The Signpost

Technology report

Tech present, past, and future

Ward Cunningham's keynote at the 2017 Wikimedia Developer Summit

Ward Cunningham, inventor of the first wiki, delivered the first day’s keynote, titled “Has our success made it hard to see your own contribution”. He used one slide for the entire keynote, aiming for 10 minutes of speaking and 50 minutes of questions, though he was ultimately unsuccessful in that timing. The second day featured a Q&A with newly hired CTO, Victoria Coleman, and the VP of Product, Wes Moran, with questions coming from an All Our Ideas survey as well as those asked in person. Notes from other sessions are available on mediawiki.org, and videos should be posted shortly. L

This is what we wished for

The Community Tech team's 2016 Community Wishlist Survey was held last month, and the results are in! There were 265 proposals for tools, bots, and the other features to help the Wikimedia projects and their core contributors. The proposals were discussed and voted on by 1132 contributors, and 5037 support votes were cast in total. The top ten proposals, which the Community Tech team will investigate and address, are:

#10 – User rights expiration
Currently, Stewards may grant temporary user rights, but these have to be manually removed when the approved time period has expired. The proposed solution is to add a new option to set a time how long rights will last when they are granted. (Phabricator task T12493)
#9 – Fix Mr.Z-bot's popular pages report
Mr.Z-bot used to automatically compile a list of the most popular pages for each WikiProject on a monthly basis – for example, Wikipedia:WikiProject Spiders/Popular pages. The bot, which stopped working in April 2016, was limited to desktop pageviews and the English Wikipedia. (Phabricator task T141154)
#8 – Automatic archive for new external links
External webpages may disappear, leaving behind dead links. Preventing link rot by using a web archiving service is additional work for editors, that could instead be completed by a bot. Whilst similar to a 2015 wish to migrate dead external links to archives, this proposal includes preemptive archiving of new external links, before they become dead. (Phabricator task T153354)
#7 – Warning on unsuccessful login attempts
Hackers may attack user accounts by testing popular passwords. This proposal is to alert users of unsuccessful login attempts through the Notifications system. (Phabricator task T11838)
#6 – Wikitext editor syntax highlighting
Syntax highlighting would make wikitext easier to edit. There are common use-cases for articles and templates, such as distinguising <ref></ref> tags and contents from surrounding text in a paragraph, or making sure the correct number of braces are present for code such as {{{a|{{{b|{{{c}}}}}}}}}. While syntax highlighting can be implemented through user scripts, this proposal is for integration into MediaWiki for faster loading and theme-friendly colours. (Phabricator task T101246)
#5 – Rewrite Xtools
Xtools (tools developed by User:X!) provide detailed information on users and articles. These include the Edit Counter (with detailed breakdowns of edits), Article Blamer (which shows who inserted specific text into an article), and several others. The Xtools are being completely written to provide stability and maintainability, which the current tools lack; this proposal is for assistance with rewriting and testing. (Phabricator task T153112)
#4 – Global settings
For users active on multiple wikis, the settings in Special:Preferences must be set on each wiki individually. This must be repeated each time new options are added, such as for compact interlanguage links, editor selection, and MediaViewer. (Phabricator task T16950)
#3 – Section heading URLs for non-Latin languages
Non-Latin section headings are handled poorly, in the display of the anchor portion of the url. For example, on the Russian Wikipedia, the section "Биология" on the article "Кошка" will display the url https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кошка#.D0.91.D0.B8.D0.BE.D0.BB.D0.BE.D0.B3.D0.B8.D1.8F , and cannot be reached from the url https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кошка#Биология . (Phabricator task T75092)
#2 – Edit summary length for non-Latin languages
Edit summaries in non-Latin-based language have fewer characters available than compared to English or other languages with a Latin alphabet – about half or even a third as many characters. This is because edit summaries are measured in bytes. While Latin characters take up one byte, non-latin characters require two or three. It is proposed that the edit summary length be measured in terms of characters rather than bytes. (Phabricator task T6715)
#1 – Global gadgets
Popular gadgets such as HotCat, wikEd, navigation popups, and WikiMiniAtlas, have to be maintained as separate forked scripts on each wiki they are available on. The proposed global gadgets would, from a single centralised copy, be available as gadgets on each WMF wiki. (Phabricator task T22153)

Some wishes that didn't make it into the top ten will also be worked on by the Community Tech team, to support smaller user groups without large voter numbers. Other wishes may be worked on by volunteer developers, the WMDE Technical Wishes team, or other Wikimedia Foundation product teams. E

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An interesting question came in via Twitter: Yurik or Evad37, doesn't it make more sense for complex data to be stored at Wikidata, and referenced by media files? How does a new initiative to store data on Commons square with the emergence of Wikidata? Will it make sense to migrate the data files there in the future? -Pete Forsyth (talk) 01:50, 24 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Pete Forsyth, this is probably the most asked question :) The most relevant is this discussion. Basically - "data blobs" and "data facts" are very different, both from technology and from legal perspectives. There has been a lot of requests to allow for non-CC0 licensed data, where as Wikidata is purely CC0 only. --Yurik (talk) 01:54, 24 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

















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