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IRC office hours/Office hours 2012-11-21

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IRC chat log of Language Engineering team Office hours on Universal Language Selector, Upcoming Language team test day, India events. Date: 2012-11-21.

(10:57:54 IST) #wikimedia-office: The topic for #wikimedia-office is: IRC office hours – https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours | Channel is logged
(11:00:24 IST) siebrand: Hey everyone.
(11:00:42 IST) siebrand: This is the Office hours for the Wikimedia Language Engineering team.
(11:00:48 IST) siebrand: We have an office hours every month.
(11:00:59 IST) siebrand: This time we haven't been as prepared as we've been the past 5-10 times.
(11:01:15 IST) siebrand: Unfortunately our communications person is not available at the moment.
(11:01:26 IST) siebrand: We hope he'll be back again with us soon.
(11:01:50 IST) siebrand: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-i18n/2012-November/000563.html stated that this office hours would start an hour ago; that was obviously wrong.
(11:02:04 IST) siebrand: Our apologies for that. We should have noticed and corrected that.
(11:02:18 IST) siebrand: We promise to better check our communications in the future.
(11:03:00 IST) siebrand: We have three topics announced, and because of Srikanth's absence, we have to drop one.
(11:03:06 IST) siebrand: 1. Universal Language Selector updates.
(11:03:23 IST) siebrand: 2. Upcoming Language team test day
(11:03:36 IST) siebrand: This topic will be skipped. We hope to pick it up as soon as possible, though, because we think it may have a lot of potential.
(11:03:46 IST) siebrand: 3. India events
(11:03:57 IST) siebrand: Please feel free to ask questions when they arise.
(11:04:25 IST) siebrand: So on ULS.
(11:04:33 IST) siebrand: We're very happy that Wikidata is using it.
(11:04:53 IST) siebrand: User language selection, web fonts and input methods are all live at www.wikidata.org.
(11:05:16 IST) siebrand: There are some minor and major issues that need to be addressed based on the deployment there.
(11:06:20 IST) siebrand: The Wikimedia cache infrastructure needs to be updated to do what ULS wants it to do: Provide anonymous users with a user interface in the the language they prefer as indicated by their browser.
(11:06:26 IST) siebrand: Also known as "Accept-Language".
(11:06:52 IST) siebrand: preilly may look into that, but he's been off for a few days and we're still waiting for details and a time line.
(11:07:45 IST) siebrand: Smaller issues are mostly related to CSS of the main screens of ULS (styling being inherited and causing awkward display) and JavaSccript
(11:08:18 IST) siebrand: The Input Method icon (a small keyboard) sometimes doesn't disappear once an element is removed from the page (or DOM)
(11:09:46 IST) siebrand: Any questions on ULS?
(11:09:55 IST) siebrand: preilly: Anything you can contribute yet?
(11:10:54 IST) siebrand: okay. Next subject.
(11:11:33 IST) siebrand: Language team test day: We're planning on doing a monthly test day on language features. This needs to be documented well, so people can actually participate.
(11:11:45 IST) sumanah: cool!
(11:11:52 IST) sumanah: qgil: ^ this is what I wanted you to hear about :-)
(11:12:14 IST) alolita: its actually a test hour on a predetermined date every month :-)
(11:12:24 IST) siebrand: As said, we had planned to do all preparation so this could be done this weekend, but because of an unforeseen lack of capacity this isn't going to happen in the next two weeks, I think.
(11:12:50 IST) siebrand: Still, it's important enough to get the bugs in, and it's a core part of getting and keeping Language team members engaged.
(11:13:01 IST) alolita: +1
(11:13:17 IST) sumanah: siebrand: would this be on a particular topic or focus area in each session?
(11:13:31 IST) siebrand: So we'll probably prioritise it in the next sprint (to start next Tuesday), and have our test day within 3 weeks.
(11:13:35 IST) qgil: siebrand, happy to help as this fits in one of my current top priorities  :)
(11:13:40 IST) siebrand: sumanah: That's the idea.
(11:13:50 IST) alolita: sumanah: yes - we will select a particular topic every test day
(11:13:57 IST) siebrand: to have preset test plans that people can play out for their languges.
(11:14:06 IST) sumanah: sounds reasonable to me
(11:14:14 IST) sumanah: about how many volunteers do you aim for at first?
(11:14:20 IST) alolita: qgil: great thanks!
(11:14:23 IST) siebrand: I'd be happy to have 5 initially.
