Say What?: WikiProject Languages

WikiProject news

News in brief

• The new WikiProject Perl is requesting feedback from the community about what is missing from Wikipedia's coverage of the Perl programming language
• New portals have been created for Underwater Diving, Mesoamerica, and Forests
• The May Copyedit Backlog Elimination Drive is underway
• The Multilingual Challenge sponsored by the Teyler's Museum runs until the end of this month

Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.

This week, we conversed with WikiProject Languages. Started in October 2003, the project has grown to include over 7,000 pages maintained by a lengthy list of volunteers. The project provides a template for starting new articles about languages, maintains an infobox, and works on a variety of open tasks including a subproject to ensure that an article exists for every language that has been assigned an ISO 639-3 language code. WikiProject Languages is descended from WikiProject Linguistics and is a parent of WikiProject Endangered Languages and WikiProject Latin. We interviewed G Purevdorj, Maunus, and Angr.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Languages? What languages do you know?

G Purevdorj: I was studying linguistics with a typological perspective and could thus relate to WP Languages.

Maunus: I was mostly editing language articles when I first started. I am a linguist by profession specializing in Mesoamerican languages. I speak Danish, English, and Spanish fluently. I have worked professionally with the Nahuatl and Otomi indigenous languages of Mexico and have done field work on both of them. I have been taught and have basic grammatical knowledge of Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), Latin and German. I have basic knowledge of the historical linguistics of Indo-European, Uto-Aztecan, Mayan, and Mixe-Zoquean languages. I read French and Portuguese with a dictionary.

Angr: I've always been interested in languages, I have a Ph.D. in linguistics, and my original motivation for joining Wikipedia was to add information about Irish, so joining WikiProject Languages was a very natural step for me to take. I know English and German best, and can converse in French. I have a very good theoretical knowledge of Irish, but couldn't carry on a conversation in it beyond the most simple things. For Welsh, both my theoretical knowledge and my practical knowledge are rather less than for Irish. I can read Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Dutch without too much difficulty if I have a dictionary. I have a good theoretical knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek, and a fair theoretical knowledge of the other ancient Indo-European languages. I have a fairly sound (no pun intended) knowledge of how Burmese phonology works, but I can't actually say anything in it besides Aung San Suu Kyi and even then I can't get the tones right.

How well are languages covered on Wikipedia? Are some better covered than others are? How does the coverage of languages vary across the versions of Wikipedia written in languages other than English?

G Purevdorj: We have a huge number of stubs created by a few users that contain basic classificational and geographic information. The 1500 start class articles and a subset of the stubs provide more context and some information on phonology, grammar, or sociolinguistics, but never on more than two (sub)areas in any detail. Only very few stub or start class articles are actually concise sketches that strive for any form of overall coverage. Most articles on better-known languages have larger articles from C class upwards, but some of the better articles belong to else less-known languages. English Wikipedia tends to be more extensive than the other Wikipedias except for articles on regional varieties.

Maunus: Not well at all. The coverage is haphazard depending on the specific expertise of particular editors. Even some of the world's major languages have very bad articles. Some of the best articles we have are about tiny exotic languages like Nafaanra or Tashlhiyt. Some editors like User:Kwamikagami are struggling valiantly to make sure that most of the world's languages are represented at least with stubs and organized in relation to what is known about their family relations. But it is a very large task and it requires editors with expertise in each language group to be done well. Many language groups have only one or two experts doing work on them and often they are unlikely to contribute to Wikipedia. That said there are a number of professional linguists that are Wikipedia editors and who have done great work on the languages they specialize in – User:A R King (Pipil grammar), User:Davidjamesbeck (Totonacan languages, Upper Necaxa Totonac), User:Taivo (Numic languages, Timbisha language, Ukrainian language), User:Lavintzin (Tetelcingo Nahuatl), User:stevemarlett (Seri language), User:G.broadwell (Choctaw language, Chatino language), User:Blillehaugen (Zapotec languages), and User:G Purevdorj (Mongolian language) are some of the professional linguists that I know have made excellent contributions to the languages they work with professionally. User:Miskwito have also done excellent work on Ojibwe language and Ottawa dialect (I think he is not a professional yet, but I'm pretty sure he will become one). I am mostly familiar here with work done on Native American languages – but I am sure there are more professionals working on languages in the rest of the world.

