Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2014/January/summary


 * This content is prepared for inclusion in the January 2014 Wikimedia Foundation report. It is a shorter and simpler version of the full Wikimedia engineering report for January 2014 that does not assume specialized technical knowledge.

Major news in January include:
 * the transition of our search engines on Wikimedia sites to ElasticSearch;
 * a presentation of how the Tech newsletter works, including a historical perspective;
 * an invitation to comment on the 2-year vision of the multimedia engineering team;
 * a request for comments on whether the MP4 video format should be supported on Wikimedia sites.

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

In January, the VisualEditor team continued their work on improving the stability and performance of the system, and added some new features. Most of the team's focus was on major new features and fixing bugs. You can now edit some page settings like whether to display a table of contents or whether to show section edit labels, set the size of a media file manually, see a keyboard shortcuts help screen, and create and edit media galleries using a very basic stand-in editor whilst the final form is being designed. Work also continued on a dialog for quickly adding "citation" references based on templates, more media and page settings, setting content language and right-to-left flags, and equation editing. The deployed version of the code was updated four times (1.23-wmf9, 1.23-wmf10, 1.23-wmf11 and 1.23-wmf12).

In January, the the deployment page for a summary.

Part of the team has been mentoring two Outreach Program for Women (OPW) interns. Others are mentoring a group of students in a Facebook Open Academy project to build a Cassandra storage back-end for the Parsoid round-trip test server.

We also participated in the architecture summit, where our RFCs about embracing a service architecture, PHP bindings for services, a general-purpose storage service based on our Rashomon revision store, and a public content API based on this were well received.

Following up on this, we started Debian packaging for Parsoid, which will soon make the installation of Parsoid as easy as.

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

Flow

This month, the Core Features team worked on integrating MediaWiki tools for dealing with spam and vandalism (AbuseFilter and Spam Blacklist) into Flow. We also launched an updated visual design and UI, based on the first round of experienced user feedback last month, as well as ongoing user testing with new users. Lastly, we created a script to disable Flow and return Flow discussions back into unstructured wikitext, so that we can begin trialing Flow in production in an extremely safe-to-fail manner. We are set to deploy our first trial on February 3, 2014 to two WikiProjects that volunteered on the English Wikipedia.

Growth

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

Wikimedia Apps

Wikimedia Apps/Commons

Wikipedia Zero

During the last month, the team added forward compatibility to Varnish scripting for Wikipedia Zero, and resubmitted a Varnish script patch to support HTTPS for select Wikipedia Zero partners under the new IP address-based zero-rating scheme, after analysis with the Operations team. We also continued proof of concept work on an HTML5 web app for Firefox OS, fixed bugs in the legacy Firefox OS Wikipedia app, and prepared alpha functionality for the integration of Wikipedia Zero with the rebooted Android Wikipedia app. The team also continued work toward a generic JSON configuration extension for use by extensions like ZeroRatedMobileAcces, submitted code for the core MediaWiki API, submitted a ResourceLoader (RL) enhancement and cooperated on alternatives for performance enhancement of RL on non-WMF Redis-backed ResourceLoaders, and submitted a small UX enhancement for the Android rebooted Wikipedia app. January 2014 was also a month of planning: the partners engineering team met for two days with the business development team to plan for partners and Wikipedia Zero-related work at large. The partners engineering team also applied itself to two days of product planning for the Partner Portal. Finally, the team conducted normal tech facilitation to enable partner launches and align approaches with current and future partners.

Mobile web projects

We have been directing much of our attention over the last month at delivering a tablet-friendly MobileFrontend experience. We've added support for tables of contents in MobileFrontend for tablets, made some design improvements for tablets, and have worked towards making VisualEditor work with MobileFrontend for tablets (in alpha for now). We've hit some roadblocks and are hoping to collaborate more with the VE team in the near future to keep moving forward on the project. Following up from last month, we have also released our overlay UI improvements as well as an improved inline diff view for MobileFrontend into stable. Finally, we have also been working to expand our coverage of browser tests to facilitate quality assurance and help prevent the introduction of bugs and regressions.