Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-12-06/Technology report

Commons Upload Wizard
The new "Upload Wizard", featured a number of times in recent editions of The Signpost, was launched on Wikimedia Commons last Tuesday. The new wizard was developed under a one year grant from the Ford Foundation and aims to improve the upload experience, especially for novice editors. It allows users to upload multiple files at the same time, add the proper licensing and sourcing information and will only allow them to publish the file to the public if they have properly completed all the steps. It also features the new licensing tutorial (see previous Signpost coverage), to help novice users determine if their material can be uploaded and freely licensed.

The new wizard is not yet the default option on Commons as it still has many problems with different types of browsers, but further improvements are planned to make this the default option in the future. Users are invited to try the new system and to report any problems they encounter.

Planning for MediaWiki 1.17
Many changes have been made to the MediaWiki software that runs Wikipedia since the (Northern) summer. However many of these changes have not yet been made available in the form of an official update to the software. The developers are now starting to plan for a new release of the software. A new 1.17 branch of the software is planned to be created this week. From that moment on, only the bigger bug fixes - and, importantly, no new features - will be allowed into that version of the software. There is still a lot of work to be done: all code that has not yet been reviewed will have to be reviewed by senior developers, for example, and a lot of testing will be required.

The hope is that in January a first test version of the software can be deployed on Wikipedia, though many important fixes are already live (draft roadmap).

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.
 * Kurt Luther (User:MaxVeers), Matthew Flaschen (User:Superm401) and their team at Georgia Tech's Electronic Learning Communities Lab have released a new tool, called ProveIt, that allows Wikipedians to more easily add and manage references. The tool is available as a Wikipedia user script, User:ProveIt GT/ProveIt.js, and has been proposed as a gadget (Wiki-research-l). See also Signpost coverage of other reference-related tools
 * A new feature on Wikimedia Commons has been released, trying to make sure that the proper language for an anonymous reader of Commons can be both selected and retained. Previously most readers were presented with the English interface, but now User:Multichill and User:mdale have developed a script that tries to rectify this problem more easily.
 * Image galleries no longer default to four images per row, but will now have a fluid width, i.e., one in proportion to the width of the user's screen (bug #3276).