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 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 hundred improvements to fix urgent  issues. In addition, the team deployed 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 appropriate notices indicating its beta status. The Wikimedia Foundation is using the beta period to collect and analyze bug reports, feature enhancements, and data and to observe actual 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.

Editor engagement
Notifications: In July we released our final features for Notifications on the English Wikipedia, mediawiki.org and meta.wikipedia.org. Benny Situ completed development of HTML email notifications, as well as improved notifications, based on designs by Vibha Bamba. Fabrice Florin managed the release of these final features, and prepared a release plan to deploy Notifications on more Wikimedia projects, starting with French and Polish Wikipedias in August. Dario Taraborelli and Matthias Mullie updated our new metrics dashboards, while Aaron Halfaker completed his report on our "A/B test" of new user activity. An A/B test gives randomly sampled users different experiences and measures the differences in how they respond. To learn more, visit the project portal, read the FAQ page and join the discussion on the talk page.

Article Feedback Tool: In July, we delivered a few last features and bug fixes for the Article Feedback Tool (AFT5) on the English and French Wikipedias. Matthias Mullie released the auto-archive feature, as well as this list of articles with feedback enabled on English Wikipedia and on French Wikipedia. At the request of the French Wikipedia community, Mullie also developed new feedback notifications to let users know when feedback is marked as useful for a page they watch (or for a comment they posted). The team plans to make the AFT5 tool available to other wiki projects interested in testing this tool, provided that no new development is required to support their needs, as outlined in the release plan.

Mobile
Wikipedia Zero and Aircel: The first Wikipedia Zero launch in India gives 60 million mobile phone subscribers free-of-charge access to Wikipedia on their mobile phones. Aircel customers now have free access to Wikipedia in English, as well as to the 19 Indic language Wikipedias.

The Wikipedia Zero engineering team also completed our first automated testing testing work, started implementing the Wikipedia Zero software re-architecture, and fixed problems. During July, we planned for the upcoming year in Wikipedia Zero. Our engineers are first focusing on automating testing of our infrastructure and re-architecting our systems, and will then  focus on making Wikipedia Zero easier to use for both the telecom  carriers and for the people reading articles via Zero, so as to support  the continued growth of the program.

Editing on tablets and phones: 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. The users of our "beta" channel will soon see mobile notifications restyling, as well as guiders for first-time editors and uploaders. ( More about the beta channel and how you can opt in.)

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.