Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2013/July/summary


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

Major news in July include:

VisualEditor
In July we enabled the new what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing interface on several Wikipedias as the default editor, first for logged-in editors and then for anonymous users as well. This resulted in a great deal of feedback and, the team responded with several improvements to fix urgent  issues. In addition, the team deployed several user interface improvements, most notably to the references insertion dialog. Currently, users are making approximately 800 edits per hour using the VisualEditor on Wikimedia sites.

There are continuing discussions with different language communities about the positioning of the VisualEditor beta in the user interface and more appropriate notices indicating its beta status. The Wikimedia Foundation is using the beta period to collect and analyze data and real user behavior, and to improve the editing experience continuously. Our eventual objective is for VisualEditor to be the default editor for all Wikipedia users, capable of letting them edit the majority of content without needing to use the wikitext editor.

Please help translate it.

Mobile
This month, the mobile web team released new contributory navigation to all Wikimedia mobile sites, including the existing upload and watchlist star features, as well as an edit button. This means that editing (in the form of section-level markup editing) is now enabled on all mobile Wikimedia sites for logged-in users.

Additional highlights
Git migration complete: Now that we've helped move the pywikipediabot codebase from our old Subversion repository to our new Git repository, we have been able to switch svn.wikimedia.org to read-only mode. This ends a migration that began in 2012, motivated by a desire to enable more participation by volunteers, and to get improvements to users faster.