This post is available in 2 languages:

Español  • English

English

Flow is a planned improvement to discussion and collaboration in the MediaWiki software. The project is currently in the design phase and the Wikimedia Foundation is actively seeking feedback and suggestions about how to make the best possible product for you, our community of contributors.

There are many reasons for us to revamp our discussion and collaboration system, but for now we’re going to focus on three primary use cases:

• Users expect and deserve a modern and intuitive discussion interface: Talk pages—as a discussion technology—are antiquated and user-hostile. Experienced editors lose a lot of valuable time dealing with people who can’t figure out how to reply to messages or who need assistance with things like signing their posts.
• Users are surprised by the cultural norms of the community: Many things about the culture that has grown up around talk pages (such as “talkback” templates or being able to change other people’s comments) are confusing or inefficient.
• We believe that a modern user-to-user discussion system will improve the projects: Better methods for collaboration will improve collaboration, which will help good editors be more productive.

We have set up three “portals” where people can go to get more information and to leave feedback. At these portals, you will find links to detailed user tests, use cases and other kinds of research, as well as visions about what Flow can become.

The portals are:

• On Meta Wiki
• On the English Wikipedia
• On MediaWiki.org

In order to help you get a feel for how Flow might work, we’ve built an interactive prototype. Please note that this is only a demo and is not reflective of the final product, which may look and behave entirely different. Nothing will be saved on the prototype and you can’t really break it so have fun!

Please read more about the Flow prototype, what it can do, what is planned and known issues with it at one of these locations:

• On Meta Wiki
• On the English Wikipedia
• On MediaWiki.org

How can I help?

I’m glad you asked.

We are actively seeking feedback of all kinds from our user community. This is not restricted to our editors — readers are welcome to comment, too! There are many, many use cases and scenarios that we want to account for and we need to know what those are. We’re interested in hearing about anything that is important to you. Your concerns, your enthusiasm, your ideas for features.

It is very important for us that you be involved in helping to design this bold step, so please go to the portal of your choice and get involved in the conversation.

Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
(more…)

In the recently concluded development sprint, the Wikimedia Language Engineering team made a new release of the Mediawiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB), fixed bugs related to the Page Translation feature in Translate UX (TUX) and began work on design changes for the Universal Language Selector (ULS). The team also hosted a bug triage session that was well attended.

Input Settings from the ULS Language Settings Panel

Universal Language Selector Design Changes

Development and design changes have been initiated for the Universal Language Selector. The option to position the extension’s main panel in the sidebar was added and this feature is now being polished. Changes to the layout of the Language Settings dialog have been initiated, and usability tests for the proposed design changes were also done.

Using Wikimedia’s default GeoIP locator, ULS can now infer the user’s location and suggest language preferences.

MLEB Release

The April release for the Mediawiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB) was announced by Amir Aharoni. Starting with this release, MLEB is no longer compatible with MediaWiki 1.19. MLEB 2013.04 and its later versions can only be used with MediaWiki version 1.20.4 or above.

The notable changes include update to CLDR v.23, bug fixes to further stabilize TUX and design changes for the Universal Language Selector. An experimental feature to present a restricted translation environment for new translators was developed for TUX. This is not enabled by default. Basic support for the XLIFF file format has also been added to Translate.

Up Next

During the next development cycle, the team will complete the changes to the Universal Language Selector design and test the features. The team is also participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and the Outreach Program for Women (OPW), and will be working on completing the tasks in the next stages of the programs. More information about the other open projects for internationalization can be found in the master list.

The next Language Engineering office hour will be held on 8 May 2013 at 17:00 UTC (10:00 PDT) in #wikimedia-office on Freenode IRC.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

Notifications inform you of new activity that affects you on Wikipedia — and let you take quick action.

We’re happy to announce this week’s release of Notifications on the English Wikipedia.

Notifications inform users about new activity that affects them on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, such as talk page messages, page reviews or edit reverts. It also lets them take quick action to respond to these events.

This new notifications system (formerly called Echo) was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation’s editor engagement team, to encourage people to participate more actively on MediaWiki sites (see earlier post). It provides a modern, unified user experience that replaces or augments existing notification systems — and gives significantly more control to users.

Here’s a quick overview of this new engagement tool.

How do notifications work?

When someone takes an action that relates to you on a Wikipedia or MediaWiki site, a red badge shows up next to your user name, with the number of unread notifications. Clicking on that badge displays a flyout listing the most recent notifications (see screenshot). You can then click on the notification of your choice to learn more and take action.

This first release features a variety of notifications:

• Talk page messages: when a message is left on your user talk page;
• Mentions: when your user name is mentioned on a talk page;
• Page reviews: when a page you created is reviewed;
• Page links: when a page you created is linked;
• Edit reverts: when your edits are undone or rolled back;
• Thanks: when someone thanks you for your edit (coming soon);
• User rights: when your user rights change;
• Welcome: when you create a new account;
• Getting started: easy ways for new users to start editing.

These notifications were created to support the needs of both new and experienced users. For example, new users who create an account receive special Welcome and Getting started notifications to guide them in their critical first steps on Wikipedia. A special Thanks notification lets experienced users give positive feedback to new users who made constructive edits, to encourage them to contribute more. And power users will benefit from the User rights notifications (which are sent when your user rights are changed) and Mentions (sent when someone mentions your name) — two features that were found useful by active editors we consulted for this project.

To learn more about notifications, visit this FAQ page. To customize your notifications, check your preferences on the English Wikipedia. Once you’ve received your first notifications, please take this quick survey and join the discussion on this talk page.

Next steps

During the next few weeks, we plan to fix bugs and tweak Notifications based on community feedback. We are working on a few more features for our next release, such as alternative displays of talk page messages, more visually appealing HTML emails and new ways to dismiss notifications you don’t want. Over time, we would also like to develop more notifications for both new and power users. If you have any suggestions for improving this tool, please let us know :).

Once Notifications have been improved and fully tested on the English Wikipedia, we plan to make this product available in more languages on other Wikipedias and sister projects. In parallel, we will start providing tools and guidelines to allow notifications to be extended by developers.

Thanks

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank some of the people who made this product possible. They include Ryan Kaldari, Benny Situ, Luke Welling, Vibha Bamba, Oliver Keyes, Brandon Harris, Steven Walling, Matthew Flaschen, Dario Taraborelli, Howie Fung, Terry Chay and Erik Moeller, to name a few of our colleagues. We’d also like to thank all the community members who have guided our development and everyone else who pitched in to help us bring this tool to life!

We look forward to continuing these collaborations in coming months and to helping engage millions of Wikimedia users to share free knowledge more productively.

Fabrice Florin, Product Manager
Wikimedia Foundation’s Editor Engagement Team

Quim Gil, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Technical Contributor Coordinator, recently wrote about internship programs that the Wikimedia tech community participates in. These programs provide a valuable platform for a diverse group of contributors and nurture deeper collaboration across open source communities. He also shared details about participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreach Program for Women (OPW) for Wikimedia projects.

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team welcomes students to participate in the projects listed for Google Summer of Code and those listed for the Outreach Program for Women. The projects listed aim to resolve shortcomings or enhance various language tools that the team maintains; they include:

• improving the jQuery.ime input method library;
• building browser extensions for stand-alone operation of input methods;
• creating a dashboard for language coverage information;
• converting legacy wiki content into translatable entries.

Providing support for nearly 300 languages is no easy feat. There is constant demand for enhancements of tools, and this demand is only expected to grow. The team constantly encourages volunteers including students, language community members and others, to work with them on internationalization challenges. This includes various components like Translate UX (TUX) and Project Milkshake, in which participants can:

• increase coverage of input methods and font library;
• improve language rules for the internationalization library;
• test and prepare validation tools;
• test and enhance the translation tool;
• write documents.

They can also contribute by building extensions like SpellingApi and LocalisationUpdate, or even creating usable multi-lingual CAPTCHAs.

Open projects are also added to the master list maintained for all mentorship programs. After ascertaining the availability of mentors, participants can collaborate on a project of interest. If no mentors are listed, students can ask the team on  #mediawiki-i18n (Freenode IRC) or write to me (runa at wikimedia dot org) for more information.

We look forward to all the exciting proposals for our projects for Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women. Student applications close on May 3rd and May 1st respectively.  Time is short — apply now!

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

Login screen on the Commons app for Android.

Love taking photos on your smartphone? Now you don’t need to wait to get home to upload your high quality educational photos to Wikimedia Commons, the free image repository used by Wikipedia and many other projects.

The official Wikimedia Commons app for iOS and Android allows you to quickly and easily upload your photos to Commons. You can also upload multiple files and add categories (Android only so far) and share your uploads through your favorite image sharing sites. Your contributions to Commons can help illustrate the world’s largest encyclopedia and make knowledge come to life for millions of readers around the globe.

The “my uploads” view on the Commons app for iOS.

In the future, we hope to add more features and make it easier to browse and discover all the great content Commons has to offer. We also look forward to being able to run more campaigns like Wiki Loves Monuments, encouraging expert Commons users and people new to Wikimedia projects alike to contribute to high-need content areas.

As always, we need your help and input to make these apps better. Take the apps for a test drive and let us know if you encounter bugs, or if you have great ideas for features we should add in the future.

And if you don’t have an iOS or Android device, don’t feel left out! Uploads to Commons for a wider selection of phones and browsers are supported on the mobile version of all Wikimedia projects.

Maryana Pinchuk, Associate Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

OPW’s robocats happy to work on their first contributions.

These days we are welcoming a new wave of candidates for Google Summer of Code and FOSS Outreach Program for Women (OPW) internships. Interested? Stop reading and hurry up! Or keep reading to learn why these free software mentorship programs are doing so much good.

Since 2006, Wikimedia has mentored 32 GSoC students. From those, only one (3.13%) was a woman (accepted in 2011), and she didn’t stick around. This number is even lower than the general percentage of women accepted in GSoC 2012 (8.3%) although perhaps it is in line with the composition of our own tech community (data missing). Can we do better?

We think we can. This is why we joined OPW last November. It was the first round open to organizations other than the GNOME Foundation, founders of the initiative. After 5 rounds of OPW, GNOME women are not an exotic exception anymore. It is too soon to evaluate results in the Wikimedia tech community, but the six interns we got during the 5th round delivered their projects in the areas of software development, internationalization, UX design, quality assurance and product management, and so far they are sticking around. We also learned some lessons that we are applying to the next internship programs. As we speak, several women are applying for Wikimedia in the current GSoC edition. A promising trend!

But there is more positive change. Paid internships are like subcutaneous injections for a free software community: in just one shot you get a full time contributor dedicated to help you within a defined scope and amount of time, with the incentive of a stipend ($5,000). The lives of the injected contributors change in the new environment. They learn and they adapt to new situations. They acquire a valuable experience that will help them becoming experienced volunteers and better professionals. At least this is the goal. But the life of the community receiving the injection also should change for good with the arrival of these full time contributors. This is also the goal. So what has improved so far in our tech community?

Scaling up complex projects

Mentorship programs require a good alignment of project ideas supported by the community and by available mentors. Thanks to the efforts of many, we have now a list of possible projects, including a selection of featured project ideas ready to start. The list includes proposals coming from different Wikimedia projects, Wikimedia Foundation-driven initiatives and MediaWiki features for third parties.

These project ideas link to Bugzilla reports in order to keep track of the technical discussion, involving the candidates, the mentors and whoever else wants to join. Full transparency! We also provide basic guidelines for candidates willing to propose their own projects.

All this has been done for the current GSoC and OPW round, but is potentially also useful in the context of other initiatives like OpenHatch, SocialCoding4Good, or Wikimedia’s Individual Engagement Grants. If you want to propose a technical project that could keep a person or team busy for 3–4 months, now you know where to start.

Improving our Welcome carpet

We are still learning how to attract newcomers.

Each mentorship program brings a wave of newcomers willing to get up to speed as soon as possible. We are betting on the “the medium is the message” approach, giving as much importance to the proposals as to the participation and collaboration of the candidate in our regular community channels. But all this requires better landing surfaces in mediawiki.org.

This pressure and the repetition of similar questions by newcomers have encouraged the creation or promotion of references such as Where to start, How to contribute and Annoying little bugs. We keep working on an easier introduction to our community through the fresh and work-in-progress Starter kit, a team of volunteer Greeters and other initiatives discussed at the new Project:New contributors. And you know what? Several former interns are involved!

Diversity enters our agenda

We believe that “a healthy mix of demographic and cultural characteristics everywhere throughout the movement is key to Wikimedia’s success.” Diversity is good for creativity and sustainability, which are primary goals of any free software community. Yet diversity in these communities tends to be quite limited, and our case is not an exception.

We have mentioned the problem of male predominance, but there are other biases and types of discrimination that we would like to help leveling. What about working on other barriers caused by abilities, age, language, or cultural, ethnic, or economic background? Just like we are doing with OPW, we can start with programs for specific audiences that we can sync with mainstream activities like GSoC, increasing their diversity. Ideas are welcome.

Quim Gil, Technical Contributor Coordinator (IT Communications Manager)

Among the Wikimedia projects, Wikipedia has the highest number of individual language projects — 285. The Language Engineering team focuses on building language tools and assets that improve the ability to interact with any article on Wikipedia. Language assets like fonts and input methods are integrated into MediaWiki and its extensions, and our wikis are localized using collaborative translation with translation tools to ensure a decent user experience.

Collaboration in Language Projects and the Language Maven Program

Language Engineering community meetup during GNUnify 2013 at Pune, India

Language tools are constantly evolving to ensure support for our users. It is a slow if not impossible task to scale our small engineering team to support hundreds of languages without close collaboration with our language communities, which have many capable and technically-savvy editors and administrators.

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team has compiled a proposal for the formation of a special interest group named the Language Mavens. With members from various language communities from around the globe, we hope to learn from our users, seek advice, guidance and validation on language features. We hope that the Language Mavens will pull in participation from community members and experts who care about language support features and their adoption in the wikis they read and contribute to.

Getting started with the Maven Program

The Language Maven pilot was rolled out earlier this month on April 13 with a meeting that was well attended. Program scope and activities were discussed. One of the recommendations was to ensure that documents and handy checklists be prepared for easy reference to the language tools available to each language community. Activities that the Mavens can participate in include usability tests, bug triages, testing days and even blogging to share valuable insights about the internationalization tools in their favorite language wiki projects.

The Mavens program is aimed to focus on collecting feedback and providing support for language tools and assets being deployed by the team. This will help develop a long-term user group that will be instrumental in helping other language community members learn more about the latest language features and tools being rolled out. The Maven team expects to meet once every month and communicate through the mediawiki-i18n mailing list. To participate as a Language Maven, please fill up this form to let us know about your interest or ping me (runa at wikimedia dot org) for any questions!

Help us make your language experience better — join the Mavens!

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

An account creation and login process that is simple and pleasurable to use is a must-have for engaging more contributors to Wikimedia projects. On just Wikipedia’s English-language version, more than 3,000 people sign up for an account on an average day. These interfaces are often the first time a new editor interacts with the site, beyond consuming content.

We’re happy to announce that, starting today, users of all Wikimedia projects will be able to try a new look for our account creation and login. For about a week, we’re asking all Wikimedia volunteer editors to give the update a try and help us spot any nagging bugs or errors in translation. We’ll then enable the new forms as the default on all our wikis.

The new account creation (mockup)

Help test the new forms

If you’re a current or prospective member of a Wikimedia community, we need your help. Please give the new interfaces a try, report bugs, or leave comments for us on your wiki’s preferred noticeboard.

We’re providing this week-long testing period–instead of simply rolling out the new interface with less advance notice–to get help making sure our localizations are correct and the interfaces will be bug free for the 800 or so wiki communities we support.

• See the new account creation form
• See the new login form

Both links above are to our largest and most active community, English Wikipedia, but if you’re a contributor to any other project, you can try out the new forms by simply appending &useNew=1 to either URL on your favorite wiki. You can also find more detailed, step-by-step testing instructions if you’re willing to go a little deeper with testing the forms.

How we got here

The new login (mockup)

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Editor Engagement Experiments team has been optimizing these forms, using weekly controlled tests to measure the impact of our new signup form and iterate on our ideas. (See our original announcement.)

Overall, the results of these experiments were encouraging. Using English Wikipedia as our proving ground, our most successful experiment gained around 800 additional signups over a two week period. The relative increase in conversion was 4 percent, from 28 percent to 32 percent of users successfully creating an account after visiting the signup page. The total number of new users gained will change based on seasonal trends. We also decreased the number of errors which held up users after they submitted the form by 14 percent.

This interface redesign marks the first time MediaWiki core (the platform shared by all our projects) is using the new form styles that we have experimented with in account creation, our new onboarding experience for Wikipedia editors, and in other features. The patterns we’re introducing via the new account creation and login, codenamed “Agora” by the Wikimedia Foundation design team, will now be able to be reused in a more standardized way by MediaWiki developers.

The redesigns we’re introducing to login and account creation are hardly radical. Simple use of typography, color and vertically-aligned form fields are not what could be called bold innovation in design. Nonetheless, we’re extremely happy to be releasing an experience that will make signing up and logging in less of a burden for the many contributors to Wikimedia communities, and thus enable them to create great, free educational resources.

Steven Walling,
Associate Product Manager

This post is available in 6 languages:

English • Deutsch  • Français • Español • Svenska • На русском языке

English

The VisualEditor is now on 15 language Wikipedias

Editors on fifteen Wikipedias – Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Swedish – can now get an idea of what the VisualEditor looks like in the “real world”, so they can give us feedback about how well it integrates with their current editing processes. We also want to get their thoughts on what aspects of development we should be prioritizing in the coming months.

The editor is still at an early stage and is missing significant functions, which we will address in the coming months. Because of this, we are mostly looking for feedback from experienced editors; the alpha VisualEditor is insufficient to really give new volunteers a proper experience of editing. We don’t want to promise an easier editing experience to new editors before it is ready.

As we develop improvements, we will push them live every two weeks to the wikis, allowing you to give us feedback as we go, and tell us what you want us to work on next.

How can I try it out?
The VisualEditor is now available to all logged-in accounts as a new preference, switched off by default, on the fifteen Wikipedias listed above. If you go to your “Preferences” screen and click into the “Editing” section, it will have an option labelled “Enable VisualEditor.”

Once enabled, for each article you can edit, you will get a second editor tab labelled “VisualEditor” next to the “Edit” tab. If you click this, after a little pause you will enter the VisualEditor. From here, you can play around, edit and save real articles and get an idea of what it will be like when complete.

At this early stage in our development, we recommend that after saving any edits, you check whether they broke anything. All edits made with the VisualEditor will show up in articles’ history tabs with a “VisualEditor” tag next to them, so you can track what is happening.

How can I help?
It’s vital that our software is available in the native language of as many of our volunteers as possible. If you speak one of these languages – or any of the other 280 languages that we support, like Welsh, Punjabi, Urdu or Scots Gaelic - please consider looking at the translations and helping us improve them!

We would love your feedback on what we have done so far — whether it’s a problem you discovered, an aspect that you find confusing, the areas you think we should work on next, or anything else, please do let us know.

James Forrester, Product Manager, VisualEditor and Parsoid

(more…)