibha Bamba. Benny Situ continued development of HTML Email notifications and deployed a variety of feature updates. Erik Bernhardson developed a special 'Suppressed' content feature, while Matthias Mullie developed a range of new metrics dashboards. Dario Taraborelli and Aaron Halfaker ran a week-long A/B test of new user activity; results show that new users who received Echo notifications made more edits than those who did not, but their edits were reverted slightly more often. Fabrice Florin led the planning process for Notifications, as outlined in the 2013 roadmap, and hosted a day-long roundtable discussion to improve editor engagement features in collaboration with Wikipedia users (see Echo demo and Q&A video on YouTube). Later this summer, we plan to start deploying Notifications on more wiki projects, starting with Meta and the French Wikipedia. To learn more, visit the project portal, read the FAQ page and join the discussion on the talk page.

In June, we deployed final features and bug fixes for the Article Feedback Tool (AFT5) on the English, French and German Wikipedias. Matthias Mullie released an opt-in feature to enable or disable feedback on a page, based on designs by Pau Giner and specifications by Fabrice Florin. In collaboration with Dario Taraborelli, Matthias also developed an updated set of metrics dashboards showing how the new moderation tools are being used: for example, about half of moderated feedback is marked as 'no action needed', while about a tenth is marked as 'useful' (these results are generally consistent across different languages). The team also supported a wider deployment of AFT5 on over 40,000 articles on the French Wikipedia, as well as a poll by the German community, which elected not to adopt the tool. Now that feature development has ended for this project, we plan to make AFT5 available to other wiki projects in coming weeks, as outlined in the release plan. For tips on how to use Article feedback, visit the testing page, and let us know what you think on this talk page.

In June, the Editor Engagement Experiments (E3) team continued work on its experiments related to onboarding new Wikipedians, and launched several new extensions to Wikimedia projects.

First, the new Campaigns extension was added to all wikis. This analytics tool helps identify internal or external sources of new registrations, by adding a "campaign" name to the signup page URL. This month, E3 began running campaigns to learn about how many anonymous editors sign up on the top 10 Wikipedias, as well as how many sign up via the invitation to "Join Wikipedia" on the login page (see the list of active campaigns and analysis). Another piece of analytics infrastructure by the team is the new CoreEvents extension, which houses logging of MediaWiki core activity, like preference updates and page saves across all projects.

For the Getting Started project, the team conducted usability testing (see results and documentation) of new designs. E3 also refactored and refined the guided tours extension in June, including adding usability enhancements like new interface animations, support for community tours, and bug fixing. The team also planned and began work on an experiment to deliver guided tours to all first-time editors.

The team also assisted with A/B testing and research for VisualEditor before its July 1 launch date, assisting with experimental design, EventLogging instrumentation, and other work. After the VisualEditor launch, E3 started a week-long micro-survey of newly-registered users on English Wikipedia, to give us a first systematic look at the gender diversity of those creating accounts.

Mobile
This month, the team launched Wikipedia Zero with Dialog in Sri Lanka, patched logic and user interface bugs, enhanced the configuration editor, expanded logging and debugging for identification of anomalous access, further decoupled ZeroRatedMobileAccess from MobileFrontend, and proposed ESI- and JavaScript-based software re-architecture.

This month, we focused on improving education around uploads, including an interactive Commons tutorial and first-time user copyright and scope check. We also released our "Nearby" feature to production, allowing users to find articles near them that are in need of images, take photos and upload them via mobile.

In beta, we started working on an update to our site and article navigation, including design tweaks to the left navigation menu and a new in-article contributory navigation that combines article actions (edit, upload, and watch) with a talk page link. We also experimented with Echo integration and successfully got Notifications up and running on the English Wikipedia mobile site. We hope to push all of this work to production next month.