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Technology report

HTTPS-only rollout completed, proposal to enable VisualEditor for new accounts

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By Legoktm

The rollout of HTTPS only (see previous Signpost coverage, blog post) has now been completed across all Wikimedia wikis. The HTTPS link is now marked as the canonical version through a <link rel="canonical" ..> tag on each page. For example, the Main Page has a <link rel="canonical" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page" /> tag. This instructs search engines to use the HTTPS version of the page. In addition, the servers are sending a HSTS header which tells the browser to only visit the website over HTTPS. Currently the expiry for the header is set to 3 days, and it is planned to increase it over time. More details are available on Meta-Wiki.

Labs outage

At around 1:00 UTC on June 18th, the Labs NFS server went into read-only mode, causing an outage of Tool Labs and some other Wikimedia Labs projects. The failure was noticed rather quickly, and further investigation showed that there was significant file system corruption. A recovery was started from a backup taken on June 9th; however it took a large amount of time due to the amount of data. As of 6:00 UTC on June 19th, Tool Labs was recovering and web tools were back up. It is expected that more information about what caused the outage and future improvements to prevent it from happening again will be published in the incident report.

Proposal to enable VisualEditor for new accounts

VisualEditor's new automatic citation generation software powered by Citoid

A research study about VisualEditor's impact on new accounts was recently completed, leading to a proposal by VisualEditor project manager, James F., to gradually enable VisualEditor for new accounts. The survey's results are summarized as:

  • no difference in newcomer productivity or short-term survival
  • small reductions in burden on current Wikipedians
  • newcomers will be less likely to save edits they start and they'll spend ~18 seconds longer editing before hitting save when they do

Discussion is currently ongoing at the Village pump.

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I hope someone is addressing the user experience flaws in the current new VE features, prior to rolling it out. So many extra steps now for basic citations with the new "automatic citation" feature. New editors will not notice the issues since the system is producing this data and most likely this will go unnoticed. Jooojay (talk) 09:34, 20 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Jooojay, yes, it's a little different now that the mw:Citoid service is available to automatically fill in citation templates for you. It used to take two clicks to get to that place (one on the 'Cite' menu, one on the Basic item), and now it takes three (one on the 'Cite' button, one on the 'Manual' tab, and one on the Basic item). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:04, 20 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Whatamidoing (WMF) yes, I get that two clicks was the goal. But unfortunately the reality of editing with this new automatic VE citation tool now has proven it does not meet it's goal, some major design issues. I have used this tool many times only to find that it never ends at only two clicks because websites are not parsing data in a way that is compatible with this tool and I have to now do four clicks and carefully check everything to properly cite. Designing new tools needs to also address all types of UX issues including tool failures, this tool definitely needs some more work! Jooojay (talk) 23:09, 20 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe we're talking about different things. The "Basic" citation still exists and hasn't changed. ("Basic" is a free-form citation field; it was the last item before Re-use in the old menu.) The only change for "Basic" is to its location, which now requires three clicks to reach instead of two. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:10, 21 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I am specifically talking about the mw:Citoid service, it is not working as it should. Jooojay (talk) 02:44, 21 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Jooojay: - If you're hoping for a process where one click starts the Citoid citation process, and then, after pasting a URL, a final click completes the process, then yes, that's not how VE works, and it's never going to work that way. Citoid depends on the Zotero translation server; lesser-used sources are likely to lack Zotero translations. In those cases, the "automatic" citation process is likely to generate, at most, a page title and an accessdate. So the standard citation-generating process must include an editing step, to review which parameters of the cite were correctly created, and which are wrong or missing. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:55, 25 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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