AskTheDevs2011

Notes for the "Ask the developers" panel at Wikimania 2011

You can also ask questions here in etherpad if you're remote and we'll ask them for you

Notes

10:51 am, people are settling down

Sumana: thank you for coming; Sumana will moderate so that Daniel Kinzler can participate in the panel We have about 40-45 minutes

The community of developers isn't just the half-dozen people standing here, but they're some of the most involved people so hopefully they'll be able to answer your questions

Kinds of questions we'd love to hear are those that would provide really useful answers

Round of introductions

• Timo Tijhof User:Krinkle, MW dev on JS & design (Features team, Unit testing, Code review...)
• Daniel Kinzler User:Duesentrieb, (WM-DE), MW dev
• Andrew Garrett User:Werdna, MW dev, Features team, back-end stuff
• Tim Starling, MW dev for A DECADE
• Brandon Harris User:Jorm, designer @ WMF
• Brooke Vibber User:Brooke Vibber, MW dev, now Lead software architect, working on new parser, visual editor + dev processes (code review, bug review, etc.)
• Roan Kattouw User:Catrope, MW dev (Features team, API, Code review ...)

Q: What is the best process for a feature request? A: (Tim) a well-written bug report, explaining why the feature is needed, how it would make life easier for users, is a good start. Then, nag people A: (Roan) We have people like Sumana & Mark Hershberger who know who can help and can help to make something happen. If your bug is being ignored, the first people you want to be bugging are Mark & Sumana A: (Andrew) Sumana has a talk this morning about how to get (ethically) what you want (professionally) from MediaWiki developers

Sumana talking about efforts to make the requests process easier, notably for shell requests (With Sam Reed)

Q: Editing infoboxes is hard. What are we doing to make editing infoboxes easier? A: (Brooke) One of our big projects this year is the visual editor project (see next talk after the break). In addition to general easier editing, we also want specific tool to edit tables, special kinds of infoboxes (what are the fields available you want to fill out, what do you want to show/expand/collapse, etc.). We're not there yet. Hopefully by Wikimania next year we'll have wonderful pretty shiny things to show A: (Sumana) Visual editing is a big priority for the WMF for the 2011-2012 year

First user facing tests for a visual editor in December 2011, first <?> in June 2012 (check WMF annual plan)

Timo: The new editor will include a way to plug in modules to extend

Q: Wysiwyg & Wikia. When are you planning to start working on the WYSIWYG editor and what would be the deadline (one years' time, maybe longer?) -- and will you be using the experiences of Wikia developers? They already have a WYSIWYG editor but apparently the Foundation decided some time ago against using it. --Tomasz (odder), Wikimedia Poland A: (Brooke) We looked at the Wikia code, but both Wikia and Wikimedia engineers agreed it wasn't ideal. Wikia engineers are actually working with WMF engineers on the new visual editor. Brooke's talk later today will go into more details

Slides from Brooke's talk: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/wiki/File:Parser_and_Editor_-_Haifa_2011.pdf

Q: How to make uploading easier? A: (Erik Môller) Neil Kandalgaonkar & Ian Baker have been working on this. UploadWizard is fully deployed on Commons. Multi-file selection is coming soon, as well as chunk uploading (to upload very large files). Jeroen has also been working on making UploadWizard customizable so that you can customize splash screen, default category; default description, etc. for uploading campaigns like Wiki Loves Monuments (Daniel K.) Problem of categories: you can't meaningfully intersect them like you can with tags. Daniel trying to get a framework for category intersection working on the toolserver (Brooke) Commons: people from so many different language projects. When you have to search for categories, it's difficult if they're in different languages. Daniel K. has been doing some interesting research on that to pull in interwikis to refine that search

Q: Recent papers about how to mine data from Wikipedia, and export data from one Wikipedia to another. Is there a way to connect them? A: (Daniel K.) Wikimedia Germany is planning to develop a central repository for factual data. Infoboxes on individual wikis would then show information from that central data wiki. Learn more at Denny's talk tomorrow: wm2011:Submissions/Towards a Semantic Wikipedia(Tim) We wrote an extension to export data at the first Wikimania, but it never really got anywhere. But the data miners themselves have been making progress on how they can extract information in a way that's useful for them.

