Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-04-09/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-04-09/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-04-09/In the media
Next Wikimedia deployment already in the pipeline and details of recent performance improvements
1.20wmf1 in the pipeline
| “ | To reiterate, I think most of the problem [volunteer resentment at the apparent preferential treatment of staff-written code] will disappear when we have regular code deployment again. At this point, it's best to focus solely on that and forget about all other complaints. If problems linger for long after everyone's code is getting deployed on a regular basis, we can talk about that then, and I think everyone will be talking on much more amicable basis. | ” |
| — Aryeh Gregor, October 2010 | ||
A provisional timetable was released for the first mini-deployment on Wikimedia sites from new version control system Git. Beyond the technical challenge of releasing against a substantially different code management background, the release should also herald the start of a new era of far quicker deployments to Wikimedia wikis—itself a development that has been discussed off-and-on for at least eighteen months (Signpost coverage).
With only a couple of months' worth of changes included (most of them simple bug fixes), it would be easy to overlook the release. Such a mistake is unlikely to be made by any developer aware of its historical significance, however, it being the quickest deployment of a block of changes (as opposed to individual "emergency" merges) in nearly two and a half years. The release thus marks the retirement of the previous paradigm – merging a small subset of revisions but retaining the majority for irregular watershed deployments – in favour of a new model focused on regular "mini"-deployments. Only time will tell whether or not Aryeh Gregor (quoted above in October 2010) will be proven right, and whether the problem of the volunteer-staff average review time divide (a problem which flared up once again on the wikitech-l mailing list only this week) will be settled once and for all.
According to the plan published on wikitech-l this week, non-Wikipedia sites (that is to say, Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiquote and Wikiversity) should receive the update on April 16, with the English Wikipedia following on April 23. Should the deployment go well, the remaining wikis will be updated on April 25, just two months after they enjoyed the benefits of 1.19.0, which will only complete its own release cycle when it is made available to external sites later in the month.
March Engineering Report published
| “ | In March 2012:
|
” |
—Engineering metrics, Wikimedia blog | ||
The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for March 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month. March was dominated at first by the deployment of MediaWiki 1.19 to all Wikipedias and more latterly by the move to Git and its associated code review system Gerrit. Other headlines from the month will also be familiar to regular Signpost readers, including the completion of the move of all Wikimedia domain names away from registrar GoDaddy in protest at their political stance on SOPA; the publication of a report on the first phase of Article Feedback version 5; and design improvements to the mobile front-end.
As is often the case, many of the changes that came in under the radar relate to incremental performance improvements aimed at allowing Wikimedia to support a rapidly increasing audience. For example, significant work was done with regard to preparing the newer Ashburn data centre to share responsibility with its Tampa counterpart for internal search functionality. Attempts to improve image caching were stymied by lingering concerns about "overloading the NIC cards and the risk of concentrating too much cache on each server", yielding only a trial improvement thus far. Network peering was also added to the Ashburn site, allowing it to pool resources with a dozen or so websites and ISPs—a move expected to reduce latency for users in Europe, Japan and Hong Kong. Similar motivations also led the Foundation to begin investigating the possibility of establishing a caching centre on the West Coast of the United States, the report said. Meanwhile, the switch in default thumbnail handling system to Swift finally settled down during the month after numerous problematic attempts at deployment during February; the same system is now expected to start handling non-thumbnailed images sometime in late May.
Elsewhere, it was announced that Wikimedia Labs' main per-project storage space (71,000 GB, currently distributed in 300 GB chunks) came online during March, though there were also two labs outages during the month. In addition, the Visual Editor team have now finalised a decision to base the new WYSIWYG editor around the contentEditable HTML5 property, having previously worked on a separate "editsurface" system in parallel, paving the way ahead towards a summer release. Finally, the first release of a complete copy of the English Wikipedia in the specialised ZIM file format (containing about 4 million articles, 11 million redirects, and 300,000 mathematical images) was also completed during March; the hope is to use regularly generated ZIM files – viewable with the WMF-supported Kiwix reader – to provide a complete offline browsing experience in the so-called "global south".
In brief
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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.
- Updated apps for iOS and Android: This week saw new releases of the official Wikipedia app on both target platforms – version 1.1 for Android (a significant incremental release) and version 3.1 for iOS (which jumps forward to parity with the Android version, which before this week was significantly more advanced). It was ultimately a stressful week for the Wikipedia Mobile team, who were forced to work around the clock to fix a number of bugs with the initial releases of both versions despite significant pre-release testing. Thus the Android line of releases saw not just 1.1.0 this week but also 1.1.1, a minor bugfix release, while the iOS line received 3.1.0, 3.1.1 (a major bugfix release) and will shortly receive 3.1.2 to fix another high priority bug. Both version releases add improved tablet support as well as full text search and "Did you Mean?"’ correction support (Wikimedia blog). It was the replacement of Google Maps with OpenStreetMap as the base map provider for both versions that really caught the attention of the media, however, being highlighted on technology news websites such as CNET and PCMag, as well as the website of Austrian daily Der Standard.
