Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-11-08/Technology report

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Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By Jarry1250

November Engineering Update published

The Foundation's November Engineering Update was this week published to the Wikimedia Techblog, and gives a brief overview of all technical operations in the last month. Developer Rob Lanphier (User:RobLa) gave an executive summary of the month:

The number of unreviewed revisions of the MediaWiki software fell in the last month as more developers became involved in review.

Additionally, a number of items had had their statuses updated since last month. For example, the Foundation noted that the establishment of the new Virginia data centre (originally planned to be online by January 1, 2011) had been delayed temporarily, but was happy with work done to the donation-handling infrastructure. In addition, the Foundation announced that it was "on track to deploy a new version of Pending Changes on November 16" and the release of the new Resource Loader was nearing, but that development of LiquidThreads had slowed due to lack of available personnel.

Likewise, regarding the new media upload wizard, the Tech team said that Neil Kandalgaonkar had finished development of a temporary storage system for media files that are missing required metadata like licensing or source information, and that Roan Kattouw has started the prep-work for deployment of this feature, scheduled for late November. Other developments included the news that developer Ryan Lane had started actively investigating OpenStack for open-source testing and that the Foundation were pleased with making some headway in code review (note the drop in unreviewed revisions of the MediaWiki software shown to the right of the chart), after allocating more resources to the task (see Signpost coverage: "More developers to review code"). In addition, the success of the Hack-a-Ton (cf. Signpost coverage) was noted, as was an intention to revamp Wikimedia's mobile sites.

In brief

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.

Old color [1]
New color [2]
Current color
  • The background color of the "You have new messages" box notifying users of changes to their user talk pages is being modified from orange to blue in the Vector skin (bug #25145, r76017).
  • {{fullurl:Special:Mytalk|diff=cur}} now works as expected (bug #25829).
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  • Yet another reason to hate the vector skin! Who's gonna notice another cool boring skyblue box in a sea of boring cool sky blue? --Orange Mike | Talk 17:08, 9 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
If you don't like the color change, please comment on the bug. Thanks. Kaldari (talk) 17:49, 9 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Meh, I'll be changing it back for me, certainly. But I support it for new users who are less... nostalgic. - Jarry1250 [Who? Discuss.] 17:59, 9 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict)Agreed, especially for vandalizing IPs. Is there a link to a discussion about this change? —Ost (talk) 18:20, 9 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
This is what the developers are spending their time on? Really?? ~ Ningauble (talk) 19:17, 9 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
No, this would take about five seconds to implement. The whole story at the top is that developers are spending their time on :) - Jarry1250 [Who? Discuss.] 22:00, 9 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Cf. color of the bikeshed ... Regards, HaeB (talk) 06:15, 10 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

RIP - Hideous orange colour. As ugly as it is, I'm going to miss it. On a related note, I like the new powered by mediawiki button. Bawolff (talk) 18:20, 9 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The signpost kinda missed that, huh? You can thank Kevin Ingersoll for submitting that (into the public domain) via OTRS. See File:Poweredby mediawiki 88x31.png and File:Wikimedia-button-for-homepage.png. Killiondude (talk) 18:50, 9 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think we'll have to think about ways to make new messages more visible for new users irrespective of the background color. Over the years I've seen lots of anecdotal evidence (individual users saying they didn't notice the bar for months) that it's not an intuitive mechanism.--Eloquence* 19:04, 9 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That's kind of surprising, I can't imagine people going around for months without noticing what's this giant ugly yellow bar taking up all my screen real estate. Bawolff (talk) 04:37, 10 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Many people have very good visual filters for stuff that doesn't appear to be relevant to them. It's how we manage to survive horrible, cluttered websites. :-) --Eloquence* 18:54, 10 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I personally like orange (and vector, for vector haters) rather than blue. If they can't have orange, do lime, but please, sky blue is way not eye-catching. WikiCopter (radio • sorties • images • lost • defense • attack) 23:07, 10 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the graph :) -- hashar —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.227.209.14 (talk) 16:12, 11 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • I don't understand why a color change is even needed? Is it necessary? There's nothing wrong with the current message bar. -- œ™ 01:17, 12 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    It makes them feel like they're doing something. Gurch (talk) 20:23, 12 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • That's why I never switched over to Vector skin. I just like the "retro" feel of using monobook and also because I'm familiar with the sidebars, layouts, and the buttons. OhanaUnitedTalk page 04:26, 13 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      Indeed, I often feel that people incorrectly assume that Vector was supposed to help established editors. It wasn't, and it's no wonder some people decided to switch back, which is totally understandable (personally, I prefer Vector, but there you go). Gurch probably has a point (see recent discussions on code deployment times, for example). - Jarry1250 [Who? Discuss.] 13:29, 13 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I prefer Vector too but I just don't see the need for changing the color of the new message bar.. why now?? If they wanted it to mesh with the rest of Vector's color scheme why didn't they do it then? -- Ϫ 19:31, 14 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]


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