ULS Deployment Prep

The Language Engineering team is working on refining several important features of the Universal Language Selector. This extension will provide an umbrella of services including selection of UI language, input tools and fonts. ULS will superannuate Narayam and Webfonts to provide a unified solution for configuring language settings for MediaWiki. During this development sprint, critical bugs related to positioning of ULS’ activation area and its “cog icon” label were fixed. These affected multiple MediaWiki skins and interlanguage wiki pages. The improved version will be deployed over several phases. More information about the upcoming deployment can be found in the deployment schedule.

ULS Testing

ULS features are to be verified based on the test scenarios identified. These scenarios, based on the Cucumber framework, can be adapted for automatic as well as manual testing. The scenarios cover core features of ULS: triggers, language settings panel, display settings, font selection and input tools selection. These have been written in a simple “Given-When-Then” format and provide the steps for easy walkthroughs. The testing instance hosts all the latest updates that are being made. The team is looking for volunteers who can help us with testing and reporting bugs. Let us know if you would like to join and help (write to runa at wikimedia dot org or ping us on #mediawiki-i18n) .

What’s Next

The team will be completing all feature changes and testing them by end of the current sprint to be ready for kicking-off the roll-out of phase 1 of ULS. Roll-out will be coordinated by Niklas Laxström with administrators of all scheduled wikis. The team will also be hosting a bug triage session on May 29, 2013 on freenode.net IRC on the #mediawiki-i18n channel.

ULS is Live on Commons!

Meanwhile, based on consensus reached by the Commons community, Universal Language Selector and the Translate extensions have been enabled on Commons.

For more details about the Language Engineering projects and ways to participate, please write to me [runa at wikimedia dot org] or ping us on #mediawiki-i18n.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

MediaWiki is being used in all kinds of environments, from internal and private corporate wikis to other Free Culture wikis. That is, of course, the great benefit behind Free and Open Source Software; the software can be modified and used in new situations the original authors didn’t necessarily expect.

Because the Wikimedia Foundation wants the MediaWiki project to be as healthy as possible, and also address the needs of as many different constituencies as possible, the Foundation invests a lot of time and effort into ensuring the entire MediaWiki community feels empowered, not just those that happen to have an @wikimedia.org email address. You can see this effort most notably from the Engineering Community Team and the efforts especially around volunteer coordination and outreach.

To encourage further outside investment in MediaWiki, we are opening a Request for Proposals (RFP) (PDF) for the release management of MediaWiki. The long-term goal of this effort is to jump-start these activities as community-supported functions, thus encouraging widespread leadership in the future of MediaWiki.

The process for this RFP is a community-involved one. There is a three-week period for organizations to prepare and submit their proposals, after which the community can comment on and ask questions of the proposers. The Wikimedia Foundation will take all of this feedback into account when making the final decision for who will lead the release management of MediaWiki for the next year.

With this, the future of MediaWiki looks bright, and we’re excited to see where this will lead us!

Greg Grossmeier, Release Manager
Rob Lanphier, Director of Platform Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation

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

Spanish

Ayúdanos a diseñar nuestra siguiente generación de sistema de discución

Flow es una mejora prevista para la discución y la colaboración en el software MediaWiki. El proyecto se encuentra actualmente en fase de diseño y la Fundación Wikimedia está buscando activamente comentarios y sugerencias sobre cómo hacer el mejor producto posible para ustedes, nuestra comunidad de colaboradores.

Tenemos muchas razones para modernizar nuestro sistema de discusión y colaboración, pero por ahora nos vamos a centrar en tres casos de uso importantes:

• Los usuarios esperan y merecen una interfaz de discusión moderna e intuitiva: Las páginas de discución -y la tecnología de discución- son anticuadas y hostiles al usuario. Editores experimentados pierden mucho tiempo valioso entendiéndose con gente que no encuentra la manera de responder a los mensajes o que necesitan ayuda con cosas como firmar sus mensajes.
• Los usuarios se sorprenden por las normas culturales de la comunidad: Muchos aspectos de la cultura que se ha desarrollado en torno a las páginas de discusión (como la plantilla “Respuesta” o ser capaz de cambiar los comentarios de otras personas) son confusas o ineficientes.
• Creemos que un sistema de discusión moderno de usuario a usuario mejorará los proyectos: Mejores métodos de colaboración permitirán una mejor colaboración, lo que ayudará a los buenos editores a ser más productivos.

Hemos establecido tres “portales” donde la gente puede obtener más información y dejar sus comentarios. En estos portales, encontrarás enlaces a pruebas de usuario detalladas, casos de uso, y otros tipos de investigación, así como ideas acerca de lo que puede llegar a ser de Flow.

Los portales son:

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

Con el fin de ayudarle a tener una idea de cómo podría funcionar Flow, hemos desarrollado un prototipo interactivo. Tenga en cuenta que es sólo una versión demo y no refleja el producto final, que puede verse y comportarse enteramente diferente. Nada se guardará en el prototipo y tampoco se puede romper, así que divierte!

Por favor lea más sobre el prototipo de Flow, lo que puede hacer, lo que está planeado, y los problemas conocidos en una de estas ubicaciones:

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

¿Cómo puedo ayudar?

Me alegra que lo preguntes.

Estamos buscando activamente comentarios de todo tipo de nuestra comunidad de usuarios. Esto no se limita a los editores – los lectores también están invitados a comentar! Hay muchos, muchos casos de uso y escenarios que queremos tener en cuenta y necesitamos saber cuáles son. Estamos interesados ​​en escuchar todos lo que sea importante para tí. Tus preocupaciones, tu entusiasmo, tus ideas de funciones y características.

Es muy importante para nosotros que te involucres en ayudar a diseñar este paso audaz, por favor visita el portal de tu elección y participa en la conversación.

Brandon Harris, diseñador senior de la Fundación Wikimedia
Traducción por Justin Duraboger

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

Major news in April include:

• the start of recruitment for a multimedia engineering team;
• the deployment of a better translation interface;
• the release of Kiwix of Android, an app to download and view Wikimedia content offline;
• the milestone of 500 million monthly unique visitors reached in March;
• improvements to the main page of translatewiki.net;
• the migration of Wikidata, and the English and German Wikipedias, to MariaDB 5.5;
• the second phase of Wikidata, whose structured data can now be displayed in Wikipedia articles;
• the deployment of VisualEditor’s alpha version to 14 more language versions of Wikipedia;
• a proposed replacement for the login and account creation interface on Wikimedia projects;
• the launch of the Language Mavens program, an advocacy and advisory body in the domain of language engineering;
• the ramp-up of technical mentorship programs;
• the launch of an official Wikimedia Commons app for iOS and Android.

Note: We’re also providing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this report that does not assume specialized technical knowledge.

This article was written collaboratively by Wikimedia engineers and managers. See revision history and associated status pages. A wiki version is also available.

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)

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