Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-06-19/Technology report

May engineering report published
The WMF's engineering report for May was published recently on the Wikimedia blog and on the MediaWiki wiki ("friendly" summary version), giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month (as well as brief coverage of progress on Wikimedia Deutschland's Wikidata project and Wikimedia CH's Kiwix offline reader project, which the report noted, recently released its first version for Android). Although the ten headlines items will be the major focus of this "Technology report", the WMF-led publication also contains a myriad of updates about smaller initiatives which interested users should peruse at their leisure.

As has been the trend in recent months, the choice of headlines mirrors the use of blogposts on the Wikimedia Techblog. Among the teams to blog the most, the Foundation's Language Engineering team wrote of their efforts to attract an intern, deploy the UniversalLanguageSelector, and make it easier to internationalise an external MediaWiki installation. Another busy team was that focussed on the Foundation's "Wikipedia Zero" project, aimed at giving free access to Wikipedia in developing nations via portable devices. The team reported that during May they had "[worked to launch] Wikipedia Zero in Pakistan, refactored its legacy codebase, migrated configuration from monolithic wiki articles to per-carrier JSON configuration blobs, generated utility scripts, patched legacy hyperlink redirect and content rendering bugs, and supported partner on-boarding" against the backdrop of widening adoption. Finally, the Foundation's soon-to-be-flagship project to improve talk pages, Flow, entered its community consultation phase during April.

Highlights from last month's report, which the Signpost did not report extensively at the time, included details on an area that the Foundation has recently begun to hire in – multimedia engineering – with the commitment to ensure that "contributing an image or video to an article while you’re editing does not require leaving the “edit mode”; as this month's report notes, however, the Foundation is still having to fix bugs in its media handling backend, as well as its core TimedMediaHandler video player, which appear to be more likely targets for development in the interim. A second featured another cornerstone project, Wikidata, in the wake of news that Russian technology firm Yandex is to donate €150,000 to support its development. Entitled "The Wikidata Revolution", the blog post details the march of Wikidata's second (infobox) phase, while the Wikidata team has more recently announced progress integrating new datatypes, including date-time and geocordinate displays.

Though neither monthly report commented greatly on any disappointments the Foundation has had over the past two months, it is clear that many of the perennial concerns – project delays, variable community resistance, and code review – remain ever present worries. Commenting on the last of these, the report noted that WMF Technical Contributor Coordinator Quim Gil has been "preparing a proposal to get automated community metrics" with the potential to help the Foundation better understand the health of the volunteer community given the spiraling number of unreviewed (but still open) commits.

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.
 * Many (if not most) recently developed features have compatibility issues with older version of Internet Explorer, an analysis showed this week (wikitech-l mailing list). The flagship VisualEditor project, for instance, intentionally does not support IE6, 7 and 8 (combined usage: 7.5% of Wikimedia pageviews) and unintentionally excludes a further 6.76% by virtue of their using IE9.
 * The Google Summer of Code code period is officially underway (also wikitech-l).
 * The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22wmf7) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 13. It will be enabled on non–Wikipedia sites on June 17, and on all Wikipedias on June 20.
 * A report on mobile upload errors was published, and software changes to reduce their number has been promised.
 * The Narayam (non-Latin script input) and WebFonts extensions were successfully replaced with the Universal Language Selector across all applicable Wikimedia wikis on June 11. It will now be rolled out to wikis which did not have either predecessor extension, including the Catalan (ca), Cebuano (ceb), Persian (fa), Finnish (fi), Norwegian Bokmål (no), Portuguese (pt), Ukrainian (uk), Vietnamese (vi), Waray-Waray (war) and Chinese (zh) Wikipedias on June 18 (wikitech-ambassadors mailing list). In related news, two new webfonts (UnifrakturMaguntia and Linux Libertine) will shortly be added to wikis that use Universal Language Selector to further help avoid the presence of unrecognised and/or unsupported Unicode characters (which would otherwise appear as a string of ���s)..
 * A patrolling link will now be visible for un-patrolled pages, even if users do not originate their page request from Special:NewPages or Special:RecentChanges (bug # 49123).