Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2013/October/summary


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

Major news in October include:
 * A report on the Open Access Media Importer, a tool that transfers multimedia files from scientific publications to Wikimedia Commons;
 * A request for proposals for a new datacenter in the continental US, published by the Operations team;
 * The creation of the Autonym Font, which allows language names to be displayed properly without degrading page loading time.

=== ve>:mw:Special:MyLanguage/VisualEditor/Portal|VisualEditor ===

In October, the VisualEditor team continued to improve the stability and performance of the system, and add new features. The deployed version of the code was updated five times (1.22-wmf20, 1.22-wmf21, 1.22-wmf22, 1.23-wmf1 and 1.23-wmf2). Beyond fixing bugs, the focus of the team's work this month was to make a number of large structural changes to make the system more dependable and extensible, and continue to make some usability improvements. For example, you now need to press the "delete" key twice to delete a template, reference or image; the first time, they only become selected, to avoid accidental deletion of infoboxes and similar content. A new feature, empowering users to switch from editing in VisualEditor to editing wikitext directly without having to save the page, was also implemented.

In October, the Parsoid team continued to refine the parser behavior in edge cases. Performance was improved by increasing the parallelism of API requests and separating page updates from dependency-triggered updates in the job queue. The round-trip testing server performance was improved so that we can now run round-trip tests on 160,000 pages over night. Support for private wikis was also added this month.

We also made additional progress on Rashomon, the revision storage service based on Apache Cassandra. Rashomon is initially going to be used for implementing HTML and metadata storage for Parsoid output. Rashomon was deployed on a test cluster and import/write tests were performed.

=== ee>:mw:New editor engagement|Editor engagement ===

Echo (Notifications) In October, we released Notifications worldwide on about 800 different sites, including most of the remaining Wikipedia wikis and 'sister projects'. Fabrice Florin and Keegan Peterzell managed the community outreach for these final releases, while Benny Situ proceeded with the technical deployments. Community members we've spoken to generally find this tool helpful, across languages and world regions. Notifications are also available on mobile devices, and seem to be adding value on these platforms as well. We now plan a final release of Notifications on the German and Italian editions of Wikipedia at the end of November. To learn more, visit our project hub, read the help page and join the discussion on the talk page.

Flow

Growth

=== mob>:mw:Wikimedia Mobile engineering|Mobile ===

Commons App Many changes were made to the iOS Commons app in October. Users can now select the license among the most common ones, and swipe to delete categories on yet-to-be-uploaded images. A number of visual and interface improvements have been made, including on the settings page and the image details slider, notably for iOS 7 compatibility. Icon consistency has been improved throughout the app. The app now also has better internationalization support (via Autolayout), as well as better landscape and iPad support.

Wikipedia Zero This month, the team released a wide array of features and enhancements. Part of the work focused on reducing accidental data charges, for example by adding interstitials and suppressing UI chrome icons. The latter change caused a 30-minute outage of JavaScript and CSS assets on Wikidata.

We started redirecting ineligible access attempts against subdomains zero.wikipedia.org to a unified warning page; this will reduce residual content in search engine caches, and reduce charges for users accidentally visiting zero.wikipedia.org subdomains while off participating networks.

We added support for partner self-management of configuration for JSON-oriented users; this will be enhanced with stage gating before any actual push to production. Last, we nearly finalized IP address zero-rating lists (with the support of the Operations team), and we've also started working on Wikipedia Zero support for all Wikimedia projects.

Mobile web projects

The mobile web team has been focusing on a variety of new features, as well as running tests and gathering metrics on new and new-ish mobile editors. The team has also been working on general design enhancements to improve the user experience and make the look and feel consistent across all aspects of the mobile experience.

Feature highlights from the past month include:a better AbuseFilter support for mobile editing, early experimentation around integrating VisualEditor with MobileFrontend for tablets, client-side performance enhancements, the ability to 'thank' from the watchlist, and Captcha support for mobile editing. In beta, 'Near this page' is now available, as well as user profiles and 'Keep Going' (a series of calls to action for new editors).