Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2013/September/summary/en


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

Major news in September include:
 * A recap on how our engineers worked with volunteers to improve language tools at Wikimania;
 * A call for wikis willing to experiment with using HTTPS for all users;
 * A recap on how our new image scaling system was implemented by a volunteer developer;
 * A call for technical projects that could for instance be completed as part of our mentorship programs;
 * Design experiments to show the community behind Wikipedia articles on mobile devices;
 * Another release of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle, with an explanation of how it's put together;
 * The completion of the sixth round of the Outreach Program for Women;
 * A recap of the launch of Notifications to more language versions of Wikipedia, and their impact.

VisualEditor
In September, the VisualEditor team continued their work to improve this visual tool to edit wiki pages, and enabled it on more wikis. The focus in the team's work this month was to continue to improve the stability and performance of the system, fix a number of bugs uncovered by the community, and make some usability improvements.

Improvements were also made to Parsoid, the program that converts wikitext to annotated HTML, and vice-versa. Bugs were fixed, performance statistics were added, and the code base was cleaned up. We planned out an implementation strategy for language variant support, and started researching and experimenting with HTML storage options, which is required for a number of projects in our roadmap.

Editor engagement
In September, we released Notifications on more Wikipedias, such as the Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Notifications allow users to stay informed of changes and discussion that affect them. Community response has been very positive so far, across languages and regions. For each release, we reached out to community members weeks in advance, inviting them to translate and discuss the tool with their peers. As a result, we have now formed productive relationships with volunteer groups in each project, and are very grateful for their generous support.

This month, we continued architecture work on Flow, the new discussion system, to integrate it with watchlists, recent changes, mentions and notifications. We also started experimenting with VisualEditor-enabled posting. We began a sprint to create a new interface for the board and discussions that will work across desktop and mobile platforms. We are aiming to implement this design next month, in preparation for several rounds of new user and experienced user feedback before the first release.

In September, the Growth team (formerly known as Editor Engagement Experiments, or E3), primarily worked on the onboarding new Wikipedians project. In particular, this included the creation and deployment of two new guided tours to teach any new user how to make their first edit, using wikitext or VisualEditor. The guided tours feature was also enabled to the following language editions of Wikipedia: Catalan, Hebrew, Hungarian, Malay, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian. Along with the renaming, the team held its third quarterly review (minutes are available) and published its 2013–2014 product goals. Last, in accordance with the 2013-14 goals, the Growth team began research into modeling newcomer retention on Wikipedia, anonymous editor acquisition, and article creation improvement.

Mobile
This month, the Wikipedia Zero team made a lot of improvement to the Zero platform, which provides free access to Wikipedia on select mobile carriers. They released enhanced URL rewriting and debug flag-only Edge Side Includes (ESI) banner inclusion to production, supported the Ops implementation of dynamic MCC/MNC carrier tagging, identified web access log and user agent anomalies, further analyzed and recommended load balancer IP address-related changes in support of HTTPS requirements, and tested JavaScript-based Wikipedia Zero user interface enhancements.

The Mobile web team mostly focused on Tutorial A/B testing, Notifications overlay in Beta, and adding campaign tracking to MobileFrontend.