Angr: Obviously better-known languages are better covered than less-known languages. The availability of reliable sources pretty much forces that to be the case. It's much easier to find sources about a language spoken by millions of people that have official or quasi-official status in the country where it's spoken than it is to find sources about a language spoken by a few dozen people. For example, I don't think our article about Sentinelese can ever be significantly expanded unless the facts on the ground change.

Has the project borrowed anything from other language versions of Wikipedia? How much overlap do you see in editors working on multiple language versions of Wikipedia?

G Purevdorj: The few articles on different language versions that I have read read rather differently. Not too much overlap, but rather different perspectives.

Maunus: No, not really. I've seen some of our articles being translated into other languages, but not by any of the editors who work with languages here. I don't generally contribute to other language wikis.

Are there any elements of a language that are difficult to cover in encyclopedia articles?

Maunus: It takes very dedicated and diligent work to give decent coverage of grammar, most language articles stop with the description after a giving phonemic inventory and basic typological information. Describing the grammar requires a high degree of expertise and writing skills since grammars are often written in highly theoretical and technical ways that needs to be translated into something that is accessible for readers that are not specialists or who want information on the language that is not dependent on a particular linguistic theory. It also requires having a full view of the literature on the language that often spans a couple of centuries and being able to weigh the different descriptions for accuracy and relevance. For many languages there is no complete grammar and there are only highly specialized articles on for example particular aspects of syntax and phonology — in such cases using the literature is difficult because it is too specialized to paint a full picture of the language and the specialized information doesn't do much good on its own without background information.

Angr: Some aspects of language, such as sentence-level intonation, are extremely difficult to explain using words alone. Sound recordings help, but they're few and far between, and have limitations of their own (such as being impossible to edit). Otherwise, most aspects of language can in principle be covered in an encyclopedia article, provided the sources are available.

Have you contributed to any pronunciation guides or recordings? How widespread is the use of pronunciation recordings in articles? What can be done to improve this?

G Purevdorj: Well, pronunciation guides would not be in the spirit of a lexicon. Phonology chapters exist in various lengths, and some are quite good. But otherwise, the integration of small sound files into articles would probably be doable and useful. This has been done very rarely only, I think for Swedish ... Still, quite a lot of work.

Maunus: I've made exactly one recording, and I am not planning to do any more. It might be a good idea to have more of that but since I mostly work on small and endangered languages it is not on the top of my to-do list. Perhaps I should upload some of my recordings of the languages I've worked on.

Have you worked with any of WikiProject Languages' descendent projects, WikiProject Endangered languages, and WikiProject Latin? What are the biggest challenges faced by these projects? Is there collaboration among the projects?

G Purevdorj: Most languages are endangered, so the coverage of WP EL and WP LANG should be about the same, thus we don't need both.

Maunus: I was among the ones to start the Endangered Languages Project. Unfortunately, it is sort of inactive now. The biggest challenge is to remain active — many editors work on one language only and, when they are satisfied with the coverage, they stop. There is very little collaboration among projects.

Angr: I'm a member of both those descendent projects, but neither of them is terribly active. The biggest challenge faced by these projects is probably editor apathy, and the fact (which applies to the main languages project as well) that editors tend to work alone rather than in collaboration.

The project has 7 Featured Articles and 12 Good Articles. Have you contributed to any of these? Have you learned any important lessons while working to promote an article to FA or GA status?

G Purevdorj: Created one article to GA, copyedited and promoted one article to GA, and demoted a number of older articles from GA. But no, I don't think I learnt a lot in the course of doing so. Basically, all linguistics plus rating criteria that must be fulfilled. Quite nice to know about picture descriptions for FA, for example, and to create those, but such knowledge is just about the system here rather than about general editing of language-related topics.

