Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-07/Technology report

2013: Wikidata, Lua and VisualEditor expected to headline


Following on from last week's reflections on 2012, this week the Technology report looks ahead to 2013, a year that will almost certainly be dominated by the juggernauts of Wikidata, Lua and the Visual Editor.

The Wikidata client (phase 1, at least) launches this week on the Hungarian Wikipedia, making almost all "manual" inter-language links obsolete. With phase 2 (infobox-style data items) yet to be reviewed, however, and the code behind phase 3 (dynamic lists) not yet written, the possibility that the developers will wrap up in late March without phase 3 being deployed remains a significant risk. Even so, the project could well be the biggest success of 2013.

The other contender for that title is the Visual Editor (VE), assuming that its development schedule does not slip further. The current target is for the VE to be enabled by default "for (almost) every Wikimedia/MediaWiki instance" by the end of July, probably requiring (at a minimum) references, images and table support to have been added, as well as some category and inter-language link functionality: an ambitious goal.

Also likely to capture headlines are the Lua and Echo projects. Lua, set to launch in the first half of the year, is an attempt to introduce a proper template programming language, though questions about code duplication could well give existing -style code a reprise. Echo, also in its early testing phase, is a similarly ambitious project to develop a series of Facebook-style notifications to track everything from new messages to being mentioned by a third party.

Because material on smaller WMF-sponsored projects is somewhat less centralised than this year, and describes a shorter timespan – most plans only run until the end of June for budgetary reasons – it is difficult to see past these big projects. Certainly, mobile uploading is now firmly on the agenda after the success of the Wiki loves Monuments app, which included a specialised version of the same functionality. There is also the Toolserver migration to consider, introducing the possibility of a stand-off in the latter half of the year between the WMF and any Toolserver developers who do not wish to migrate. Other smaller projects up for debate at the moment include tweaking the API and deleting little-used preferences, though they are (counter-intuitively) probably less likely to make it to fruition.

So much for the WMF-led development. Volunteer developers, now with up to nine months of experience of Gerrit development under their belt, should continue contributing in 2013 as they have done in previous years, though it remains to be seen whether reform of WMF staff's 20% time can finally eradicate code review complaints (answer: probably not, though any amelioration would no doubt be warmly welcomed). In short, then, it is set to be a very exciting 2013 for Wikimedians, or, perhaps, a very disappointing one indeed.

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 several weeks.
 * Page view data revised downwards: Page view data from late December and early January had to be revised downwards after it appeared to show a 44% month-on-month increase in the number of visitors to the mobile site. The figures, eventually given as 5% increase month-on-month, nevertheless still show a 77% increase in visitors to the mobile site over the last year. Mobile views have been boosted by the Wikipedia Zero project, which currently allows 200–300 million mobile subscribers (incorrectly reported last week as approaching a billion) to access the project for free.