The Signpost

Technology report

Pencils down in Google Summer of Code, August analysed and integrated HTTPS support in action

Google Summer of Code: pencils down please

Work concluded this week on this year's MediaWiki-related Google Summer of Code projects. Of the seven projects that made it to the half-way stage, all passed their end of term assessments and will now submit their work to Google for auditing. (Google will then issue a final monetary reward to contributors for their volunteer development efforts over the summer.)

Of the seven projects, then, a number are likely to have an impact on Wikimedia wikis, including student Salvatore Ingala's project to make gadgets more easily customisable. One of his two mentors, Max Semenik, stressed that the project had been designed to make it compatible with the Foundation's own work to improve the usability of gadgets, and so it was unlikely to be discarded. He was also pleased with his student's progress in general, adding that constant intervention to keep the project on track and up-to-standard had not been necessary, with advice focussed only on small bursts at the beginning, middle, and end of the timeline. Yuvi Panda's attempt to make the compilation of large article subsets easier via a new extension also seems to fill a need onwiki. Other potentially Wikimedia-related projects include Kevin Brown's experimental ArchiveLinks extension and Aigerim Karabekova's work on Extension management. Also of interest is Akshay Agarwal's progress on separating the logic of logging in and registration from its presentation, with a view to allowing new ways to log in in future.

Other projects included work on the Semantic MediaWiki variant and on a Facebook-esque "status update" feature.

August Engineering Report published

Wiki Loves Monuments (logo pictured) was one of the community projects to receive developer attention in August.

The Wikimedia Foundation's Engineering Report for August was published last week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month (because of the discrepancy of Wikimania, the August report was published approximately two weeks after July's). Many of the projects mentioned have been covered in The Signpost, including the Wikimania and Developer Days, progress on HTTPS support, major work on customized campaigns for the Wiki Loves Monuments event, and the increasing readiness of both MediaWiki 1.18 and a new mobile platform for Wikipedia.

Nonetheless, the report also contained developments, which, although classified as major, have not yet received external coverage. In particular, a new team was set up within Wikimedia engineering to support a renewed effort at making Wikimedia-related software both readable and in particular more writeable in other languages (localisation and internationalisation). Comprising four staff members, its primary aim is to provide "a set of tools to facilitate editing in languages using a non-Roman alphabet". Also of note was a significant operations team meeting, focussed on improving its workflow and re-prioritising outstanding projects. Other projects which saw progress include data dumps (improved ability to restart failed processes without having to throw away previous progress) and the visual editor project, where the possibility of having a transaction-based edit system is being looked at. Such a system would allow for edits to be more easily merged in the event of edit conflicts.

Also included in the report was news that, after new users began to use the WikiLove extension as an easy way to send messages to other users, a new tool will be developed to provide a more consistent framework for this action. Meanwhile, developer Neil Kandalgaonkar "continued to work on real-time collaboration and is close to presenting a [working] demo" while Ian Baker "investigated and started to work on a chat system to be integrated to the concurrent editing interface, for collaboration and live help". Another project to look out for in the future is a renewed effort to allow a safe subset of arbitrary code to be included in pages to simplify template syntax.

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.

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