- Developer starts work on Gerrit replacement: After discussions last week about the apparent shortcomings of new code review system Gerrit (Signpost coverage), one developer announced this week that he would be starting work on a new, custom-built system (wikitech-l mailing list). In announcing the "long term" project, experienced coder Daniel Friesen stressed that it was a response to "issues stemming fundamentally from how Gerrit is designed" rather than the minor UI issues that have also been discussed at length. The initial reception was largely negative, with Wikimedia regulars stressing that Friesen was taking a risk putting time into something that would only be considered for Foundation support and eventually implementation when it became a "real alternative" to Gerrit.
- Google Summer of Code applications closed: At midnight on April 6, applications closed for summer placements at the Wikimedia Foundation (provided via the Google Summer of Code programme). Volunteer Development Coordinator Sumana Harihareswara reported that the Foundation had received 63 such applications, of which 41 were of sufficient quality to go forward to the assessment phase. There they will compete for a number of places decided by Google; last year that number was eight, but it could well inch up slightly this week. Foundation staff and other top developers will now begin discussing and ranking proposals; successful applicants with be notified on April 23. In unrelated news, applications are now open to present at the Strange Loop conference, which will be held in Missouri in September this year.
- One-ish bots approved: 4 BRfAs were recently approved:
- Thehelpfulbot's 13th BRfA, general tagging (and untagging) of categories as requested, typically after CfD closures
- Hazard-Bot's 7th BRfA, a re-implementation of its 3rd BRfA
- Two extensions to H3llBot's 2nd BRfA (2b and 2c), switching to existing archived copies once a link dies; and tagging identified, dead domains/links with {{dead link}}
- Additionally, Rcsprinter123 has nominated himself for BAG membership; the community is encouraged to join that discussion, as well as those relating to the 16 currently active bot approvals.
- WMF organisation chart published: As reported by Erik Möller on the wikitech-l mailing list, Mark Holmquist (a contractor working for the Foundation) has generated a series of organisation charts for the organisation. The charts, which show staff names, locations and job titles hierarchically, currently cover all engineering departments; the hope is to expand them to also cover the remaining Wikimedia Foundation departments.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-04-09/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-04-09/Opinion
Projects launched in Brazil and the Middle East as advisors sought for funds committee
Education Program launches Brazil pilot
The Wikipedia Education Program (WEP) has launched a pilot program in Brazil for editing the Portuguese Wikipedia. This has been a recent goal of the Brazilian community, which, in late 2011 and early 2012, discussed the idea with professors from universities in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. These professors had an overall positive response to the idea of "Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool in their classes". After discussions, five professors and 150 students were included in the pilot program, covering the topics of history, sociology, physics, and public policy.
The new program is the latest in a long line of developments relating Wikipedia to the classroom – a budding number of projects and programs spearheaded by the Public Policy Initiative conducted in 2010 and 2011. The approach has already seen success in Brazil, with a smaller solo project revolving around articles on Roman history. The five professors are Pablo Ortellado of the University of São Paulo, whose classes will collaborate on articles on cultural policy (of 11 proposed articles, only one exists); Edivaldo Moura of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, whose 13 students have each chosen to expand an article related to electromagnetism; Vera Henriques, whose class will improve articles related to biological systems; Heloisa Pait of the Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho, whose sociology students are to "explore their cultural memories"; and Juliana Bastos Marques, whose 60 freshmen will encounter Wikipedia in their history class.
As with all pilot programs, professors have been given creative freedom to shape their participation as they think best suits their specific coursework, and the community is keen to see the results of their varied models of participation. The second component, the program's ambassadors, are coming together as well in the face of geographical and logistical challenges; WEP participants and local meet-ups have helped spread the word in that regard. The community will track student contributions and motivation to gauge the effectiveness of the program; potential ambassador candidates are encouraged to introduce themselves on the program's page.
Call for advisers on new funding committee
A call for participation in the new advisory group of the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) was issued on the foundation-l mailing list on April 9 (the list has since been renamed wikimedia-l). The group is to advise the FDC, which was created by the Board of Trustees by resolution at the end of March in Berlin after months of debate over how funding ought to be distributed (chronicled in the Signpost most recently in an interview this week and a report on the resolution in last week's edition). The committee-to-be is intended to provide recommendations to the Wikimedia Foundation on how to handle the distribution of all funds, except core and operative reserve as defined in the resolution, collected for the Wikimedia movement through Wikimedia project sites such as the English Wikipedia.
