Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2013/September/summary


 * 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 [https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/10/https-by-default-beta-program/ using HTTPS for all users]; A recap on how our [https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/12/vipsscaler-implementation-wikimedia-sites/ new image scaling system] was implemented by a volunteer developer; A [https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/16/call-for-wikimedia-tech-projects-needing-contributors/ call for technical projects] that could for instance be completed as part of our mentorship programs; Design experiments to [https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/25/humanizing-wikipedia-editing-mobile-experiments/ show the community behind Wikipedia articles] on mobile devices; Another release of the [https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/26/get-introduced-to-internationalization-engineering-through-the-mediawiki-language-extension-bundle/ MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle], with an explanation of how it's put together; The completion of the sixth round of the [https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/30/foss-outreach-program-for-women-success-and-new-round/ Outreach Program for Women]; A recap of the [https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/01/notifications-launch-on-more-wikipedias/ launch of Notifications] to more language versions of Wikipedia, and their impact.

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

Parsoid: We fixed a few bugs reported in production, added performance stats to our RT-testing framework (and discovered a couple bugs and fixed them as a result) and did some long-standing cleanup work in our codebase. September also saw the all-staff meeting at the WMF offices in San Francisco which gave us the opportunity to work in person and discuss some proposals. We planned out an implementation strategy for language variant support, and started researching and experimenting with HTML storage options which is required for a number of projects in our roadmap.

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

Echo (Notifications): In September, we released Notifications on more Wikipedias, such as the Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Fabrice Florin and Keegan Peterzell managed community relations for these new releases, and are reaching out to more projects. Our next deployments will take place every other Tuesday. Developer Benny Situ was responsible for these deployments and fixed a number of bugs, with the help of Erik Benhardson and Matthias Mullie. Community response has been very positive so far, across languages and regions. For each release, we reached out to community members weeks in advance, inviting them to translate and discuss the tool with their peers. As a result, we have now formed productive relationships with volunteer groups in each project, and are very grateful for their generous support.

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.

Growth: In September, the Growth team (formerly known as Editor Engagement Experiments, or E3), primarily worked on the onboarding new Wikipedians project. In particular, this included the creation and deployment of two new guided tours to teach any new user how to make their first edit, using wikitext or VisualEditor. The guided tours extension was also deployed to the following language editions of Wikipedia: Catalan, Hebrew, Hungarian, Malay, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian.

Along with the renaming, the team held its third Quarterly Review (minutes are available), published its 2013–2014 product goals, and shared a new job opening for two additional software engineers.

In accordance with our 2013-14 goals, the Growth team began research into modeling newcomer retention on Wikipedia, anonymous editor acquisition, and article creation improvement.

=== mob>:mw:Wikimedia Mobile engineering</>|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.

Mobile web projects: In September, we mostly focused on Tutorial A/B testing, Notifications overlay in Beta, and adding campaign tracking to MobileFrontend.