Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-05-06/Technology report

Hi all. I'm trialling a "Comment" box this week. It's been a running complaint for some time now (and not without merit) that I intermingle my thoughts and the "facts" of the situation too greatly, even without thinking about it. Given that (a) this tends to manifests itself when I have little time to write the report more carefully (b) I have a decreasing amount of time to write the report and (c) I'm going to be missing or contributing only minorly to significant numbers of issues in the near future due to RL changes, I thought it was high time I did something about this. My exact proposed solution is based on that employed by the BBC. I quite like it, but YMMV. Thoughts? - Jarry1250 [Vacation needed] 22:21, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Not bad, not bad at all. Getting other people (users, developers) to comment on the stories would be nice too for different issues. ^demon[omg plz] 20:33, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

The title of the report kind of made me think that wmf was getting 100 grand towards its general engineering budget, which would be a bit different. Bawolff (talk) 18:06, 10 May 2013 (UTC)
 * It's more akin to, say, Google's contribution to the Wikidata project, but even more tied than that I guess. Still a whopping amount though! - Jarry1250 [Vacation needed] 20:52, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

About "(normally but not exclusively staff)", the count of users mentors in GSoC 2013 shows 18 WMF employees, 3 WMDE and 16 "other" (Wikimedia / MediaWiki independent volunteers, WikiWorks, Wikia, Kiwix...) Let's see what the % will be once we know the projects approved. And I guess Google gave us the slots we requested because we all deserve their trust? I am impressed by the average quality of the project proposals as much as by the great response we have got from volunteering mentors. Thank you for reporting!--Qgil (talk) 22:11, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Somebody PLEASE leave a link to the rfc for the orange bar, because I REALLY want to leave a piece of mind with the people who removed it (for all the good it won't do, I know, but it will make me feel better). TomStar81 (Talk) 06:45, 11 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Never mind, I found it. Left a piece of my mind too :) TomStar81 (Talk) 06:51, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

What a joke. $100K from Google, who are now making it look like Wikipedia article content is being served by their search engine. Should be $100M. Bloody thieves. --Surturz (talk) 00:41, 13 May 2013 (UTC)


 * RfC for new-messages orange bar: The opinion poll about restoring the orange bar, for Have-new-messages, is under WT:Notifications, as thread:
 * WT:Notifications, most replied under WT:Notifications
 * The count on 21 May 2013, was: Yes 147 (80%), No 36 (20%), growing at the rate of 5 "yes" to each "no". -Wikid77 19:06, 21 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Notify urgency by color of message-bar: Another suggested design was to highlight ANI notices or important posts, such as by bar-color for URGENT, which might be a tag placed into a user-talk page, under each urgent message. Many people noted seeing a red number at username, but not on all old browsers. -Wikid77 19:06, 21 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Perhaps Google students could write software to spot important features to add: Many people complained that the orange-bar fiasco was due to out-of-touch decisions, about what features would really help writing the encyclopedia. For example, suppressing the orange-bar message, such as by customizing a tiny-font message style, might have been the total work needed about messages. Meanwhile, the remaining Edit-conflicts should be auto-corrected, such as simply append a 2nd reply after the 1st at the same line number, rather than enter "edit-conflict" mode. Edit-preview would be much easier if a 2nd  button was also above the edit-buffer area. In fact, the edit-buffer could auto-shrink to a few lines when editing a short page, so editors would have less scrolling around short pages. Anyway, perhaps ask the Summer of Code students to prioritize valuable improvements to Wikipedia, and they might have some good ideas. -Wikid77 19:06, 21 May 2013 (UTC)