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 the editor and roll it out to additional wikis. The deployed version of the code was updated four times (1.22-wmf16, 1.22-wmf17, 1.22-wmf18 and 1.22-wmf19). 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.

Editor engagement
Flow: This month, we continued back-end work on the Flow first release – integrating with the recent changes table (to ensure that users will be able to monitor Flow boards via the watchlist and Special:Recentchanges, in the same way they monitor wiki pages), mentions and notifications, and an early experiment with VisualEditor-enabled posting. We also kicked off a sprint to create a new visual design treatment 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 onwiki release.

Mobile
Wikipedia Zero: This month, the team 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.