Q: Domas: What about continuous integration and time between development and codereview/deployment? I know there are conflicting views about that among the panel. A: (Brooke) Delay before stuff makes it to production. We're in the process of trying to tighten up our release cycle and trying to do better continuous integration (see mw:Continuous integration). Rob Lanphier leading this project. Release cycle: we're in the process of figuring out how to change; More testing => more confidence in the code => shorter release cycle (Roan) Both WMF devs & WMF tech management are aware that this is an important goal (Brooke) We also want to remove bottlenecks. Some things currently require shell access because they are controlled through PHP configuration variables. One of the current projects is refactoring the configuration model to be editable from the wiki. So that for example the right to change a logo would be granted to a sysop or a steward. As well as other common configuration variables that are currently only changable through bugzilla tickets. The wiki administrators are more numerous than the Ops, and Ops don't have a deciding factor in most of these variables, making them configurable from the wiki will lighten the Ops load and satisfy wiki users.

Q: (Vadim / spider) on Wikia Labs, there's a feature that allows any admin to switch on/off some configuration variables (e.g., enable extensions). Is WM/MW planning to do something similar? Like a configuration dashboard for a wiki? (Roan) <repeating what Timo wrote>. Chad Horohoe working on this on and off. Not likely to happen in the short term. (Victor Vasiliev) Started to work on this a few years ago

Q: (Yaron Koren) Subtle changes to the look and feel between versions. Are there any guidelines for extension developers? A: (Brandon) YES, indeed. Style guide

"The style guide that anyone can edit, and Brandon will revert" (just kidding)

• getting down the basics on UI principles
• modifying HTML forms
• RTL should magically work

(Timo) automagic RTL flipping. Timo will talk later today about that during the ResourceLoader talk later today. (Andrew) HTMLForm is a form generation framework he wrote 2 years ago when working on the prefs system. If you're writing code that outputs forms, you should use this, because it has automatic security features, and many more consistency solutions. Soon it will also have automatic compliance with the style guide, etc.

Q: (Alolita Sharma) Brandon, are you going to add accessibility guidelines to the style guide? A: (Brandon) Yes. There are already some accessibility guidelines in the style (eg. for visually impaired people, but not for blind people). But Brandon wants to add more about accessibility in the future.

Andrew Garrett talks about the HTMLForm class in MediaWiki's PHP (see section above)

Q: Haifa resident, Michael (?) Difficult to find stuff, discoverability of tools and gadgets A: Daniel K.: not really a great way. Some stuff developed by core or extensions in Subversion. Some other utilities are written in JavaScript on the wikis. Many others do not even know about the JavaScript gadgets! Lastly there's also tools written on toolserver by volunteers extending MW from the outside.

Gadgets on the wiki are created and maintained by users and administrators of the individual wikis. Most wikis with gadgets have created a documentation/overview page of the gadgets and tools they recommended. The software allows the navigation sidebar to be modified, it's up to the administrators to put the links to pages they create in there. Q: How do you find the relevant people to ask? A: Ask an administrator, best place to ask is the Help desk: w:en:Wikipedia:Help_desk w:en:Wikipedia:Tools

(Timo) Sharing gadgets that are managed by separate wikis. New with ResourceLoader2: Global Gadgets. Automatic updates, l18n, etc. People will be able to use them on all wikis. (Daniel K.) Gadgets are one of the ways to create tools, but not the only one.

Sumana asks people to make some noise if the session was useful to the audience. Tim and Andrew didn't speak too much. Tim: mostly working on the back-end, so not surprised he didn't get too many questions. Tim's the invisible plumber.

Sumana: Doing a recap of the session. Please also come to the other talks after the break & continue to talk to us at Wikimania and post-Wikimania through the various communication channels (lists, IRC, etc.)

11:44 - Session ended