Improved search, and WMF data scientist tells all

Technology report

Improved search, and WMF data scientist tells all

Sister projects in search results

Sister project search results for "Brazil"

When you search on Wikipedia you can now find pages on other Wikimedia projects that could be relevant. They appear next to the search results. By introducing this feature, the Discovery department hopes to provide visitors with additional information, and reduce the likelihood of searches returning zero results. This also raises the visibility of sister projects, and may encourage visitors to explore these projects further, and potentially contribute to them. Some communities have already had similar functionality via custom JavaScript.

On English Wikipedia, a Village Pump RfC was held to determine which sister projects should be included. There were concerns that "content returned by some projects is too often irrelevant, problematic, outdated, spammy, or in some other way contradictory to the aims and purposes of [English Wikipedia] and not really what we want to send our readers to". The RfC resulted in the following projects being approved:

Wikisource
Wiktionary
Wikiquote
Wikivoyage (title matches only)

Commons multimedia, Wikinews, and Wikiversity results will not be shown. Wikidata and Wikispecies are not within the scope of this feature.

Results from Wikibooks are also currently displayed, in contrast to the RfC closure; a Phabricator task has been opened requesting their suppression.

Since the feature was enabled, there have been multiple requests for an opt-out option. A way to collapse the sister project results was suggested on a Village pump (technical) thread:

Here's a quick snippet you can add to your common.js to make it collapsible and collapsed by default:

	if ( mw.config.get( 'wgCanonicalSpecialPageName' ) === 'Search' ) {
		$.when(
			mw.loader.using( 'jquery.makeCollapsible' ),
			$.ready
		).done( function () {
			var $mwInterwikiResults = $( '#mw-interwiki-results' );
			
			$mwInterwikiResults.addClass( 'mw-collapsible mw-collapsed' )
				.find( '.iw-results' ).addClass( 'mw-collapsible-content' );
			$mwInterwikiResults.makeCollapsible();
		} );
	}

— User:Murph9000

While at a Village pump (proposals) discussion, code to remove those results was posted:

just add
div#mw-interwiki-results { display: none !important }
to your own common.css.
— User:Nemo bis

WMF data scientist answers the Internet's questions

Aaron Halfaker

Aaron Halfaker (User:EpochFail), a data scientist with WMF, conducted an Ask Me Anything session with Reddit contributors on 1 June (UTC). The question-and-answer session attracted 118 comments and covered Halfaker's ORES AI-based antivandal project and AI construction in general, Wikipedia editing for wider audiences, Reddit, and AIs for content generation, including automatic summarization for unseen Twin Peaks episodes. B.

In brief

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

MoveToDraft^[1] (source) by User:Evad37 – move undersourced articles to draft space, including cleanup and author notification. Useful for New Page Reviewers.

Newly approved bot tasks

WugBot (task 2) – Moves (tentatively) approved hooks from the main DYK nomination page to the approved sub page.
Monkbot (task 12) – Removes/replaces {{London Gazette}} parameters that have been deprecated and/or are no longer supported
PrimeBOT (task 13) – Replaces magic words with templates
CensusBot (approval) – Checks total population and ranking values in U.S. State page infoboxes, and edits to add official values from U.S. Census Bureau API's

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2017 #24 & #25. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

Problems
- ORES had some problems on 13 June between 16:00 and 19:40 UTC. It has now been fixed. (Wikitech incident documentation)
Recent changes
- Some wikis have the larger and brighter OOjs UI edit page buttons. When you write an edit summary there you can now see how many bytes you have left before the summary is too long. (Phabricator task T165856)
- irc.wikimedia.org has to be rebooted. This will probably happen on 21 June. It may be postponed. Some tools use this to get the recent changes feed. They will not work when it is down. (Phabricator task T167643)
- Special:PageData will be an entry point for machine-readable page data. (Phabricator task T163923)
Future changes
- You will soon be able to get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account. You can test this on the test wiki. This will only work if they fail to log in to your account. [1]
- Wikimedia wikis use OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is Electron. You can tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron now works on all Wikimedia projects. (Phabricator task T165956)
- Administrators can soon search for deleted page titles and find results that are similar to what they searched for. Today the search only finds pages that are exactly the same as what you search for. This is to make it easier to find pages when you don't know the exact title. Administrators on Arabic, Catalan, English, Persian, German, Italian, Polish, and Russian Wikipedia and on mediawiki.org can test this by adding &fuzzy=1 to the end of the web address when looking at Special:Undelete. (MediaWiki.org page, Phabricator task T109561)
- CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. You can now see how the TemplateStyles extension works on Beta Labs.

Installation code

^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js' ); // Backlink: User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js

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23 June 2017 (all comments)

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The errors messages I'm getting when I try to add the suggested code above to my commons.css suggest that it should be just: #mw-interwiki-results { display: none }. - Dank (push to talk) 13:59, 23 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I created a new RfC to settle the Wikibooks issue. Feel free to express your opinion there. Kaldari (talk) 21:59, 23 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Why are results from Wikidata excluded? It adds real value to the search results. Often the results of Magnus's search extension are of higher quality that currently provided. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 09:44, 24 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Add all the search results you like, as long as "#mw-interwiki-results { display: none }" works (and more visible ways to turn it off would be better). - Dank (push to talk) 11:56, 24 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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