Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-04-22/Technology report

Wikidata phase 2 deployed to English Wikipedia
On Monday, the English Wikipedia became the 12th wiki to be able to pull data from the central Wikidata.org repository, with other wikis scheduled to receive the update on Wednesday. The deployment gives users access to a  parser function, most obviously suitable for use in infoboxes.

Wikis are not obliged to use the new functionality they will receive. As the Signpost reported two weeks ago, the English Wikipedia community remains divided on the matter, although the early indications of an RFC established since are that the phase 2 code will be put to at least some use there, if only on a trial basis.

In related news, the English Wikipedia will have version 5 of the Article Feedback Tool re-enabled this week on an opt-in basis, following its rejection of the function for general deployment last month. In addition, wikis including the English Wikipedia have, eight years after bug #189 was opened requesting the feature, finally gained access to a new  pseudo-HTML tag, analogous to , but providing instead for the creation of music notation on the fly:

English-language Wikipedia to be first to receive Echo deployment
Within the next week, the English Wikipedia will become the first Wikipedia to benefit from Echo, a major WMF-developed extension aimed at providing MediaWiki with a Facebook-style notification system. Though many types of notifications are possible, this initial deployment will focus on providing only core updates, including news of new user talk messages. More controversially, these kinds of notifications will launch in an "opt-out" fashion; users opposed to the change will be directed to a user preference toggle.

Announced nine months ago, the Echo project has lived a comparatively quiet existence, with trial deployments on MediaWiki.org rarely causing a stir. Proponents point to the applicability of Echo to both power-users (who may be monitoring many different goings on) and first-time editors (who find Wikimedia wikis' idiosyncratic array of news channels confusing), while detractors cite the potential for users to be overwhelmed with a torrent of notifications of varying importance.

The extension will supersede the existing email notification system, opening the door for new types of email notification to be added. However, as developers behind the project were keen to point out, the email half of the system will be strictly opt-in: no existing user should begin receiving email notifications for which they did not previously sign up.

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.
 * VisualEditor opt-in test expanded: This week, 13 Wikipedias join English Wikipedia in the opt-in alpha test of VisualEditor. Nine of the new test sites rank 2nd to 14th (behind English Wikipedia) in size; the other four were selected as challenging environments (including Hebrew and Arabic). For those participating in the test, VisualEditor is now the default editor when a tester clicks the "Edit" tab; clicking an "Edit source" tab starts the current editor (wikitech-l mailing list; see also previous Signpost coverage for background). When testing is satisfactorily completed, VisualEditor will become the default editor for all users unless they opt-out. Developers plan full deployment in late July.
 * WMF Director of Technical Operations to step down: CT Woo will be standing down from his position in approximately three months time, he reported this week (also wikitech-l). Woo, who gave an interview to the Signpost in July, cited "the growing and maturing of the TechOps department, resulting in significant improvement in both the technical infrastructure and service processes" as the greatest achievement of his two-and-a-half years on the job. Certainly, the period has seen the WMF operations team largely succeed in keeping performance in line with a boom in visitor numbers, even if outages have stubbornly popped up in this report. It was also announced that "web developer and operational jack-of-all-trades" Erik Bernhardson will be joining the Foundation as a features engineer.
 * Toolserver users to get year to migrate: Toolserver developers will get a year to migrate to Wikimedia Labs under a draft timetable published by service provider Wikimedia Germany. Although developers can already start moving their tools over, the Labs project is not expected to have all of the desired functionality until the end of June 2013. Tool owners will then have until the end of June 2014 to complete the migration process, about six months longer than under the original timetable, published last September. In turn, Wikimedia Germany promises to support all those needing help with the potentially difficult transfer, though as WMDE toolserver manager Silke Meyer admitted this week, "it is not clear which tools will not be able to move ... or which maintainers might decide not to move and why".
 * Wikipedia adopts MariaDB: As reported on the Wikimedia blog this week, the Foundation has now completed its transition from using a Facebook-developed fork of database management system MySQL to community-developed fork MariaDB. The change brought considerable performance improvements of about 20%, WMF performance engineer Asher Feldman reported; however, users are unlikely to notice the change, since database reads constitutes only a small proportion of total request time when viewed from the user's perspective. As reported in the Signpost last December, the move also visibly lends the Foundation's support to the MariaDB open-source project following its split from the main MySQL project in 2009 amid licensing concerns.