Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-08-24/Technology report

In a pre-Wikimania technology blog update Brion Vibber relayed a number of technologies news items, the most significant of which include test wikis for Flagged Revisions and Reader Feedback and the release of a Wikipedia iPhone app. He also lays out an ambitious list of projects to work on during the Wikimania Codeathon this week.

Test configurations for Reader Feedback and Flagged Revisions
Two wikis are being populated with featured articles in order to test configurations of the Flagged Revisions and Reader Feedback extensions, in preparation for enabling the extensions on English Wikipedia:


 * http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
 * http://readerfeedback.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

A number of other Wikimedia projects already use Flagged Revisions, including the German and Polish Wikipedias and English Wikinews and Wikibooks. Reader Feedback is being used to generate quantitative feedback on individual proposals on the Strategic Planning wiki.

Wikipedia iPhone app
The first version of the official Wikipedia iPhone app was released this week. Although the app currently does little more than the mobile version of the site itself, it is open source and is expected to become more powerful in future versions.

Image Annotator enabled on Commons
The Image Annotator Javascript extension was enabled on Wikimedia Commons this week, allowing users to append notes to arbitrary regular regions within an image (examples:, ). Lupo developed the extension.

Bots approved
Three bots were approved this week:


 * KslotteBot, for various miscellaneous tasks using AWB.
 * YATBot, for WikiProject tagging.
 * DixonDBot, to maintain interwiki links.

Critically, a BRFA for date-delinking was opened this week, in line with ArbCom's guidelines.