Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-05-07/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-05-07/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-05-07/In the media
| “ | In April 2012:
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—Engineering metrics, Wikimedia blog | ||
The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for April 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month (as well as brief coverage of Wikimedia Deutschland's Wikidata project). Three of the headlines for the month have already received coverage in previous issues of the Signpost: the selection of nine Google Summer of Code students (explored in more detail below), the shift to a rapid deployment cycle with the deployment of 1.20wmf1 and a new version of the Wikimedia iOS app. Of the two others, one relates to work on a document detailing Wikimedia engineering’s goals for the next fiscal year, which will be featured in the "Technology report" as soon as it becomes official, and the deployment of a new mobile skin (example), which occurred after the publication of last week's issue. The skin update has since received broadly positive commentary among users; it provides a rival to the more native experience of an Android or iOS app.
Elsewhere, the roundup contained details of a massive improvement in the amount of time taken to use Wikimedia's Lucene-based internal search engine after "months of preparation and refactoring work". The difference reported was "quite amazing": the actual search component of 99% of search requests now takes under a second, down from nine seconds before; and the average search time is now 100 ms, down from 700 ms. Among the interesting updates included in the report was the news that the localisation team had started coding for a universal language selector, over 18 months after the feature was first proposed.
Coding has begun on a full system of Lua scripting, while April also saw over 20x improvements in the processing speed of the new parser on template heavy pages, suggesting that preparations for its rollout (a prerequisite for deployment of the new Visual Editor) will begin shortly. Among the relative failures of the month was the deployment of a new media caching layer ("Varnish"), which, while it has the potential to improve performance and scalability, seems to be preventing users from downloading large files successfully (bug #36577).
Corrections:
As announced a fortnight ago, nine students have now been selected to work on MediaWiki this year, supported by Google stipends and WMF mentors (Wikimedia blog). The projects they represent fall across a broad spectrum: some, like Aaron Pramana's project to rethink the display and functionality of Wikimedians' watchlists, involve highly visible changes; others will have a more indirect effect on the average Wikimedian user experience (such as Suhas HS's project to improve the OpenStackManager extension that underpins the virtualisation functionality of Wikimedia Labs and Robin Pepermans' attempts to improve the usability, performance, and coverage of Wikimedia's Incubator for nascent language editions). It will be the first time many of the students have undertaken such ambitious projects in the name of open-source development; they join hundreds of other students worldwide, each working on different projects for different open-source initiatives (several countries are represented even among the WMF's nine students).
In terms of focus, three of the nine projects selected for WMF mentorship relate to media handling: Ankur Anand will work on integrating Flickr upload and geolocation into Wikimedia Commons' UploadWizard, Platonides on a new cross-platform mass media uploader with a broader function set than existing tools, particularly with regard to image upload "campaigns" such as Wiki Loves Monuments, and Harry Burt (the author of this Signpost report) on an upgrade to the Translate extension to allow it to translate Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) files and with a view to eventual deployment to Wikimedia Commons.
Other projects defy such easy categorisation by topic; these include Akshay Chugh's work on a convention/conference extension for MediaWiki that will ease the job of meetup organisers, Ashish Dubey's attempts to get real-time collaboration integrated into the upcoming visual editor (a topic that hit mailing lists again this week), and last but not least Nischay Nahata's attempts to optimise the performance of the Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) extension. If particularly successful, the last project could clear the way for its use on a test Wikimedia wiki (see previous Signpost coverage).
Students will officially start coding later in the month, although they may begin when they wish. They must present their final work in late August for evaluation.
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Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
<math>-rendering preference for all Wikimedia wikis (wikitech-l mailing list). The JavaScript-based system, which has been available as a user script for some time, replaces the usual PNG renderings of mathematical formulae with asynchronously typeset non-image-based representations. Although well received, the escaping of HTML tags (bug #36059) has continued to be an annoyance for MathJax users; indeed, a dozen MathJax-related bugs of varying severity have been filed in the past two weeks.Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-05-07/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-05-07/Opinion
The Wikimania 2013 jury announced this week that the ninth global community conference will be held in Hong Kong next year.
Wikimania is the annual conference for the international Wikimedia community. It is organised by community members and held every July or August in locations as diverse as Germany, Taiwan, Egypt, and Argentina. The conference features presentations on Wikimedia projects and fellow open-content projects, open-source software, and the social and technical aspects of our work. The first Wikimania was held in 2005, while the most recent was in Haifa, Israel in August 2011 (Signpost coverage); the next will be in Washington DC in July 2012.
The Hong Kong bid team, formed from the local community and backed by the local Wikimedia chapter, beat four other bids: London, Bristol, Naples and Surakarta, Indonesia. Details of the process are available on Meta, including minutes of the public meetings, along with the judging criteria.
While China is not listed on the priority list of Wikimedia's strategic areas to increase participation, the Hong Kong bid team made a different case. The team argued that a Wikimania in the city state would strengthen ties among Asian Wikimedia communities, improve regional co-operation in Greater China, and raise awareness for a sensitive handling of community and political issues related to the Chinese mainland and the Chinese language projects such as Cantonese.
Changes related to the organization of the Wikimania conference are coming up as well. Since its inception, the conference format has been organised through an ad hoc group of long-standing community members, Wikimedia Foundation and chapter staff, and former organizers. A discussion is currently underway on Meta on replacing this approach with a more community-led, open process, while continuing expert support from the movement for the organizers of each conference.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-05-07/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-05-07/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-05-07/In focus
The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, keeping the number of open cases at two.
The case involves accusations of disruptive editing against Rich Farmbrough. Specifically, concerns were raised about the editor and his observance of bot policy.
The proposed decision was posted on 5 May by drafter Kiril Lokshin. The decision's framework centers around principles of collegiality and behavior with automation tools. After a long series of findings of fact, the proposed decision would remove administrator privileges from Rich Farmbrough and ban him for up to one year. Kirill Lokshin gave his reason for proposing the ban: "Given Rich's history of using automation without disclosing it ... it is apparent that we have no effective means of enforcing [the] remedy [absent a] ban from editing entirely." However, arbitrator Courcelles described the ban proposal as "too draconian", arguing instead for a stringent editing restriction.
It will require six of the eleven active arbitrators on the case to adopt these proposals.
A review of the Race and intelligence case was opened as a compromise between starting a new case and proceeding with a ruling by motion. The review is intended to be a simplified form of a full case, and has the stated scope of conduct issues that have purportedly arisen since the closure of the 2010 case.
A complete decision was proposed on 16 April by drafter Roger Davies. The proposed principles include clarifications of harassment policies and sockpuppet investigation procedures. After a long series of findings of fact, the proposed decision seeks to admonish one editor involved in disruptive actions and to ban two others for 12 months. Voting so far has established a tentative consensus on some principles and some findings of fact.
On 6 May, Roger Davies posted a set of new findings of fact and remedies which effectively add two new parties to the case. According to the proposals, two other editors not named in the original case registered accounts on Wikipedia with the intent to resolve what they saw as "censorship". The two editors in question would be topic-banned from this area of the site along with a full site-ban for no less than six months. One existing party to the case attacked the addition of these new parties and the related findings, arguing that "the scope is being changed after the fact to include [the new parties] for the sole purpose of banning them." The drafting arbitrator responded by asking whether the committee should ignore "compelling new evidence that goes to the heart of the case purely on procedural grounds?"
When asked about the length of the Review and the delay in posting of these new findings, Roger Davies explained that "the main difficulty has been that the case spans about three years, with thirty-plus dispute related processes".
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-05-07/Humour
