Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2014/September/summary


 * This content is prepared for inclusion in the September 2014 Wikimedia Foundation report. It is a shorter version of the full Wikimedia engineering report for September 2014.

Mobile Apps
In September, the Mobile Apps Team released a new version of the iOS app containing the Nearby feature which shows you articles about things that are near your location, and a references panel that pops up whenever you tap a reference. The team also released an iOS 8 compatibility build to market, and spent time performing code quality improvements and refactoring on both the iOS and Android apps.

Mobile Web
This month the Mobile Web team focused on the first prototype of WikiGrok, a new contribution feature that asks users who are reading Wikipedia articles to help add Wikidata content that is missing about the article subject. Over the course of the month, we built and user-tested the first experimental interface for allowing users to input Wikidata: a simple binary question mode that provides the user with a suggested occupation on biographies that are missing this information in Wikidata but contain a possible occupation in the Wikipedia article. In this early test phase, we are storing the replies in a separate database, not pushing to Wikidata. We plan to add suggestions for more Wikidata fields and test this version against a slightly more complex tagging interface in beta in October.

Flow
In September, the Flow team enabled new test pages on the French and Hebrew Wikipedia. The French test is for the Forum des Nouveaux, a help space for new contributors (similar to the Teahouse on the English Wikipedia). The Forum des Nouveaux hosts reached out to the Flow team after Wikimania, excited to try out the new discussions system. The Hebrew Wikipedia test is helping the team diagnose problems for Right-to-Left languages, and general internationalization issues.

The team also refined the new Echo notifications functionality, with lots of feedback from contributors on mediawiki.org and the English Wikipedia. New topic notifications are now bundled in Echo, and we fixed several bugs related to the behavior of the Alerts and Messages tabs, and getting excess mention notifications.

VisualEditor
The team working on VisualEditor expanded browser support, improved some features, and fixed nearly 60 bugs and tickets.

Users of Internet Explorer 10, who we were previously preventing from using VisualEditor due to some major bugs, will now be able to use VisualEditor; this follows on from Internet Explorer 11 support last month. When editing a template with a required field, VisualEditor now warns you to avoid leaving it blank, and you can now create auto-numbered links using VisualEditor.

Improvements and updates were made to a number of interface messages as part of our work with translators to improve the software for all users, based on feedback from users and user testing. We made progress on table structure editing and auto-filled citations, both of which will be coming soon. The deployed version of the code was updated five times in the regular release cycle.

SUL finalization
In September, the team wrapped up the feature development for SUL finalisation. The steward end of the rename request form is outstanding and will be finished in October. In October, the team is planning to proceed into deployment and testing of the features.

Phabricator migration
phabricator.wikimedia.org was set up with tickets imported from the previous Labs instance (public registration will be enabled once all remaining tasks have been sorted out). Restricting access to Phabricator tasks based on project membership was implemented. Inbound email was configured so Phabricator can let you interact with external (non-Phabricator) users via email. Furthermore, we improved the Phabricator documentation and help and showed the very basics of Phabricator in a video. A new Phabricator test instance was also set up at https://phab-01.wmflabs.org/.

Metrics and dashboards standardization
We completed the definitions, documentation and requirements for a new set of metrics to be implemented in Vital Signs. We completed a first draft of a page view definition, which is currently being discussed. We supported the mobile team with baseline traffic reports for Apps and Mobile Web.

Content API
September saw a lot of activity on the RESTBase storage and API service. A new 'pagecontent' composite bucket type using revisioned blob buckets was introduced. This uses the by-now fairly rich table storage backend to provide functionality similar to MediaWiki's revision table, and supports any number of revisioned types of content (like HTML, wikitext, JSON metadata) associated with each revision. Work on secondary index updates continued at full steam, and is now close to being merged.