The Signpost

Technology report

Left-aligned edit links and bugfixes abound; brief news

The change in design currently being tested

Historically, the links for editing individual sections of a page have been aligned to the right hand side of the page, distancing them from the sections to which they refer. At the same time, having left-aligned edit links next to each header has been an available gadget on the English Wikipedia. In 2009, the Wikimedia Usability Initiative suggested making the left-aligned variant the default for all users, but although Wikia switched over and reported an increase in section editing the change was never implemented on WMF wikis.

In renewed efforts to increase the number of editors on Wikimedia projects, on 9 March the Foundation's usability and engineering departments began a joint week-long study of the editing impact of any switch to left-aligned edit links. To achieve this, they began to collect anonymous click data from readers, some of whom will be temporarily switched to the left-aligned style. If successful, this test could prove to be the first of many such experiments (Wikimedia Techblog). Developer on the project Trevor Parscal added that the current tests would be strictly quantitative and would be "followed up with additional research that will better assess the more subtle effects of such a change... these are experiments... just guidance as we explore ways to improve the usefulness of the site."

In response to privacy concerns, the blog post also added that "if any editor would like to abstain from participating in this and other experiments in the future, they can select the 'Exclude me from feature experiments' option in their user preferences."

Further bug fixes highlighted

After numerous bugs were found in the wake of the deployment of MediaWiki 1.17 almost a month ago, developer Robert Lanphier chose to highlight some of the issues that had recently been resolved (Wikimedia Techblog).


When the category sorting changes come into effect, they should enable non-English wikis to have their categories sorted in a more logical order, rather than have letters with diacritics sorted after Z.

In brief

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks. Users interested in the "tarball" release of MW1.17 should follow bug #26676.


















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-14/Technology_report