Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-01-08/Technology report

MediaWiki developers will be meeting in San Francisco on January 23–24 for an Architecture Summit. The first architecture meeting was during the Amsterdam Hackathon, and discussed the Architecture guidelines document and parts of the MediaWiki codebase. Further meetings were held at Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong and at the WMF Engineering's All-Hands meeting; there were also bi-weekly meetings on IRC to review various requests for comments.

For the summit, RfCs have been split into clusters to facilitate discussion. Developers are now voting in a straw poll on what they are interested in concerning the creation of the program. As of writing, the categories with the most votes are:


 * HTML templating (26 votes): providing an abstraction layer for server-side or client-side HTML generation
 * Configuration (15 votes): introducing an on-wiki method to configure MediaWiki settings
 * Service-oriented architecture (15 votes): Changes to internal interfaces and the web API
 * UI/UX styling (14 votes): various styling and UI improvements

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.
 * Special:Version overhaul: The time of the last commit, license information, and a full credits list for extensions will be displayed (65299).
 * The codebase anyone can edit: Tim Starling will be giving a presentation at the linux.conf.au conference in Perth, Western Australia, about enabling Lua scripting on Wikimedia sites (more information).
 * Typography refresh updated: The Typography refresh beta feature has been updated based on feedback. Comments can be left on mediawiki.org (announcement).
 * Site performance: Performance engineer Ori Livneh gave a presentation (video – 37:14) about site performance at this month's metrics and activities meetings.