Earlier this month, about thirty MediaWiki developers and interested technologists gathered in New Orleans to learn and to work on Wikimedia’s technical infrastructure.  We made broad progress on the infrastructure of innovation at Wikimedia (notes).  Specifically:

Tim Starling and DJ Bauch driving towards greater media file storage system independence and robustness

• We are now much closer to officially opening the doors to Wikimedia Labs and giving far more people the ability to contribute to MediaWiki without having to set up and maintain their own development environments at home.  Wikimedia Labs will provide hosted, virtualized test and development sandboxes for new and experienced programmers and systems administrators.  Many developers got beta Labs accounts, we tested at a larger scale, and we fixed several bugs.
• Developers agreed to create a file backend abstraction layer to enable large-scale MediaWiki installations to use one of several storage systems to contain big collections of big media files.  (Wikimedia plans on using Swift, which is open source.) Microsoft’s Ben Lobaugh and SAIC’s DJ Bauch collaborated towards improving MediaWiki’s performance on Microsoft technologies as well.  Developers made architectural decisions, refactored some existing code, and improved documentation and tests for the SwiftMedia extension to MediaWiki.
• 

  Chad Horohoe teaching developers unit testing

  We now have a continuous integration server up and running.  This will continuously run tests checking on the latest new features and bugfixes that developers write, resulting in fewer bugs and faster development. Developers will need to write tests to reap the benefits, so Chad Horohoe taught a test-writing workshop.

• Max Semenik finished and demonstrated the first version of his API Query Sandbox.  This allows software developers anywhere to experiment with ways to automatically get data from Wikipedia or other sites that run MediaWiki, thus enabling wider and deeper reuse of Wikimedia content.
• Operations folks continued the Puppetization of our infrastructure: they completely reworked Varnish management in Puppet, and worked on Puppet configurations for SwiftMedia testing. This configuration management work will ensure that ops can move faster and more confidently in building and maintaining Wikimedia infrastructure. And Canonical’s Mark Mims and Kapil Thangavelu worked on improving methods for Wikimedia developers “to spin up stacks of services within the labs environment” using Juju (more details).
• 

  Brion Vibber leading developers into the "glorious Git future"

  Since the engineering department is planning a switch from Subversion to Git in the next few months, Brion taught nearly everyone there how Git works (slides, audio), and how we’ll be using Git in the future. This change in our source code repository and workflow will, we hope, enable more speed and flexibility in development, both for WMF developers and community contributors.
• We prioritized and addressed several open requests for the operations team and defect reports about the latest version of MediaWiki, 1.18, which had just been deployed across WMF sites.
• Roan found and fixed an issue that was spouting symbolic link errors into our Apache logs, so now it’ll be easier for us to see more dangerous errors in those logs.
• Google Summer of Code students Salvatore Ingala and Kevin Brown made progress on integrating their summers’ work into MediaWiki as used and deployed by others; Salvatore and WMF developer Roan Kattouw have a plan for getting his user scripts improvements reviewed and deployed, so they can benefit Wikimedia readers and editors.
• A volunteer came in on Friday night knowing nothing about developing for MediaWiki, and by the end of the weekend had a working development environment on her laptop and had some ideas about how to contribute.
• We had substantive conversations about the summer internship program and about third-party collaboration that will affect how we work in the future.

Launch Pad New Orleans, a great venue

Thanks to Ryan Lane and Dana Isokawa for organizing the event with me, and thanks to Launch Pad New Orleans for providing the venue!

Our next developers’ event is a hackathon in Mumbai November 18-20 concentrating on internationalization, localization, and mobile work.  To find out about other upcoming Wikimedia technical events, check the meetings wiki page, and follow @MediaWikiMeet on Identi.ca or Twitter.

Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation

Since a few months, the “Moodbar” function has invited new users on the English Wikipedia to indicate how they feel about their first editing experiences, and why. Today, the Feedback Dashboard was launched, an experimental live stream displaying these comments. Take a look to find out what makes new editors Happy, Sad, or Confused!

Follow this series of brief news on enhancing Wikipedia participation via RSS, on Tumblr, or on Wikipedia.

Probably the most repeated words around the Wikimedia movement are Jimmy Wales’ “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” The Wikipedia community are the ones creating that world, and the ubiquity of mobile internet is what may actually enable it. With mobile internet users expected to surpass desktop users by 2014, mobile is fast becoming the primary medium by which people around the world can access knowledge. In the Global South particularly, many new mobile internet users are part of a generation whose first and only access to the internet is on mobile. This presents both an opportunity and a challenge to Wikipedia – how do we let these users know that the sum of all knowledge exists in their pocket, and how do we make it free? On the desktop, many readers discovered Wikipedia through search, but on mobile, sessions and queries originate differently. With this in mind, we need the help of partners – namely mobile operators and handset manufacturers – to help ensure the distribution of knowledge.  This is why we’re setting out with a global mobile partnership program.

We are looking for operator partners, particularly in the Global South, to join us in this mission. We want to work with them to help promote the availability of Wikipedia on phones — and, not just on smartphones, but across the range of data and feature phone users. This would include links through bookmarks, decks, and portals as well as marketing messages driving awareness towards the accessibility of free knowledge on mobile. Additionally, we are currently exploring ways to develop feature phone access to Wikipedia through SMS and USSD, and operator partnerships will be core to that initiative as well.

