Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-06-17/Technology report

The rollout of HTTPS only (see previous Signpost coverage, blog post) has now been completed across all Wikimedia wikis. The HTTPS link is now marked as the canonical version through a  tag on each page. For example, the Main Page has a  tag. This instructs search engines to use the HTTPS version of the page. In addition, the servers are sending a HSTS header which tells the browser to only visit the website over HTTPS. Currently the expiry for the header is set to 3 days, and it is planned to increase it over time. More details are available on Meta-Wiki.

Labs outage
At around 1:00 UTC on June 18th, the Labs NFS server went into read-only mode, causing an outage of Tool Labs and some other Wikimedia Labs projects. The failure was noticed rather quickly, and further investigation showed that there was significant file system corruption. A recovery was started from a backup taken on June 9th; however it took a large amount of time due to the amount of data. As of 6:00 UTC on June 19th, Tool Labs was recovering and web tools were back up. It is expected that more information about what caused the outage and future improvements to prevent it from happening again will be published in the incident report.

Proposal to enable VisualEditor for new accounts
A research study about VisualEditor's impact on new accounts was recently completed, leading to a proposal by VisualEditor project manager, James F., to gradually enable VisualEditor for new accounts. The survey's results are summarized as:


 * no difference in newcomer productivity or short-term survival
 * small reductions in burden on current Wikipedians
 * newcomers will be less likely to save edits they start and they'll spend ~18 seconds longer editing before hitting save when they do

Discussion is currently ongoing at the Village pump.