Archive for October, 2009
Usability Beta Enhancements
New watch/unwatch and cascading tabs
Thanks for trying out the usability beta. Close to 280,000 people tried out the usability beta and about 220,000 people continue using it. One of the most-frequently reported frustration about the beta was that (1) watch/unwatch was hidden under the drop-down menu and (2) tabs overlaps when the browser is scaled down or the resolution is low. Tab issues were more significant for language communities whose words tend to be long such as German. We are also simplifying the search box to simplify the interface and in order to minimize the overlapping side-effect. Those new features are currently staged on the prototype wikis in English, German, Japanese, Arabic, Serbian, Russian, and Sinhala. You need to log-in in order to see watch/unwatch tabs. The screenshot on the right is the shot when the browser window is scaled down to 640×480. “View History” is moved to drop down menu in order to keep “Read” and “Edit” tabs visible. Let us know your feedback here.
- Naoko
Update on November 18th: Thank you for your support and feedback. These features are now available in the usability beta across all Wikimedia projects.
Wikipedia Mobile October Update
Posted by Hampton Catlin in mobile, software on October 12th, 2009
We have a lot of cool stuff that got pushed out today. I’m really excited to tell you about it. First of all, Derk-Jan Hartman (github: hartman) has been hard at work bringing us NetFront support. NetFront is the HTML rendering backend to many devices. Here is a list of the devices that Derk’s hard work has given us blessed access to.
- Most SonyEricsson Phones
- Nintendo Wii
- Sony PS3
- Sony PSP
He’s also working on Opera Mini support and has done a lot of awesome refactors on the code. Fixing many an embarrassing lines of code for me. Its great to see other people chipping into the project and I know for me personally, its a big inspiration to see people giving their time to help this project out!
Now, on to a small tweak that we made to the subcategory expansion system. Its a really small change, but should make using the app even easier. If you want to expand a subcategory, clicking on the title of the category gets the job done. No more having to aim your finger at the “Show” button. Obviously, it also hides if you do it when the section is visible. Its these types of changes that are my favourite. Someone might not even notice it, but it should make their usage of the site a litttttle bit easier.
We’ve also done various and sundry internal changes. We got a patch from Jacques Crocker to use Bundler to manage our Gems. Getting the capistrano part right on that was a bit difficult and so we had a little downtime today while I was working out those kinks. But, from now on, it should be much, much easier to get a local copy of Wikimedia Mobile up and running on your system.
We’ve also expanded the number of supported languages recently. All of this is thanks to the tireless work of Niklas Laxström and others from the TranslateWiki project. They were very helpful in building an API for us to import new languages. I wrote a couple rake tasks and Ruby bits to make it all go. So, now all you have to do is type `rake lang:import` and it will download the freshest strings you’ve ever parsed.
Here is an updated list of all of the languages we support: af, ak, ar, az, bg, bn, br, bs, ca, cy, de, dsb, el, en, eo, es, eu, fi, fr, gl, gv, he, hi, hr, hsb, hu, ia, id, is, it, ja, ka, km, kn, ko, ksh, kw, lb, li, lv, mg, mk, mt, nl, no, oc, pl, pms, ps, pt, ro, ru, sah, sh, sk, sl, su, sv, te, th, tr, uk, vec, vi, wo, and xal. I really have no idea what most of those languages are, but I’m also super happy to support them. And, I’d like to welcome the newest member to our class: Akan (ak), comes to us from Ghana! I know, cool right? Technically, its not a language but an Ethnologue. (Must stop myself from reading too much about this on Wikipedia… and finish this post)
Well folks, that’s it for the moment. Now that I’ve completed my move to another continent you should be seeing a lot more updates coming through on the mobile site. I’m really excited about where we are going and I’m also excited to reveal the results of our survey in the next couple weeks. Some really interesting and exciting things in there!
New Media Features Gadget
Posted by Michael Dale in wikimedia on October 10th, 2009
I would like to announce that some of the new media features are now available in gadget form on Wikimedia Commons and the English Wikipedia. These include a new ogg player, the add media wizard, and firefogg upload support. I hope having these components in gadget form will enable some more testing and feedback :)
Getting Started to enable these components you must turn on the mwEmbed gadget. You can turn it on by visiting your preferences page. Once you enable the gadget you should shift reload to ensure you have a fresh copy of the JavaScript. (note you will need to enable the gadget for each wiki you want to test (ie both for wikimedia commons and Wikipedia). Once enabled you can check out the following features: Read the rest of this entry »
Click Tracking on Edit Toolbar deployed
After many a hearty SQL battle, we finally have click tracking deployed on the wikimedia projects!
Data on button usage
What’s being tracked?
Which buttons are clicked on the toolbar during editing
What information is being recorded?
The button clicked, the time of the click, total edit count of the user clicking, and edit count for the last 1, 3, 6 months
What information is NOT being recorded?
Individually identifiable information of any sort (eg who exactly clicked what) and anything that would violate our privacy policy in general
Why?
As we revamp the UI, rather than randomly throwing buttons up there we think are pretty (we think they’re all pretty), we thought we’d put buttons up and features that people actually use. Novel, right?
What about the edit history and stuff?
We figure the way a novice editor uses the toolbar is different form a ‘power’ editor, and that there’s probably some gradation in between. Is there? Well, that’s what we hope to find out…
–Nimish
Image renaming fix
Fixed an ugly internal caching bug which could break renamed image redirects on Commons being accesses from other non-English sites. Hopefully that’s most of those solved now. :)
SVG in Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons
Slides for my talk at SVG Open available for download as PDF or Keynote source. (I can make my test corpus available as well — let me know if interested!)
– brion
Babaco is ready for tasting
Preview of the second set of usability features, Babaco, are available through user preferences. The first feature is the article outline in the right hand side of the editing area. The outline updates itself in real-time as you type the headers in the articles and provides links which when clicked will jump you to the start of each section in the article. The second feature is the assisted way to insert links and tables. Instead of inserting wiki syntax, a dialogue box pops up when you hit the link icon in the toolbar. For internal links, link suggest features offers auto-complete options and validate the existence of articles. A click of the table icon in the toolbar will also assist define the number of rows and columns without modifying table rows and columns in the wiki syntax. Thirdly, new search and replace dialogue is added to the advanced toolbar. These features are released in the stealth mode, which means users need to turn them on by going to user preferences. To enable these features, please go to “My Preferences”, select ‘Editing’ tab and enable the features listed under ‘Experimental features’. We, the usability team, is still refining look and feel, but we wanted to invite active users to start using these features and provide us feedback.
Known Issues: Accuracy of cursor positions using the article outline feature (aka Navigable Table of Contents) degrades in long articles and significant so if you use Firefox. We are also still working on the display issue of NTOC in Firefox2 on Vista. Bug 20669
The release details and discussion can be found in the Babaco discussion page of the usability project wiki. Looking forward to receiving your feedback.
- Naoko
Navigable Table of Contents
Inserting link using link dialogue
SVG Open
Posted by brion in open-source, wikimedia on October 2nd, 2009
I’m hanging out down in Mountain View for the SVG Open conference this weekend, to speak a bit on how we use and plan to use SVG at Wikimedia and to get up to date on the state of the art. I’ll post my full talk slides on Sunday after my talk…
One of the most exciting new developments in the SVG world right now is svgweb, a very cool tool which brings high-quality SVG rendering support — including full support for the SVG DOM and interactivity — to any browser that supports Flash. This essentially fills the “SVG gap” for most Internet Explorer users, which opens up a huge world of possibilities for both interactive content and tools for building, editing, and localizing SVG-based diagrams, charts, maps, etc right in the browser.
Google web standards evangelist Brad Neuberg gave a great talk about the background of how something like svgweb was needed and showed some great demos, including a quick preview of an inline SVG pan-and-zoom tool for Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons; we’ll have some even funner demos based on that Sunday!
Also saw a good talk from Sam Ruby on some of the gotchas in the current state of HTML vs XHTML vs HTML5 and how SVG is (or isn’t) supported in various profiles and various browsers. Most interesting was his proposal to rethink how we deal with markup validators in the webdev world — right now most validators give you a lot of errors about things that don’t really make a difference (font vs style?), but freely ignore problematic but “legitimate” structures (say, unclosed list items).
MediaWiki’s new discussion system in testing on Wikimedia Labs
Posted by andrew in mediawiki, software, summer of code, wikimedia on October 1st, 2009
I’m very excited to announce that LiquidThreads, the next-generation discussion system that I’ve spent the last few months developing for the Wikimedia Foundation, is now in beta testing on liquidthreads.labs.wikimedia.org.
Sample of the LiquidThreads interface
Wikimedia XML data sets released on Amazon Public Data Sets
For our community members that do analysis on Wikimedia project data, I’m happy to announce the release of our XML snapshots within Amazon Public Data Sets.
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/09/new-public-data-set-wikipedia-xml-data.html
To those curious about why this happened … earlier this year I had gotten approached multiple times from researchers and community members wanting to parse our data but frustrated at the costs and time of doing it on their own infrastructure.
Many of them were already familiar with academic computational clusters and were wondering if there were any similar solutions available for them to do large scale processing. The tool sever was one option but sometimes it didn’t provide the level of flexibility that they needed and/or their projects were too computationally intensive to run alongside other tasks.
Instead I mentioned that I had already been thinking of pushing our data sets in the Amazon cloud as they had a wealth of the infrastructure in place and had an infrastructure that our users who were familiar with.
Fast forward to now, we have our first release ready to be worked on and I’m sure that we will hear back about new and exiting discoveries that our communities make.
This isn’t the first Wikipedia data set to exist in Public Data Sets but it will be the first that Wikimedia is committing to supporting on a regular release cycle. Amazon will be picking it up every month and retaining copies for at least three months.
I’m excited to see the stats of how many people use it.
–tomasz
Supporting translatewiki.net
Translatewiki.net is a core part of the MediaWiki ecosystem. While not a Wikimedia Foundation project, it’s used by hundreds of volunteers to improve the localization of MediaWiki and its extensions, alongside other open source projects, which has led to MediaWiki being one of the most internationalized software packages available.
We’re very pleased to be able to recognize the incredible volunteer efforts behind translatewiki.net at least in a small way. Starting tomorrow, Siebrand Mazeland will be able to devote one day a week to the support of the project on a contract with the Wikimedia Foundation. We’ve identified core priorities for the next year as an increase in the number of volunteer developers supporting the translatewiki.net infrastructure, and the number of volunteer translators working on localization for the most widely spoken languages.
Welcome, Siebrand, and a big thank you to the entire translatewiki.net community for their work. :-)
Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation