When you look at the “sprint backlog” in mingle (guest, guest), you may notice that even though we have been slowed down because of the slush, the feature freeze because of the imminent MediaWiki release, we are not sitting on our hands. Documentation, testing, code review and outreach is on our agenda.

Because of the way we are planning, it is apparent how much code review actually gets done. This sprint we added a review of the ArticleFeedback extension for its internationalization and localization aspects. This is a logical development considering that, with 280+ languages, we are not developing for one language. Our objective for this job is: “As a user I can use the functionality of the ArticleFeedbackv5 so that nothing looks odd in my language from an internationalization and localization perspective”. Reviews like this have been performed informally in the past by translatewiki.net staff. This review, however, will be done during Wikimedia hours and reported through Wikimedia channels.

One old open bug is about EasyTimeline.  It started its life in 2005 and it is finally getting the attention it deserves. The bug explains the lack of support for languages like Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi that are written from right to left. The software has Ploticus as a dependency and for a long time the waiting was for a version of this software that does support RtL languages. We are not waiting any longer and you can read in our story 230 about the complexities involved.

You could say that implementing a translation memory for page translation is a bit more adventurous; it is however debatable if that functionality is new; a translation memory has for a long time been functional at translatewiki.net. It is also very much a feature that makes people more productive. Our team has always had the goal of making life easy and productive for our editors and translators.

The “grammar” functionality for JavaScript is part and parcel of the i18n tooling for our developers. It was not ready before the “slush” and it does make our lives difficult not having it available in the code. When you are building tests for “gender” and “plural”, it is so obvious to create them for “grammar” as well. In this sprint, “grammar” will be included in the code for all these good reasons.

This is the first time that there is a story for outreach. We are reaching out to all the Wikipedia language communities to have their own language support team. It will make a difference when all our language communities have been asked to provide their expertise to us. We already have found that many people show an interest and issues do get raised as a result.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

Every month, hundreds of thousands of people press the edit button on Wikipedia for the very first time. And for many of these new users, the first (and sometimes only) message that appears on their user talk page is a template rather than a human response. This is especially true on our larger, older projects.

User talk page templates were developed by the community because of the tremendous volume of contributions that began pouring in as Wikipedia grew more and more popular. Today, with the focus of our movement shifting to openness and attracting new editors, it’s time to rethink the message we’re sending via templates.

That’s why Steven Walling and I have started a project to A/B test many of the template messages received by new users, such as warnings and deletion notices. In collaboration with over 20 members of the Wikimedia community, including the English and Portuguese Wikipedias so far, we’ve designed a number of experiments that will give us tangible data to improve communication on the projects.

How it works

With the help of tools developed by our summer researchers, different messages we want to test are randomly delivered to different groups of users. Tracking the data from these two groups, we can assess the efficacy of different kinds of messages, based on whether users continue to edit constructively after receiving them.

Our working hypothesis, which we are continuing to test and refine, is that making templates more personal will help retain the good-faith editors who receive them, while continuing to detract vandals, spammers, and other bad-faith editors. For both groups, showing them that the encyclopedia is built through the hard work of other people like them is key.

What you can do

There are thousands of different user talk page templates on Wikimedia projects. We need your help to construct and carry out more tests, especially in non-English communities!

Please visit our task force page on English Wikipedia or our interlanguage hub on Meta and sign up. You can add your project to the list if you’re interested in starting new tests.

This is the first time that the Wikimedia Foundation has devoted resources to helping test and improve the template infrastructure the community uses every day to function. We hope that together, we can significantly improve the way Wikimedia projects communicate with editors.

Thank you,
Maryana Pinchuk and Steven Walling

Calling all mobile Wikipedia users! We’re happy to announce that the new Wikimedia Mobile prototype is ready for testing. Before enabling it, we need your help to test functionality and uncover bugs.

Please point your mobile browser over to our prototype sites, e.g. Wikipedia in English, in Japanese, or in Hebrew.

We have also imported a few stories from Wikinews for testing, in English ([1], [2], [3], [4]), Japanese ([1], [2], [3]) and Hebrew ([1], [2], [3], [4]).

When you’re done browsing, head over to our feedback page and let us know how it went.

Please keep in mind that our prototypes only contain a small subset of our content; you’re likely to see a lot of missing pages and templates (red links).

If you’re feeling especially brave and have found technical glitches, please file them directly in our bug tracker.

There are three possible experiences when loading the mobile gateway:

• We detect that you have a well-featured smart phone and show you the site exactly as m.wikipedia.org would;
• We detect that you have a WAP/WML-only phone and show you a paginated view;
• We don’t identify your phone as having a mobile browser and show you the PC version.

Our detection is based on the WURFL library; so if you find that your phone is not redirecting properly to the mobile version, please contribute your phone’s details to the WURFL project so that it is recognized in the future.

The new mobile prototype is a replacement for our current Ruby-based gateway; the prototype is implemented directly as a MediaWiki extension.

You can learn more about our mobile projects and future work by visiting our Mobile Projects page. If you are a developer and would like to get involved, check out the page detailing our work. And if you just want to say hello or give us some super quick feedback then join us on irc through freenode #wikimedia-mobile

Thank you for helping us test our mobile prototype!

Tomasz Finc
Engineering Program Manager — Mobile
Patrick Reilly
Senior Software Developer — Mobile

My time as a Fellow of the Wikimedia Foundation has been divided between the Bookshelf Project and the Account Creation Improvement Project. But now my Fellowship has taken a new and exciting turn.

Since I started, the Bookshelf Project has grown steadily. We have more and more people helping out, and the number of translations is increasing every week. The brochure “Welcome to Wikipedia,” for instance, has been translated into five languages, most recently French, and it has been a popular handout for the newcomers in the Public Policy Initiative.

The Bookshelf pages have also become more easy to navigate. I have filled the pages with many of the videos and books and handouts that have been created previously, beside the new materials. In total, around 100 different works have been collected and organized on those pages. Hopefully these pages will become the go-to library for anyone who wants to find out more about Wikipedia and its sister projects. The address is easy to remember: http://bookshelf.wikimedia.org. If you have more material that you think fits in the Bookshelves, feel free to add to them.

But most exciting is this third piece of news:

Starting today, we will help you spread the Bookshelf materials. Go to the Bookshelf pages, select any material that you want to give out at a conference or event – and apply for printing money from the Wikimedia Foundation! We have a simplified grants process. See more details here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/Bookshelf Grants. With this grant we hope to help you reach out to many new individuals and inspire them to edit.

Lastly, in the upcoming weeks, the new Wikipedia Cheat Sheet will be finished. It is right now being designed and printed. If you want to translate it, we will make it very easy for you. Then you can get a grant and have it printed in just a few weeks.

This marks the end of my full-time engagement in the Bookshelf project, but I will still check in on it now and then, and I love to see what happens with it in the future.

What happens next?

One of the proposed designs for the new account creation processes.

With all of these milestones reached, my Fellowship changes. I will concentrate fully on the Account Creation Improvement Project. After having performed surveys and tests of the account creation process, we have discovered that this project can have a real impact on the number of people with new accounts that actually start to edit. So with a few volunteers and support from the tech staff, I have started working on an approach to the next tests. First we have set up a new tracking system. Now we are working on creating two high-quality account creation processes that are significantly different from the existing process. We will start testing these very soon and see how many more new users we can get to the point of starting to edit.

After about a month of testing, this will lead to an increased understanding of what we can do to get the new users to stay. Of course, we would love to have your input and ideas.

Lennart Guldbrandsson
Community Fellow

Preview of the second set of usability features, Babaco, are available through user preferences. The first feature is the article outline in the right hand side of the editing area. The outline updates itself in real-time as you type the headers in the articles and provides links which when clicked will jump you to the start of each section in the article. The second feature is the assisted way to insert links and tables. Instead of inserting wiki syntax, a dialogue box pops up when you hit the link icon in the toolbar. For internal links, link suggest features offers auto-complete options and validate the existence of articles. A click of the table icon in the toolbar will also assist define the number of rows and columns without modifying table rows and columns in the wiki syntax. Thirdly, new search and replace dialogue is added to the advanced toolbar. These features are released in the stealth mode, which means users need to turn them on by going to user preferences. To enable these features, please go to “My Preferences”, select ‘Editing’ tab and enable the features listed under ‘Experimental features’. We, the usability team, is still refining look and feel, but we wanted to invite active users to start using these features and provide us feedback.
Known Issues: Accuracy of cursor positions using the article outline feature (aka Navigable Table of Contents) degrades in long articles and significant so if you use Firefox. We are also still working on the display issue of NTOC in Firefox2 on Vista. Bug 20669
The release details and discussion can be found in the Babaco discussion page of the usability project wiki. Looking forward to receiving your feedback.
- Naoko

Navigable Table of Contents

Inserting link using link dialogue

I’m very excited to announce that LiquidThreads, the next-generation discussion system that I’ve spent the last few months developing for the Wikimedia Foundation, is now in beta testing on liquidthreads.labs.wikimedia.org.

Sample of the LiquidThreads interface

(more…)

Apparently due to some miscommunications, a lot of people didn’t realize that the FlaggedRevs labs test wiki has been active and waiting for people to poke at it for a month, since just before Wikimania!

We need interested people to be get up as local administrators to try out the the per-page stabilization settings (accessed via the ‘protect’ tab); by default most pages do not activate FlaggedRevs in the configuration we’re testing for English Wikipedia.

I’ve added a couple quick notes to this affect on the main page.

Update: We’re collecting some folks to be bureaucrats and help set up more test admins so we can get things going quick!

Ok, we still need to complete automation of update runs for LocalisationUpdate, but it seems to be working!

It’s not the most glamorous of extensions, but you can see here an updated message (“Den här sidan” where the current deployed message file says “Denna sidan har”)!

– brion

Have you noticed the “Try Beta” link on the top of Wikimedia project sites?  The usability team is proud to introduce the new skin, Vector, and the enhanced toolbar.   Well, they have been available from user preferences over a month now, but we wanted to reach out to anonymous users.  Please check it out and let us know your thought, if you haven’t tried already.  We deployed a bunch of bug fixes since the release on July 1st.  Right-to-left languages are fully supported, and you will see integrated special characters in the tool bar.  If you are a administrator of Wikimedia project sites, we would like to ask you a favor.  Please consider removing the special character menu below the editing dialogue box in edit page.  As special characters are easily accessible from the toolbar, it will be good to reduce the duplication to make the page simplified.  The special character in the toolbar has generic universal set.  If you find missing character sets or have a request, please let us know through the project page or file an enhancement request via bugzilla under User Interface.

Arigato!

Naoko Komura
Usability Initiative

"Try Beta" screenshot

Special Characters screenshot