At the center of this whole strategy will be the launch of Wikipedia Zero – a lightweight, text-only version of our mobile site optimized for slower connections. The “zero” part means zero-rated, or rather zero cost to the user. Operator partners would “zero-rate” the custom site, meaning the user would not get charged data fees (nor be required to have a data plan) to access it. This will be a great asset to many mobile users in the Global South, who, although they may have an internet-ready phone, are deterred by data fees. This, to us, is in pursuit of truly enabling the “free” in “freely share in the sum of all knowledge.”

We are working to enlist new global partners now, particularly for Wikipedia Zero.  Mobile partnerships have long been seen as an important priority, but we haven’t had enough manpower to execute them on a fully global scale until now.  I joined the foundation three months ago as part of the global development mobile team (lead by Kul Wadhwa) with enlisting and managing these partnerships as my priority. Kul and I have begun to talk with new partners already, and we hope to announce some soon.  Given that we have a lot of ground to cover, we have to be systematic, so we are focusing first on India and East Asia in Q4 of this year, followed by the Middle East and Africa in Q1 2012, and Latin America in Q2 2012. This coincides in part with the global development programs including India Catalyst, Arabic Catalyst, and Brazil Catalyst.  Of course, we expect there will be some deviations from this sequence.

We’re also working very tightly with the mobile dev/product teams and community to ensure all the innovations and enhancements (including the forthcoming Android release) they are bringing are accessible throughout the world through these partnerships. We look forward to sharing the progress,  learnings, and discoveries here.

Amit Kapoor
Senior Manager, Mobile Partnerships

Search and Wikipedia

Search is central to the Wikipedia experience – both as a way of reaching the website as well as discovering content on Wikipedia.  Several questions on the Readers Survey 2011 were aimed at understanding the search experiences across nations, languages, and devices. Here are some of the key insights about search from the study:

Contents

• a. About half of our readers specifically look for Wikipedia in search engine results
• b. Search is the most desired improvement to Wikipedia
• c. Readers speaking Portuguese and Arabic are much more desiring of better search
• d. Search on mobile platforms does not perform as well as desktops

(more…)

Wikipedia Participation Challenge

2011-10-26: Edited to correct description of the winning algorithm

The first article has been submitted in Google’s challenge to translate articles for the Setswana Wikipedia:

http://tn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nko (“Nose”)

Around 130 participants have been trained to attend the competition in Botswana. The grand prize, sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation, is an all-expenses paid trip to attend Wikimania 2012 in Washington D.C.!

Asaf Bartov, Head of Global South Relationships

Follow this series of brief news on enhancing Wikipedia participation via RSS, on Tumblr, or on Wikipedia.

Over the last month, we’ve been hard at work building a Wikipedia Android app for our users and partners that prefer apps over the mobile web. It’s built with the PhoneGap framework and makes use of HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript to power all of its features. Many thanks to our partners at Nitobi for getting us here.

Yesterday was the last day of our first ever Arabic Wikipedia Convening which was which was held in Doha and kindly hosted by QCRI. For 3 days, Arabic Wikipedians, academics and technical specialists, shared their thoughts on improving the quality of articles, increasing the number of contributors and the different models of engaging Wikipedia in education.

This is probably the first time Arabic Wikipedians, who are scattered across the Middle East, get a change to meet in person. It was our pleasure meeting each of Ciphers, Abanima, Ahmad, OsamaK as well as Rami Tarawneh, who is among the early founders of Arabic Wikipedia. On the first day and after brief introductions, Rami told us the story behind how Arabic Wikipedia started; what were the challenges that faced the community during the early days and how Arabic Wikipedia policies changed along with time. For the rest of the day and for the following couple of days, the discussions revolved mainly around three main topics: Machine translations, education and outreach. We listened to the lessons learned from a machine translation project that was carried out in 2009 on Arabic Wikipedia and we had a presentation by Bala Jeyaraman, who gave us a detailed and impressive talk about a similar project that was finished last March on Tamil Wikipedia. Naren Datha, from WikiBhasha team, also gave a small talk about how their tool works. In addition to machine translation, Frank Schulenburg gave a brief introduction to how our global education program operates in different countries, then we listened to a success story by the coordinator of WikiArabi project. Our last day included discussions around possible online and offline outreach strategies that can leverage both the content and the number of contributors of Arabic Wikipedia, we were also introduced to Arabic Web Day initiative.

The discussion helped the community communicate on a personal level, and present its culture and aesthetic to enthusiasts who are considering using Wikipedia as a platform for enhancing Arabic web content, and to the QCRI team who are currently helping our Global Development department render a number of solid projects on the ground across MENA.

The global development team will leave the 80°F/27°C Doha in a couple of hours, heading to Amman for a one day visit to The University of Jordan, before we go to Egypt, for meetings with professors at Cairo University, and with the Arabic Wikipedia Community.

A year ago, Arabic Wikipedia was nearly 120k articles, with a community striving to start an action on the ground in different places, by applying a chapter model in different locations across the region. Our MENA catalyst project is now bringing new possibilities, growing a more solid vision, with feasible funding and a work-in-progress action plan.

We shall keep you posted with our next steps and research findings, meanwhile, wish us luck in our MENA endeavors, a region which is hot, in many different ways.

Salaam!
Moushira Elamrawy
Global Development Team