According to the formation process page on Meta, several seats (up to three of maximal eleven) of the new advisory board are open to all community members meeting the criteria—notably experience in finance and administering projects within the scope of the body, as well as a time commitment of roughly four hours per week on average over 18 to 24 months. In cooperation with the Bridgespan Group, the group will draft recommendations to the Foundation's board on how to make the FDC work and support the implementation of the resulting new volunteer-run committee.
The open nomination period will end on April 17 and the first meeting of the advisory board is scheduled for the week of April 30th. (Self-)nominations are invited on Meta.
Arabic Language Initiative gets off the ground
The Wikimedia Foundation's Arabic Language Initiative to boost participation in Arabic language projects made progress at the end of March, as Moushira Elamrawy, Consultant for the Arabic Language Initiative, reported on the Wikimedia blog on April 6.
She and the Chief Global Development Officer Barry Newstead conducted a series of outreach visits to local Wikimedia communities, conferences, NGOs, educational and research institutions in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Morocco. Among the events in the North African kingdom was a consultation with a potential GLAM partner, the Moroccan Bibliothèque Générale et Archives.
Notably, while in Cairo, Newstead took part in a meeting on the nascent Cairo Education Pilot (in preparation since October 2011). The program is being conducted during the 2012 spring semester (February to June), at Ain Shams University and Cairo University. Documentation of the results is scheduled until the end of June.
Brief notes
- Call for POTY organizers: Mono, coordinator of the sixth annual Picture of the Year contest on Wikimedia Commons, has issued a call for volunteers for this year's organising committee. The contest, held since 2006, is a volunteer-run event that aims to identify the best freely licensed image promoted to featured status in a given year; this year's event will cover images uploaded in 2011. Last year's POTY counted a sum total of 2,463 votes; committee members are expected to help in "set[ting] up contest pages, posting messages in relevant locations, translating interface messages, assisting voters, and counting votes". Interested editors are invited to fill out the application form.
- Creative Commons 4.0: On April 2, Creative Commons, whose CC-BY-SA license has powered Wikipedia since June 2009, announced the release of the first draft of CC 4.0. According to the development timeline, the first opportunity for public input – either via the mailing list or the wiki – is open until May 2.
- Board Q&A: The Board of Trustees has issued a Q&A document about its recently published fundraising and funds dissemination resolutions (Signpost coverage). The document is divided into three sections: one is an overview of the board process leading up to the decision and its summary, while the other two deal with specific questions (some already asked, some anticipated) about the resolutions. Discussions are directed towards the resolution talk page.
- Wikidata office hours: The Wikidata team (whom the Signpost interviewed elsewhere in this issue) held their first office hours on April 5; the log has been published.
- Teahouse, AFT, and Triage updates: The metrics summary for the Teahouse project to date has been published, showing visitor statistics and feedback. Updates regarding the Article Feedback Tool include an announcement of new office hours by liaison Okeyes (WMF), as well as the release of instructions for feedback evaluation on Version 5 of the project. Elsewhere, feedback is requested on the New Page Triage talkpage.
- New administrators: The Signpost welcomes our newest administrator, Yngvadottir, "an experienced clean-up editor [with] a long history of rescuing/improving bad articles, often taking articles from AfD to the front page." Following her successful nomination, she plans to be most active at did you know?.
- Milestones this week: The Nepali Wikipedia has reached 250,000 page edits, Mediawiki has reached 100 administrators, the Japanese Wikipedia has reached 800,000 articles, and the French Wikipedia has reached a total of 5,000,000 pages.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-04-09/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-04-09/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-04-09/In focus
Arbitration evidence-limit motions, two open cases
The Arbitration Committee opened one case this week, bringing the number of open cases to two.
Open cases
Rich Farmbrough (Week 1)
This newly opened case involves accusations of disruptive editing against Rich Farmbrough. Specifically, concerns have been raised about the editor and bot policies. Arbitrator Hersfold originally filed the case, which the committee chose to accept on 4 April. Hersfold and Elen of the Roads (who had blocked Rich Farmbrough) have both recused from participation in the case.
Arbitrator Newyorkbrad is drafting a proposed decision, expected in about a month's time. Until then, evidence submissions and workshop proposals are permitted until 25 April. There have already been several such submissions in the past week.
Race and intelligence review (Week 4)
A review was opened of the Race and intelligence case as a compromise between opening a new case and ruling by motion. The review is intended to be a simplified form of a full case and will cover conduct issues that have purportedly arisen since the closure of the 2010 case. Over the past week several editors submitted specific evidence at the request of the committee. While the posting of the complete proposed decision is expected in the next few days, several proposed principles have already been posted.
Other requests and committee action
- The Arbitration Committee has begun voting on a series of proposals to change the limits for evidence submissions in cases. At the time of publication, no motion had passed.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-04-09/Humour