Maunus: I was the main contributor to Nahuatl (with a lot of help from User:CJLLWright, User:A R King and User:Lavintzin), to Mayan languages (with a lot of help from User:CJLLWright, User:Homunq and User:Madman2001) and to Greenlandic language (with a lot of help from User:G Purevdorj). When I was trying to get Otomi language to FA, I realized it wasn't worth the effort. I was very disheartened by the FA process, which I found mostly consisted in people chastising the nominator and making demands for including types of information that was irrelevant or non-existent. I would have preferred a more collaborative spirit where the reviewers see the potential of the article and work with the nominator to improve it and make it as good as it can be. I don't mind demanding or even snarky reviewers if I submit an article to a journal, but in that case I have a personal stake in improving the content that I don't have here. This is something I am doing in my free time as a volunteer, I don't need people yelling at me or telling me what to do when I work as a volunteer. I am happy to accept constructive criticism and advise if offered in a collaborative spirit — but that wasn't what I met at FAC. If I publish an article my career advances, that makes it worth the while to have to deal with unreasonable reviewers. But if I get an article to FA I get a gold star I can put on my userpage. That's not worth the hassle, and I'd rather focus on publishing articles then. In my view, FA depends on creating an amiable collaborative environment. I do have a plan about getting Language to FA status, but that is a huge amount of work and I am not going to do that unless I have at least two or three co-nominators.

Angr: I was the main contributor for Irish phonology. Bringing it up to FA status was a very satisfying experience, but I can understand some of Maunus's frustration. It's difficult dealing with reviewers who have no understanding of the topic you're writing about, and often their suggestions seem irrelevant or uninformed. The writing itself is difficult because it's extremely hard to write on such an arcane subject as Irish phonology in a way that can be understood by the average reader. As the writer, you don't want to have to walk the readers through a virtual introductory linguistics course and introductory phonology course before you can get to the matter at hand, but neither do you want 99.9% of your readers (especially on Today's Featured Article day) scratching their heads in puzzlement before they get to the end of the first sentence. It's a lot of work, and something I was only able to do while I was unemployed and could spend pretty much all day doing research and writing the article. Now that I work 40 hours a week again, there's no chance of my bringing another article up to featured status.

What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?

G Purevdorj: Of course, there is a vast number of languages that don't have any reasonable coverage. Turning stubs or start class article into C class articles that include a reasonable share of overall information on grammar and sociolinguistics is presumably much more useful to the average reader and would make a lot of sense. If referencing is good, building up articles to C class might have the best working time / gain ratio. The other thing is articles on linguistic theory that are overall very poor. But non-linguists can't do that, and most linguists just don't invest the time.

Maunus: We need ever more contributors with expert knowledge of particular languages. Language articles cannot be written to reasonable standards by editors without expert knowledge (i.e. both knowledge of linguistics and of the language (being a native speaker is rarely enough)). Editors without expert knowledge could participate by expanding the thousands of stubs that we have on minor languages — information to write a decent C class article is often readily available from sites such as [www.ethnologue.com], [www.wals.org], [2] or from specialized websites about the languages. Information such as where spoken, number of speakers, language family and whether the language is considered endangered or not is often readily available and does not require specialized knowledge.

Angr: Obviously we need more experts, especially ones who can read languages in which descriptions of tiny languages may have been written. For example, there are dozens if not hundreds of small languages in the former Soviet Union, but if they've been described at all in print, they've been described in Russian, which means only editors with a working knowledge of Russian can use those sources to write articles. A new contributor can help by finding a language we don't have enough info on and going to the library!

Next week, we'll have a spot of tea with Wikipedia's editor support group. Until then, introduce yourself to the archive.

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2012-05-07

This week at featured content: How much wood would a Wood Duck chuck if a Wood Duck could chuck wood?

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By Crisco 1492 and Mathew Townsend

Featured articles

Three featured articles were promoted this week:

• SMS Ostfriesland (nom) by Parsecboy. SMS Ostfriesland was the second vessel of the Helgoland class of battleships of the German Imperial Navy. Named for the region of East Frisia, Ostfriesland's keel was laid in October 1908 at the Kaiserliche Werft dockyard in Wilhelmshaven. Ostfriesland was launched on 30 September 1909 and commissioned into the fleet on 1 August 1911. Along with three sister ships, Helgoland, Thüringen, and Oldenburg, she participated in all of the major fleet operations of World War I in the North Sea against the British Grand Fleet and saw action in the Baltic Sea against the Russian Navy. Ostfriesland was sunk during air power trials off the Virginia Capes in July 1921.
• Tichborne case (nom) by Brianboulton. The Tichborne case was a legal cause célèbre that captivated Victorian England in the 1860s and 1870s. It concerned the claims by an individual sometimes referred to as Thomas Castro or as Arthur Orton, but usually termed "the Claimant", to be the missing heir to the Tichborne baronetcy. He failed to convince the courts, and was convicted of perjury and sentenced to 14 years. In 1884, the Claimant was released and died destitute in 1898. Although most commentators have accepted the court's view that the Claimant was Orton, some analysts believe that a lingering doubt remains as to his true identity and that, conceivably, he was Roger Tichborne.
• John Sherman Cooper (nom) by Acdixon. John Sherman Cooper (1901–91) was a politician, jurist, and diplomat from the U.S. state of Kentucky. He served three non-consecutive, partial terms in the U.S. Senate before being elected to two full terms in 1960 and 1966. He also served as U.S. ambassador to India from 1955 to 1956 and to East Germany from 1974 to 1976. He was the first Republican to be popularly elected to more than one term as a senator from Kentucky and, in both 1960 and 1966, he set records for the largest victory margin for a Kentucky senatorial candidate from either party.

Featured lists

Four featured lists were promoted this week:

• List of amphibians of Michigan (nom) by Dana boomer. The US state of Michigan is home to 26 species of amphibians: 12 species of frogs, 12 of salamanders, and two of toads. Two of these species are considered endangered by the state, and another is considered threatened. Amphibian habitats in the state are generally split into four regions: the northern and southern Lower Peninsula and the eastern and western Upper Peninsula.
• 1936 Summer Olympics medal table (nom) by Miyagawa. The 1936 Summer Olympics, held in Berlin, saw 388 medals awarded to athletes from 32 National Olympic Committees (NOCs). The most successful NOC at the games was Nazi Germany, with 33 gold medals; African-American runner Jesse Owens was the most successful individual athlete, much to the ire of the German leader, Adolph Hitler.
• Casting Crowns discography (nom) by Toa Nidhiki05. The American contemporary Christian band Casting Crowns has released five studio albums, two independent albums, one holiday album, 14 singles, four live albums and five music videos since being founded in 1999. Their most successful release to date is their self-titled debut album, released in 2003, which has sold 1.7 million copies.
• Timeline of the 1990 Atlantic hurricane season (nom) by 12george1. The 1990 Atlantic hurricane season produced 16 tropical depressions, of which 14 intensified into tropical storms, eight became hurricanes, and one became a major hurricane. The strongest storm of the season was Hurricane Gustav, but Hurricane Diana and Tropical Storm Marco caused the greatest damage and loss of life, respectively.

Featured pictures

Nine featured pictures were promoted this week:

• The Second of May 1808 (nom; related article), created by Francisco Goya and nominated by Crisco 1492. Spanish artist Francisco Goya's painting The Second of May 1808, also known as The Charge of the Mamelukes, was painted in two months in 1814. Measuring 266 × 345 cm (105 × 136 in), the oil on canvas painting depicts the Dos de Mayo Uprising. Another painting by Goya of the uprising, The Third of May 1808, was featured in March.
• Portrait of the Princess Maria Amalia of Saxony in Polish costume (nom; related article), created by Louis de Silvestre and nominated by Crisco 1492. Maria Amalia of Saxony (1724–60) was the German-born daughter of Augustus III of Poland and Maria Josepha of Austria. She later became wife of Charles III of Spain. Of this painting, reviewer Calliopejen1 asked "what insane anatomy must the artist have imagined" to have a foot peeking out of the subject's dress.
• African buffalo skull (nom; related article), created by Jebulon and nominated by Tomer T. This picture, described by reviewer Saffron Blaze as a "slam dunk", depicts the skull of an African buffalo. The buffalo, which can grow to 1,000 kg (2,200 lb), has a strong skull. An adult bull's horns fuse together to form a "boss", which can stop a rifle bullet. The animals are considered among the five most dangerous African species.
• Hammersmith Bridge (nom; related article) by Diliff. This panorama consists of four segments with a two-second exposure each, showing the Hammersmith Bridge in London, which crosses the River Thames, at dusk. The second permanent bridge at the site, the 700-foot (210 m) Hammersmith Bridge, is open to both traffic and pedestrians.
• Boston Massacre (nom; related article), created by Paul Revere and Christian Remick, nominated by Crisco 1492. This depiction of the Boston Massacre, shows seven uniformed British soldiers firing into a crowd of American civilians. The actual massacre, which killed five Americans, led to a propaganda struggle between radicals and the British government; the featured picture is an example of pro-American propaganda, which whitewashed several details.
• Monarch in May (nom; related article), created by HaarFager and nominated by Pine. The Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus), perhaps the best-known North American butterfly, is also found in Europe and Oceania. It has a wingspan of 8.9–10.2 centimetres (3½–4 in) and is known for its large migrations, which last three or four generations.
• Bald Eagle portrait (nom; related article) by Saffron Blaze. The image shows the head of the Bald Eagle, the national bird of the United States. Bald Eagles are not actually bald; the name derives from the older meaning of the word, "white headed". Reviewer Sanyambahga opined that this was "the most striking image" in the article.
• Wood Duck, London (nom; related article) by Diliff. The Wood Duck (Aix sponsa), a generally North American species, is generally found in wooded swamps, shallow lakes, marshes or ponds, and creeks; the male specimen pictured was photographed in St James's Park, London. Reviewer Daniel Case described the image as "fit for framing on the lodge wall."
• Anagallis monelli (habitus) (nom; related article), created by Lycaon and nominated by Tomer T. The Blue Pimpernel (Lysimachia monelli) is a plant native to the Mediterranean region. Although generally blue, the flowers can also be other colours; the subject has orange flowers.

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2012-05-07

Proposed decision in Rich Farmbrough, two open cases

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By Lord Roem

The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, keeping the number of open cases at two.

Open cases

Rich Farmbrough (Week 5)

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.

Race and intelligence review (Week 8)

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".

Other requests and committee action

• The Committee unanimously rejected opening a case into alleged misconduct between editors MBisanz and Fae.
  
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2012-05-07

Search gets faster, GSoC gets more detail and 1.20wmf2 gets deployed

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By Jarry1250

April engineering report published

“	In April 2012: 67[updated 1] unique committers contributed code to MediaWiki. The total number of unreviewed commits went from about 100 to 138. About 34 shell requests were processed. 63 developers got developer access to Git and Wikimedia Labs, of which 60 are volunteers. Wikimedia Labs now hosts 81 projects, 136 instances and 305 users.	”
—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:

1. ^ Originally reported as 53, later revised upwards.

Google Summer of Code students and their project

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.

In brief

Signpost poll

Diff colours revisited

You can now give your opinion on next week's poll: Which of the following best describes your thoughts on Wikimedia's internal search engine?

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.

• 1.20wmf2 begins deployment process, 1.19 released: 1.20wmf2, the second "rapid deployment" to Wikimedia sites, began its process of deployment on April 30 when MediaWiki.org was switched over to the latest version, 20 days after the wiki received 1.20wmf1. It was then deployed to Wikimedia Commons May 2 2012, where it will have its greatest impact: the most significant feature of 1.20wmf2 is the introduction of so-called "chunked" uploads, which prevent intermittent connection failures from restarting an upload in its entirety. Representing just those 20 days of development, the deployment (which also hit the English Wikipedia on May 7 2012 and will be introduced to other Wikipedias on May 9 2012) includes some 47 bugfixes, among them fixes allowing the translation of edit notices and better display of the Vector skin on "high definition" devices. This week also saw the official release of MediaWiki 1.19 to external sites, allowing their wikis to benefit from a similar range of improvements as those that came to Wikimedia wikis in late February (wikitech-l mailing list).
• Gerrit upgraded: Gerrit, MediaWiki's new code review system, has been upgraded to version 2.3, incorporating "lots of fixes and various other improvements". However, the most notable feature is the internalisation of Git's submodule system, which allows developers to get copies of ("clone") and update copies of multiple related repositories at the same time; as developer Chad Horohoe explained, the primary-use case is to allow developers to replicate their pre-switchover ability to grab the code from all WMF-hosted extensions simultaneously. The update has not prevented work on a competitor review system: named "Gareth" and developed by long-time volunteer developer Daniel Friesen, the code review system is an attempt to provide a more homegrown, MediaWiki-compatible review experience (also wikitech-l).
• Two billion mobile pageviews: Mobile devices accounted for some 2.089 billion pageviews in April 2012, as reported on Thursday via the Wikimedia blog. The monthly figure, the first to break the self-set two billion pageview target, represents a 187% year-on-year increase, WMF Senior Manager Amit Kapoor reported on behalf of the WMF mobile team in his blogpost addressing the milestone – a jump which he attributed to improvements in both the standard mobile site and device-specific "apps" during the last calendar year. The figures for non-English Wikipedias look particularly encouraging: among those wikis seeing enormous jumps in mobile device browsing, the Portuguese Wikipedia clocks in with 600% growth, Arabic with 500% growth, and Turkish with 800% growth. Several less-developed countries are also set to gain in the second half of this year with the wider rollout of Wikipedia Zero, although the list of countries is protected by commercial confidentiality agreements.
• Two performance and two preference problems: Wikimedia wikis suffered two performance issues in the past seven days, one prompting "failed images, scripts, and other static resources" for almost an hour on April 30 (Wikitech incident documentation), the other causing image corruption and various related and unrelated issues for at least four minutes on 3 May 2012 (Wikimedia Commons Village Pump). Two changes to default preferences (enabling email watchlist notifications and edits-add-to-watchlist by default) also went amiss during the week, the result of a problem related to distinguishing between the default preferences of new users preferences and those of older users who had simply never overridden the defaults; consequently, users registered more than a couple of years ago found that their preferences had mysteriously changed overnight until both changes were reverted pending a proper fix for the issue.

• 

  Mixed news for New Pages Feed project: As reported in last week's "Technology report", this week should have seen the deployment of one of the two halves of the New Pages Feed (formerly "New Page Triage") project. Bugs encountered during the first attempted deployment of this new "list view" – essentially a successor to Special:NewPages – forced a second attempt to be scheduled later in the week. That attempt was also unsuccessful, prompting a third attempt to be scheduled for May 7 2012 (PDT). The second half, community liaison Oliver Keyes reported in a newsletter this week, will take the form of a new "toolbar, which we're calling the 'curation bar'; you can see a mockup here. A stripped-down version of this should be ready to deploy fairly soon after the list view is [deployed]". When fully released, the 'curation bar' will contain many options to interact with the page including patrolling it, adding maintenance tags and nominating it for deletion, Keyes says.
• MathJax preference goes WMF-wide: After a trial installation on the MediaWiki wiki, MathJax has been enabled as a <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.
• Four bots approved: 4 BRFAs were recently approved for use on the English Wikipedia:
  1. Lowercase sigmabot II's 1st BRFA, clearing the Sandbox and reinserting its header;
  2. 28bot's 4th BRFA, reverting test edits and removing signatures from articles;
  3. Xqbot's 4th BRFA, adding GA and FA signs to interwiki links;
  4. Justincheng12345-bot's 1st BRFA, adding, removing and modifying interwiki links.

At the time of writing, 14 BRFAs are active. As usual, community input is encouraged.

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