May engineering report: Flow enters consultation phase and other headlines

The WMF's engineering report for May was published recently on the Wikimedia blog and on the MediaWiki wiki ("friendly" summary version), giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month (as well as brief coverage of progress on Wikimedia Deutschland's Wikidata project and Wikimedia CH's Kiwix offline reader project, which the report noted, recently released its first version for Android). Although the ten headlines items will be the major focus of this "Technology report", the WMF-led publication also contains a myriad of updates about smaller initiatives which interested users should peruse at their leisure.

As has been the trend in recent months, the choice of headlines mirrors the use of blogposts on the Wikimedia Techblog. Among the teams to blog the most, the Foundation's Language Engineering team wrote of their efforts to attract an intern, deploy the UniversalLanguageSelector, and make it easier to internationalise an external MediaWiki installation. Another busy team was that focussed on the Foundation's "Wikipedia Zero" project, aimed at giving free access to Wikipedia in developing nations via portable devices. The team reported that during May they had "[worked to launch] Wikipedia Zero in Pakistan, refactored its legacy codebase, migrated configuration from monolithic wiki articles to per-carrier JSON configuration blobs, generated utility scripts, patched legacy hyperlink redirect and content rendering bugs, and supported partner on-boarding" against the backdrop of widening adoption. Finally, the Foundation's soon-to-be-flagship project to improve talk pages, Flow, entered its community consultation phase during April.

Highlights from last month's report, which the Signpost did not report extensively at the time, included details on an area that the Foundation has recently begun to hire in – multimedia engineering – with the commitment to ensure that "contributing an image or video to an article while you’re editing does not require leaving the “edit mode”; as this month's report notes, however, the Foundation is still having to fix bugs in its media handling backend, as well as its core TimedMediaHandler video player, which appear to be more likely targets for development in the interim. A second featured another cornerstone project, Wikidata, in the wake of news that Russian technology firm Yandex is to donate €150,000 to support its development. Entitled "The Wikidata Revolution", the blog post details the march of Wikidata's second (infobox) phase, while the Wikidata team has more recently announced progress integrating new datatypes, including date-time and geocordinate displays.

Though neither monthly report commented greatly on any disappointments the Foundation has had over the past two months, it is clear that many of the perennial concerns – project delays, variable community resistance, and code review – remain ever present worries. Commenting on the last of these, the report noted that WMF Technical Contributor Coordinator Quim Gil has been "preparing a proposal to get automated community metrics" with the potential to help the Foundation better understand the health of the volunteer community given the spiraling number of unreviewed (but still open) commits.

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.

• Many (if not most) recently developed features have compatibility issues with older version of Internet Explorer, an analysis showed this week (wikitech-l mailing list). The flagship VisualEditor project, for instance, intentionally does not support IE6, 7 and 8 (combined usage: 7.5% of Wikimedia pageviews) and unintentionally excludes a further 6.76% by virtue of their using IE9.
• The Google Summer of Code code period is officially underway (also wikitech-l).
• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22wmf7) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 13. It will be enabled on non–Wikipedia sites on June 17, and on all Wikipedias on June 20.
• A report on mobile upload errors was published, and software changes to reduce their number has been promised.
• The Narayam (non-Latin script input) and WebFonts extensions were successfully replaced with the Universal Language Selector across all applicable Wikimedia wikis on June 11. It will now be rolled out to wikis which did not have either predecessor extension, including the Catalan (ca), Cebuano (ceb), Persian (fa), Finnish (fi), Norwegian Bokmål (no), Portuguese (pt), Ukrainian (uk), Vietnamese (vi), Waray-Waray (war) and Chinese (zh) Wikipedias on June 18 (wikitech-ambassadors mailing list). In related news, two new webfonts (UnifrakturMaguntia and Linux Libertine) will shortly be added to wikis that use Universal Language Selector to further help avoid the presence of unrecognised and/or unsupported Unicode characters (which would otherwise appear as a string of ���s)..
• A patrolling link will now be visible for un-patrolled pages, even if users do not originate their page request from Special:NewPages or Special:RecentChanges (bug # 49123).

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Hi all, after more or less 100 Tech Reports, this is my last as Lead Writer (at least for a while) due to real life time commitments. This won't come as news to many of you (I've already missed quite a few weeks in the last couple of months) but I thought I should mention it as it may mean that there are no Tech Reports for a bit. I hope that isn't the case – some people have spoken to me about contributing already – but there is a pressing need for a lead writer to coordinate those contributions, if nothing else; please do shout if you think you could fill that role. In any case, with the creation of Tech News it's probably time for a reassessment of the Tech Report as an independent source of technology news anyway (and whether we can really be bothered, given the ~4 hours a week time requirement), which I leave you to ponder. All the best, - Jarry1250 ^{[Vacation needed]} 10:56, 19 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Jarry, let me be the first to wish you the best with your real life obligations. :-) Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 21:14, 20 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you Jarry! Your contributions have been appreciated. 192.136.210.191 (talk) 01:32, 21 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry to see you go, Jarry. I hope you'll be back. Thanks very much for your dedication and the many long hours you've spent helping to keep us Signpost readers updated on the latest tech happenings. Your work has been appreciated by many, many readers. Best. 64.40.54.119 (talk) 05:03, 21 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Jarry! I always enjoyed reading this section. Just a note about this one: While the title is about VisualEditor being set for rollout early July, the report itself does not mention nor details that information. Cheers! Nicolas1981 (talk) 05:05, 21 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your work Jarry. I'm putting a well earned Signpost barnstar on your talk page. --Pine^✉ 06:29, 21 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Jarry, your excellent work on the Signpost's Tech report is what prompted us to create Tech News, because we wanted to spread technical updates to a wider and multilingual audience. I hope you'll be able to join us and help write Tech News; your talents and experience with the Tech Report would be much welcome, and it would require much less of your time. guillom 08:34, 21 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Your posts were always good, at a minimum. Thank you for your dedication. Cantons-de-l'Est (talk) 20:33, 21 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Thanks for the great work on the tech reports. Honestly it was one of the main reasons I read the signpost. Bawolff (talk) 17:50, 24 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]