(11:14:27 IST) sumanah: I'm curious about what the measures for success will be
(11:14:34 IST) alolita: sumanah: no more than 10
(11:14:42 IST) siebrand: I'd be ecstatic to have 25 by end of fiscal year.
(11:14:50 IST) alolita: me too :-)
(11:14:57 IST) Nemo_bis: so many :o
(11:15:12 IST) siebrand: Structured community assisted QA would be huge for our products, IMO.
(11:15:19 IST) Nemo_bis: how many did previous bug triages/bugsquads have?
(11:15:35 IST) sankarshan: A greater coverage of the test cases for each area of focus and, contributed test cases+ bug reports provide a reasonable early measure of success/failure
(11:15:43 IST) siebrand: Once the current QA people have set up their infrastructures, we'll certainly try to get them involved in this, too.
(11:15:47 IST) santhosh: sumanah: this idea is mainly inspired by https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days
(11:15:54 IST) alolita: sankarshan: hi! thanks for joining in
(11:16:11 IST) siebrand: Documentation will be important. A few other FOSS projects (Fedora) for example, use MediaWiki to document test results.
(11:16:12 IST) alolita: this was an outcome of our language summit in pune
(11:16:26 IST) siebrand: We're planning to adopt their templates and structure to not reinvent the wheel.
(11:16:29 IST) sumanah: yay
(11:16:43 IST) alolita: and work with the fedora team closely
(11:17:31 IST) sumanah: that's great
(11:17:34 IST) sumanah: Adam Williamson?
(11:17:35 IST) siebrand: Any other questions about this subject? As said, this is just a concept, so your valuable input now can lead to it being taken into accout within two weeks ;).
(11:18:08 IST) alolita: indic and general l10n testing for fedora is done by the redhat india team
(11:18:42 IST) sumanah: how will we be publicizing this event?
(11:18:53 IST) sumanah: will the language support teams be involved? I think they got renamed, forgot the new name
(11:19:02 IST) sumanah: who is leading it?
(11:19:05 IST) alolita: on all our irc and mailing list
(11:19:12 IST) alolita: srikanth will be leading the effort
(11:19:15 IST) siebrand: Page on mediawiki.org, mediawiki-i18n and wikitech-ambassadors. probably also poking individual Language team members.
(11:19:39 IST) siebrand: sumanah: Language support team -> Language team.
(11:20:20 IST) sumanah: I think I asked about measures for success but that was in the midst of some questions several minutes back :-) still curious
(11:21:28 IST) alolita: measures of success include following through specific use cases and then executing the tests
(11:21:31 IST) siebrand: sumanah: Haven't thought about that yet specifically. KPIs I can think of are # of languages covered, # participants, # bugs reported
(11:21:35 IST) alolita: reporting the results
(11:21:39 IST) sumanah: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/QA/WTA_Test_Plan
(11:21:41 IST) santhosh: sumanah: to get an idea about expected result of test hour/day, please see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2012-09-18_i18n
(11:21:44 IST) sumanah: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Testing_June_2012
(11:21:56 IST) santhosh: That is how Fedora logs the results
(11:22:02 IST) sumanah: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/QA/Strategy
(11:22:24 IST) sumanah: some useful past stuff chrismcmahon made or worked on
(11:22:47 IST) sumanah: siebrand: # of bugs reported, and then, what subset of those are duplicates or not
(11:22:54 IST) ***sumanah looks at Fedora stuff
(11:23:13 IST) sumanah: yup, makes sense
(11:23:28 IST) sumanah: siebrand: also, # of participants who are responsive days, weeks, months after the event
(11:23:48 IST) sumanah: you may want to consider whether to reach out to Weekend Testing as chrismcmahon did for a pool of experienced testers
(11:23:52 IST) siebrand: we have very limited capacity on the team.
(11:23:54 IST) alolita: sumanah: we are specifically focusing on i18n language completion tests - so beyond general testing strategy we plan to tune the testing further
(11:24:06 IST) siebrand: I wouldn't want to have to spend hours and hours tallying and reporting.
(11:24:09 IST) sumanah: if you have well-defined scope and setup instructions then it's ok that the WTA folks don't have as much Wikimedia domain knowledge
(11:24:35 IST) sumanah: siebrand: oh I'm not saying "measure all these things" so much as "when you decide what to measure, these are ideas you could pick"
(11:24:47 IST) siebrand: alrightly then :)
(11:24:57 IST) sumanah: siebrand: and one last of those: # of *new* tech contributors vs ones we had already been engaged with.
(11:25:06 IST) siebrand: Anyway. We'll of course be course correcting iteratively.
(11:25:10 IST) sumanah: I'm happy to help with that one if I get the list of participants afterwards
(11:25:13 IST) sumanah: yes, mais oui
(11:25:15 IST) siebrand: cool.
(11:25:20 IST) alolita: great sumanah
(11:25:26 IST) sumanah: just figured I'd slosh a lot of data and ideas and links to past work now :)
(11:25:50 IST) siebrand: Just an intermezzo: translatewiki.net now supports translation of Etherpad-lite. Nikerabbit took care of that in the past week.
(11:25:54 IST) sumanah: yay!
(11:26:01 IST) sumanah: that's great
(11:26:10 IST) siebrand: In the first day of being available for translation, localisation levels for Etherpad lite have doubled.
(11:26:15 IST) ***chrismcmahon is lurking, but we discussed community testing some with qgil recently, there are some reasonable approaches pioneered by Weekend Testers and others
(11:26:55 IST) siebrand: Current stats at https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Special:MessageGroupStats/out-etherpad-lite
(11:27:03 IST) alolita: cool
(11:27:29 IST) Nikerabbit: more translations wanted!
(11:27:31 IST) siebrand: chrismcmahon: We're sourcing mainly from translatewiki.net, because there we have a group of engaged people already, which makes it easier.
(11:27:44 IST) ***marktraceur applauds for Etherpad Lite
(11:28:01 IST) siebrand: chrismcmahon: There is a risk of scattering though, and getting THEM to reach out to their respective communities is where the real leverage lies, IMO.
(11:28:32 IST) siebrand: we have to try to make it as easy as possible for them to do that, though. By providing boilerplate texts, etc.
(11:29:06 IST) siebrand: Another thing: We're working on the monthly release of a MediaWiki language extension bundle.
(11:29:20 IST) siebrand: It's currently in alpha/beta. We hope to announce release early next week.
(11:30:10 IST) siebrand: Since the move to git, Wikimedia Foundation has come to care less about third party usage of MediaWiki developments of functionality developed initially for Wikimedia, in our opinoin.
(11:30:36 IST) siebrand: We want to at least provide 3rd party users with a tested and up to date bundle for all kinds of i18n niceness.
(11:30:53 IST) siebrand: Current docs are at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MLEB.
(11:31:32 IST) Nikerabbit: I could use some help with shaking out the git tags/branches stuff and unit testing
(11:31:43 IST) siebrand: The initial release of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle will contain Babel, cldr, CleanChanges, LocalisationUpdate, Translate, and
(11:31:43 IST) siebrand: UniversalLanguageSelector
(11:31:53 IST) siebrand: Please volunteer with Nikerabbit is you want to help shake it down :)
(11:32:07 IST) sumanah: chrismcmahon: do you have bandwidth to advise Nikerabbit on the testing side?
(11:32:09 IST) siebrand: So then our last topic of the day...
(11:32:18 IST) siebrand: India events.
(11:32:18 IST) ***marktraceur giggles because the project used to be called Milkshake
(11:32:35 IST) aharoni: marktraceur: Milkshake is something else.
(11:32:47 IST) marktraceur: aharoni: Oh, really? /me can't keep up anymore
(11:32:48 IST) sumanah: ah yes India events! this is another reason I wanted to bring qgil in :-) to hear about this stuff
(11:32:52 IST) marktraceur: Something changed names
(11:32:57 IST) siebrand: alolita will go through the giant trip we the Language Engineering team and the Mobile team made from 3-12 November.
(11:33:07 IST) sumanah: cool
(11:33:10 IST) marktraceur: And then my foundation for trusting the names of i18n projects was shaken
(11:33:14 IST) chrismcmahon: Nikerabbit: I'm not really much help on unit tests
(11:33:19 IST) ***sumanah was mistaken
(11:33:26 IST) aharoni: Milkshake is several portable JavaScript libraries for internationalization, which don't depend on MediaWiki. jquery.webfonts, jquery.ime, jquery.i18n and jquery.uls.
(11:33:32 IST) siebrand: Here again we're behind on communication because our communications person has become unavailable.
(11:33:56 IST) marktraceur: aharoni: Thanks, I'm educated :)
(11:34:22 IST) aharoni: MediaWiki Language Extensions bundle is, as the name implies, a set of MW extensions that are related to internationalization - Translate, Babel, cldr and a few others.
(11:34:23 IST) sumanah: and we have about the next 25 min for this + any other questions, right?
(11:34:45 IST) siebrand: There are two blog posts on the trip so far. Two more are planned: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/11/16/writing-malayalam-on-wikipedia-just-like-with-pen-and-paper/ and http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/11/16/opensource-language-summit/
(11:34:46 IST) siebrand: sumanah: correct.
