Discovery/Status updates/Next

This is the weekly update for the week starting 2019-05-20

Highlights

 * Most of the team attended a three-day offsite in Prague last week, and Deb, Erik, Stas, and Trey also attended the Wikimedia Hackathon.

Search

 * At the Hackathon, we hosted a session on "Advanced search syntax for newbies" —and we had a few in-depth discussions with volunteers about search, our APIs, etc., and talked more in-depth about Arabic and Slovak.
 * As a result of our discussion, Trey opened a ticket to investigate the effects of searching without diacritics in Slovak.
 * Trey completed a change to Arabic-language completion suggester (upper left search box) to make Eastern Arabic Numerals and Western Arabic Numerals equivalent. It will still take a little while for the change to be seen on-wiki.
 * Stas made a set of preliminary patches to convert CirrusSearch extension to extension.json registration (merged) and final conversion patch still in review

Wikidata Query Service

 * At the Hackathon, with the help of Krinkle, the bug with URL shortener widget being hard to use was fixed
 * WDQS bug with label service clauses nested in subqueries being processed incorrectly was fixed

Analysis

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Portal

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Events and News

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Other Noteworthy Stuff

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Did you know?
Naming Things is Hard, Volume 187: The Phab ticket mentioned above to equate different numeral systems for Arabic-language wikis uses the names Eastern Arabic Numerals (١٢٣...) and Western Arabic Numerals (123…). In English, the numerals we usually use (123...) are often called “Arabic numerals” because they came to Europe from Arabic sources. In Arabic, the Eastern Arabic Numerals are called “Indian numerals” because they came from Indian sources. In English, “Indian numerals” refer to the numerals used in India (१२३...) but they are just called “Devanagari numerals” in Hindi, for example. Some have tried to make the subtle distinction in English that “arabic numerals” are the numerals that came from Arabic sources (123...), while “Arabic numerals” are the ones that are used by Arabic speakers (١٢٣...).

It’s also interesting to look at a table of the various related numeral systems and see the similarities and “false friends”—note that your fonts may vary: Devanagari 7 looks like a 6 (“७”), Arabic 6 looks like a 7 (“٦”), Gujarati 5 looks like a 4 (“૫”), Bengali 4 looks like an 8 (“৪”), Gurmukhi 1 looks like a 9 (“੧”), etc. But any of those systems are MMMDCCXXIV times better than Roman numerals! 

Development

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 * Looking to get involved? See tasks marked as Easy or volunteer needed