Community Tech/Monthly reports

October 2015

In the Community Tech team, we're constantly striving to make the world better by creating helpful things and fixing unhelpful things. We are basically superheroes, and we wear capes at all times. Here's what we've been up to this month.

• We built a new Special:GadgetUsage report that's live on all wikis; it lists gadgets used on the wiki, ordered by the number of users. Not to be clickbait or anything, but THE RESULTS WILL SHOCK YOU. Check it out at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:GadgetUsage or your own favorite wiki.

• HotCat is one of the most popular gadgets -- see: GadgetUsage report above -- which helps people remove, change and add categories. We fixed HotCat on over 100 wikis where it was broken, including Wikipedias in Egyptian Arabic, Ripuarian, Buginese and Navajo, and five projects in Farsi -- Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikivoyage and Wiktionary. You're welcome, Farsi! (More info on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:HotCat)

• CitationBot is a combination tool/on-wiki gadget that helps to expand incomplete citations. We got it running again after the https change, updated it, and fixed some outstanding bugs, including handling multiple author names. (See http://tools.wmflabs.org/citations/ for more info.)

• We also built a prototype of a new tool called RevisionSlider, which helps editors navigate through diff pages without having to go back and forth to the history page. The prototype is live now on test.wp, and we'd love to get your feedback -- visit https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/RevisionSlider

Coming up in November:

• We're starting a big cross-project Community Wishlist Survey on November 9th, inviting contributors from any wiki to propose and vote on the features and fixes they'd like our team to work on. The survey page is on Meta, at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey -- please join us there on Monday to add your proposals.

• While that's going on, we're currently considering work in a few different areas, including completing Gadgets 2.0 and building some modules to help WikiProjects.

You can keep track of what we're working on by watching Community Tech/News on Meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/News -- and feel free to leave questions or comments on the talk page. Thanks!