Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2013/December/summary/en


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

Major news in December include:


 * a retrospective on Language Engineering events, including the language summit in Pune, India;
 * the launch of a draft feature on the English Wikipedia, to provide a gentler start for Wikipedia articles.

VisualEditor
In December, the VisualEditor team worked to continue the improvements to the stability and performance of this interface that allows users to edit wiki pages visually rather than using wiki markup. Most of the team's focus was on major new features and fixing bugs. There is now basic support for rich copy-and-paste from external sources into VisualEditor, and a basic tool to insert characters not otherwise available on users' keyboards. Work also continued on a dialog for quickly adding references using citation templates.

The Parsoid team, who is developing the parsing program that converts wiki markup to annotated HTML (and back) behind the scenes of VisualEditor, continued their relentless work to eliminate bugs and incompatibilities. Problems arose during the migration to node 0.10, the platform that runs Parsoid. The team rolled back the upgrade, investigated and fixed the issue. Testing has also been improved so that similar issues are caught in the future. Last, the team created several requests for comment concerning architectural components of the MediaWiki platform.

Editor engagement
Flow:

Growth:

Mobile
During the last month, the Wikipedia Zero team continued to make it easier to configure partnerships with telecommunications carriers that offer access to Wikipedia at no data cost to their mobile subscribers. They also implemented a global landing page redirector for mobile Wikipedia website access. Last, the team started working on an HTML5 webapp proof of concept as an option for rebooting the Firefox OS app.

Mobile web projects: