On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 3:44 AM, Guillaume Paumier <gpaumier@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi,

The latest tech newsletter is now available at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2014/01 . Below is the English version.

You can help write the next newsletter: whenever you see information about Wikimedia technology that you think should be distributed more broadly, you can add it to the next newsletter at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/Next .

More information on how to contribute is available at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News#contribute . You can also contact me directly.

As always, feedback (on- or off-list) is appreciated and encouraged.

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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

  • You can now see the text of DjVu and PDF files in search results on wikis testing the new search tool (CirrusSearch). [1] [2]
  • With the new version of the Wikibase DataModel extension, you can install it outside Wikimedia wikis. [3]

VisualEditor news

  • Images are now shown inside VisualEditor as HTML5 <figure /> elements. Comments are welcome. [4]
  • You can now test a basic version of VisualEditor on mobile devices; see this article as an example.

Problems

Future software changes

  • CirrusSearch will be added as the second search method for Spanish (es), French (fr), Portuguese (pt) and Russian (ru) wikis on December 30. Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies and Wikinews users will also be able to enable it in their Beta Features options.
  • AbuseFilter log entries will be visible in CheckUser tool reports. [6] [7]
  • It will soon be possible to search for log entries done by users without an account. [8] [9]
  • It will no longer be possible to globally hide users with more than 1,000 edits. [10] [11]

There is a lot going on with CirrusSearch and the above isn't entirely accurate in that regard.  Read on if interested.

Some CirrusSearch changes take longer to get into user's hands then others due to reindexing time.  Here is what you should expect from Cirrus after the release in an hour and a half:
1.  Commons, wikispecies, and all wikinewses will get CirrusSearch as a beta feature.
2.  hastemplate:, boost-templates:"", and the cirrussearch-boost-templates message will be available to commons, wikispecies, and all wikinewses.  The syntax will technically work for all other wikis but won't be useful because all pages won't have their templates indexed.  I'll be kicking off a full reindex sometime in the next few days.
3.  We'll begin indexing the contents of pdf and djvu files and any other kind of file from which Mediawiki is able to extract text.  The file text will start to trickle in as the files (or their pages) are modified and when I perform the full reindex which is also required for #2 above.
4.  We're going to start indexing eswiki, frwiki, ptwiki, and ruwiki.  You'll be able to watch our progress by adding &srbackend=CirrusSearch to the end of the url of a search results page.
5.  We're also trying to speed up search updates from single page edits by stopping them from getting "behind" template edits.  This has mostly been a problem with commons but I've seen it happen a few days on enwikisource.


Our plans for next week (subject to change):
1.  Default all searches to CirrusSearch on itwiki, frwikisource, wikidata, and all wikivoyages.
2.  BetaFeature for eswiki, frwiki, ptwiki, and ruwiki if the indexes are ready.  I imagine they will be but I've been surprised in the past.
3.  Unify the "go" search behavior with the prefix search behavior in all wikis that have cirrus as a primary.  In other words: replace TitleKey with CirrusSearch.
4.  Start indexing dewiki and all wikibooks.


Nik