Wikimedia Features engineering
From MediaWiki.org
The Wikimedia Foundation Features Engineering team is responsible for developing new features for MediaWiki. The group is managed by Terry Chay and is part of the larger Wikimedia Engineering team.
Contents
Current projects[edit | edit source]
| Project | Description | Project lead & team | Status | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Editor Retention: Editing Tools | |||||
| VisualEditor |
[edit]
Creating a visual editor for MediaWiki, other platforms and the Web at large |
[edit]
James Forrester, Trevor Parscal, Roan Kattouw, Rob Moen, Alex Monk, Ed Sanders, Moriel Schottlender, Timo Tijhof • David Chan (Language Engineering), Rummana Yasmeen (Quality Assurance) • Kaity Hammerstein (Design) |
Status: (2014-05-08 (MW 1.24wmf4))
VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.24wmf4 branch deployment on Thursday 8 May. In the week since 1.24wmf3, the team made some minor feature improvements and fixed a number of bugs.
The new citation system was enabled on the English Wikipedia for feedback ahead of rolling it out for more wikis. In templates, transclusions and citations, parameters are now labelled "fields" to avoid a technical term that was confusing for users. The language search widget was improved to show search results clearly when finding results in languages other than the one you typed in. The mobile alpha build of VisualEditor added support for citation editing using that interface, too. Some improvements were made, particularly in animating the toolbar, which should make the transition between read mode and edit mode should have fewer visual shifts (bug 64751). An issue that meant editing a citation would duplicate it rather than update it was fixed and released early to avoid disruption (bug 64717), as was a fix for the location of the new language Beta Feature's pages. Some template layouts which were previously getting broken due to using CSS hacks, such as the English Wikipedia's football kit template, should now appear correctly; this change should also slightly improve performance (bug 52499). The notices shown to the user on saving have now been merged into those in the wikitext editor, for consistency (bug 52871). The styling of the formatting drop-down has been synchronised with the "Typography refresh" changes to Vector (bug 63540). A bug that meant that VisualEditor would not navigate to the section if you entered a section-edit VE link manually rather than from the read page was fixed (bug 52566). The citation tool was adding an unnecessary stray line break at the end of the wikitext, which has been fixed (bug 63128). A UI issue that meant that a drop-down menu could remain open inside a dialog when you switched to other panes in Firefox has been fixed (bug 64334). The keyboard shortcut dialog was wrongly listing the shortcuts for changing formats on Macs; these have been corrected (bug 64771). The browser tests were significantly improved to more simply locate the editing surface, to avoid logging in where possible, and to re-use the browser test templates for many of the existing tests. The documentation system moved further towards automatically publishing documentation for all VisualEditor-related tools, starting with OOjs whose documentation is now published. You can monitor the live results of the automated browser tests (triggered every twelve hours) on the server. A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.24/wmf4 changelog, and all Bugzilla tickets closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list. |
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| Parsoid |
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A bidirectional wikitext parser and runtime. Converts back and forth between wikitext and HTML/XML DOM with RDFa. |
[edit]
James Forrester, Gabriel Wicke, C.Scott Ananian, Arlo Breault, Marc Ordinas i Llopis, Subramanya Sastry |
Status: (2014-04-monthly)
In April, the Parsoid team continued to fix bugs and tweak code. Two areas in particular received a lot of attention: template encapsulation and link handling. We ironed out a whole bunch of edge case handling in template encapsulation code and its interaction with fostered content from tables (caused by misnested tags in tables). We also fixed many unhandled scenarios and edge cases parsing and serializing links. In addition to bug fixes, we also improved the performance of the parsing pipeline; some pages like Barack Obama should now parse 30% faster than before. We continued migrating our debugging and tracing code to use our new logger. April also saw additional progress providing support for visual editing of transclusion parameters; this should land on master soon.
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| Editor Engagement | |||||
| Flow |
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Initial ideas for the user "home page" feed system, including modules. |
[edit]
Terry Chay, Andrew Garrett, Benny Situ, Brandon Harris, Erik Bernhardson, Maryana Pinchuk, Matthias Mullie, Oliver Keyes, S Page |
Status: (2014-04-monthly)
This month, the Flow team focused on back-end changes to improve moderation and history viewing, as well as implementing new front-end JavaScript templating to make Flow more responsive and easier to add new features onto. On the user-facing features side, we released the ability to close and summarize topics. This will allow users to manage active discussions and end ones that have come to a resolution. Flow is now the default discussion experience for many Beta Features discussions on mediawiki.org, and the team is accepting requests to enable Flow on more pages on that wiki for the purpose of testing complex multi-user discussion interactions.
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| Growth | |||||
| Growth |
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To create sustainable growth in the community of editors on Wikimedia projects. |
[edit]
Terry Chay (EPM), Matt Flaschen, Aaron Halfaker, Kaity Hammerstein, Rob Moen, Sam Smith, Moiz Syed, Steven Walling |
Status: (2014-04-monthly)
In April, Growth switched gears to focus on a new experimental area: anonymous editor acquisition. The team prepared its first two experimental interface changes, aimed at asking anonymous editors to register accounts (expected to be launched in early May). The team also will be conducting basic research into the role anonymous editors play in Wikipedia − more at Research:Anonymous phenomena and Research:Anonymous editor acquisition.
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| Support (Fundraising, Education…) | |||||
| Wikipedia Education Program |
[edit]
A MediaWiki extension to support the Wikipedia Education Program |
[edit]
Terry Chay, Andrew Russell Green, Sage Ross, Jeroen De Dauw (original author) |
Status: (2014-04-monthly)
This month we deployed several bug fixes, including disabling the malfunctioning and little-used student profiles feature and setting a sensible default end date for new courses. Thanks to volunteer Tony Thomas, the extension-related preferences were moved into the Appearance tab of Preferences. Progress toward several other improvements was made in April: Sage Ross began implementing an API to generate lists of enrolled student editors from one or more courses, and the Facebook Open Academy students continued their work on new notification features, and also embarked on need-finding research for an improved course activity feed.
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Future and backburner projects[edit | edit source]
| Project | Description | Project lead & team | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Article Creation Workflow |
[edit]
A feature to improve the article creation workflow for new editors. |
[edit]
Fabrice Florin, Benny Situ, Ryan Kaldari, Ian Baker, Brandon Harris, Oliver Keyes, Howie Fung, Dario Taraborelli, Terry Chay |
Status: (2013-03-monthly)
ciao
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| GlobalProfile |
[edit]
A set of features to help users provide information about themselves and associate by interests. |
[edit]
Alolita Sharma, Brandon Harris |
Status: (2011-09-30)
This project was on hold in September, because of a lack of development resources.
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| Community prototyping |
[edit]
Features development to support community research and community change experiments. |
[edit]
Alolita Sharma, Katie Horn |
Status: (2012-12-monthly)
In December, active development has begun on the user metrics API project in E3. The effort is threefold: to standardize user metrics [1], to build infrastructure to efficiently compute metrics for a large set of users [2,3], and finally to expose those results via an API. The technical portion of this project is written in Python and Flask, and the assigned resources are Dario Taraborelli and Ryan Faulkner. Development and documentation efforts will be continuing through January.
[2] https://github.com/rfaulkner/E3_analysis [3] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=analytics/E3Analysis.git;a=summary |
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| LiquidThreads 3.0 |
[edit]
A rewrite of the LiquidThreads extension to improve its back-end and UI |
[edit]
James Forrester, Andrew Garrett, Brandon Harris, |
Status: (2012-07-14)
"Further deployments of LiquidThreads are indefinitely on hold because we don't have the resources to support it." – Andrew Garrett (2012-03-19) there is no further development expected.
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| Etherpad lite integration | Create a project page for this activity (how-to) | |||
| MoodBar |
[edit]
A feature to encourage new users to provide feedback. |
[edit]
Alolita Sharma, Brandon Harris, Howie Fung, Ian Baker), Rob Moen, Benny Situ |
Status: (2014-04-monthly)
LEMBANG the culinary uniqueness,
history of colonialism are revealed. |
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| Mobile/Athena | Create a project page for this activity (how-to) | |||
| ResourceLoader |
[edit]
Delivery system in MediaWiki for the optimized loading and managing of modules for JavaScript, CSS and localization. |
[edit]
James Forrester, Terry Chay, Roan Kattouw, Timo Tijhof, Trevor Parscal |
Status: (2012-12-24)
Per Wikimedia Engineering/2012-13 Goals the Wikimedia Foundation is not working on ResourceLoader (including Gadgets 2.0) until after the current fiscal year ends, in mid-2013.
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| FlaggedRevs maintenance |
[edit]
A feature to allow changes made by logged-out and new users to be reviewed before they appear as the primary version of an article. |
[edit]
James Forrester, Matthias Mullie, Aaron Schulz |
Status: (2012-11-monthly)
No update this month.
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| MicroDesign |
[edit]
Low hanging fruit |
[edit]
Howie Fung, Oliver Keyes, Munaf Assaf, Vibha Bamba, Rob Moen, Benny Situ |
Status: (2013-10-15)
salut
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| UploadWizard |
[edit]
A feature that provides an easier way of uploading files to Wikimedia Commons, the media library associated with Wikipedia. |
[edit]
Rob Lanphier (engineering director)Fabrice Florin (product manager), Mark Holmquist, Gergő Tisza, Gilles Dubuc, Aaron Arcos, Pau Giner |
Status: (2013-01-monthly)
No update this month.
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Recently completed projects[edit | edit source]
| Project | Description | Project lead & team | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feedback Dashboard |
[edit]
A dashboard allowing experienced users to answer comments and concerns coming from MoodBar |
[edit]
Fabrice Florin, Brandon Harris, Ian Baker, Rob Moen, Benny Situ, Alolita Sharma |
Status: (2012-01-31)
We implemented a leaderboard of recent top responders on the feedback dashboard. New editor feedback is now added to a dedicated log. When feedback is marked as helpful, that fact is displayed on the feedback dashboard itself. Other than a few other smaller changes, we're now moving the project into maintenance mode to focus on article creation workflow and New Page Triage.
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| WikiLove |
[edit]
An extension to encourage expressions of appreciation between users. |
[edit]
Alolita Sharma, Ryan Kaldari, Jan Paul Posma, Roan Kattouw, Brandon Harris |
Status: (2011-08-01)
The code was completed, and the feature deployed to the English Wikipedia at the end of June. The Product research team published a basic analysis of its usage, and stories of its evolving usage and impact. This project is now considered to be completed.
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| Page Curation |
[edit]
Interface for reviewing new pages |
[edit]
Fabrice Florin, Ryan Kaldari, Benny Situ, Brandon Harris, Vibha Bamba, Howie Fung, Terry Chay |
Status: (2012-12-monthly)
Page Curation is now in 'maintenance mode', following its release on the English Wikipedia in September 2012. There was no significant development activity on this project this month. Oliver Keyes has completed a project to look at various ways of localizing Page Curation to any and all wikis that want it: it is currently being reviewed by Howie Fung to assess its feasibility.
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[edit]
Create infastructure for providing guided tours, as well as some initial tours |
[edit]
Terry Chay, Matt Flaschen, Steven Walling |
Status: (2014-02-12)
Matt Flaschen and Sam Smith met on GuidedTour refactoring, and decided next on steps, including testing out the proposed domain-specific language, reviewing existing tours, and refactoring the user state code.
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| 2012 Wikimedia fundraiser |
[edit]
Engineering support and development for the 2012 fundraiser of the Wikimedia Foundation |
[edit]
Katie Horn, Peter Gehres, Adam Wight, Matthew Walker, Jeff Green |
Status: (2013-03-monthly)
In March, we wrapped up our 2012/13 non-English international fundraising efforts, making approximately 5 million USD over the course of the month. Originally, we had planned to run the non-English international fundraiser continuously until June, but were forced to accelerate our plans due to some potential instability at the beginning of April with one of our crucial payment gateways. At the very end of March, we started publishing aggregate public fundraising data to samarium.wikimedia.org.
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| Notifications |
[edit]
Project hub for the Notifications infrastructure and UI (code-name: Echo) |
[edit]
Fabrice Florin, Terry Chay, Howie Fung, Ryan Kaldari, Benny Situ, Luke Welling, Vibha Bamba, Brandon Harris, Oliver Keyes, James Forrester, Andrew Garrett, Matthias Mullie |
Status: (2014-04-monthly)
ContentTranslation was the team's main effort this month. Source text segmentation was further improved and stabilized. Other developed features:
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| Article feedback |
[edit]
A new tool to engage readers to improve articles on Wikipedia. |
[edit]
Fabrice Florin, Matthias Mullie, Pau Giner, Oliver Keyes, Dario Taraborelli, Howie Fung, Erik Möller |
Status: (2013-10-monthly)
There was no activity on Article Feedback in October, as we await the results of the French pilot to determine our next steps for this project.
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| 2013 Wikimedia fundraiser |
[edit]
Engineering support and development for the 2013 fundraiser of the Wikimedia Foundation |
[edit]
Katie Horn, Peter Gehres, Adam Wight, Matthew Walker, Jeff Green |
Status: (2013-10-monthly)
The fundraising team has been steadily ramping up to the big English fundraiser, and so the fundraising tech team has been transitioning into their usual year-end fundraising monitoring and support role. At the end of October, we went in to a feature freeze for CentralNotice, and have been concentrating on bugfixes with the intent of increasing stability on the payments cluster and in the rest of the donation pipeline. We have also started planning for the international fundraising campaigns targeted for early 2014.
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Team meetings[edit | edit source]
See Category:Features team notes.