(11:35:16 IST) aharoni: marktraceur: The bundle is basically a stable release with integrated installation and configuration instructions. ( Nikerabbit, correct me if I'm wrong.)
(11:36:18 IST) alolita: thanks siebrand - the 2 blog posts were on the language summit and dev camp participation
(11:36:47 IST) alolita: we're in the process of publishing a blog post on the devcamp in bangalore
(11:37:11 IST) alolita: we were very pleased with the output from the working sprints both at the language summit and devcamp
(11:37:40 IST) alolita: the quality and seriousness of the developers at the devcamp was much better than in prior meetups
(11:37:43 IST) Nikerabbit: aharoni: yeas "tune my mediawiki with language support for dummies"
(11:38:01 IST) alolita: it also helped us to be more strict in the screening process for participation at the devcamp
(11:38:55 IST) alolita: i am also in the process of putting together notes from retrospectives done on the language summit with redhat, gnome, kde and other open source project participants
(11:39:30 IST) sumanah: alolita: oooh, glad to hear that this devcamp had better participation and participants -- to what would you attribute that?
(11:39:37 IST) sumanah: location, selection process, timing, topic ....?
(11:39:38 IST) alolita: we had 17 projects (mobile apps and language projects) which were presented and demo'ed at the devcamp
(11:40:03 IST) alolita: sumanah: both location and selection process
(11:40:08 IST) sumanah: nod
(11:40:36 IST) alolita: i was pleasantly surprised at the level of participation we saw for language tools
(11:40:38 IST) Jamesofur|away is now known as Jamesofur
(11:41:15 IST) alolita: we had expected more mobile development but saw excellent participation on language as well as ui/ux design work
(11:41:30 IST) alolita: pau - can you talk a bit about the design projects
(11:41:59 IST) pginer: We did different activities
(11:42:46 IST) pginer: On the one hand, we did rounds of quick sketching with designers to come up with designs for different projects.
(11:42:55 IST) siebrand: We have about 15 minutes left.
(11:43:06 IST) alolita: lots of mockups were done :-)
(11:43:10 IST) pginer: Some of these projects we already had in mind: mobile versions of translation tools
(11:43:51 IST) pginer: other projects came from the development teams in the same room
(11:44:40 IST) pginer: and we colaborated with them (commons mobile app, create a mobile home page for accessing relevant Wikipedia articles)
(11:44:59 IST) pginer: and also did some user testing on existing tools.
(11:45:03 IST) Nemo_bis: sumanah: siebrand also took cute photos of each https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Open_Source_Language_Summit_Pune_2012
(11:45:10 IST) siebrand: ;)
(11:45:28 IST) sumanah: oh how great!
(11:45:34 IST) siebrand: (thanks to Yuvi's camera)
(11:45:51 IST) alolita: that was siebrand practising his portrait taking skills :D with a fixed lens
(11:46:40 IST) sumanah: oh Karunakar was there!
(11:47:21 IST) aharoni: the two projects I enjoyed the most at the DevCamp:
(11:47:42 IST) alolita: yes karunakar was there :-) (have known him for many years)
(11:47:47 IST) aharoni: 1. Hacking MathJax to allow translating its menus to other languages. (Currently it's hardcoded English.)
(11:48:13 IST) aharoni: It was basically done by one of the participants, and we are talking with MathJax devs to submit it upstream.
(11:49:06 IST) aharoni: 2. Creating a mobile main page for the Urdu Wikipedia. Theoretically it's just means to add a couple of id attributes to HTML elements on the web page, but the very messy code and the mix of right-to-left and left-to-right text there made it very hard.
(11:49:36 IST) aharoni: We eventually did it, with a lot of help from an Urdu speaker who was participating.
(11:50:03 IST) sumanah: yay
(11:50:06 IST) sumanah: that's great!
(11:50:29 IST) sumanah: already shared with the other RTL languages as a possible example?
(11:50:37 IST) alolita: yup
(11:51:04 IST) sumanah: cooool
(11:51:04 IST) aharoni: Well... there isn't much to share, except to call upon everybody to clean up the code of the main pages. And that's probably futile :)
(11:52:45 IST) dungodung|away is now known as dungodung
(11:52:50 IST) siebrand: 5 minutes to go.
(11:52:50 IST) malkum: Guys... I started translating etherpad in telugu and did some progress from past 1/2 hour. I am stuck at one point. I have to type TH in telugu.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_language. I am not able to ...any help
(11:52:50 IST) pginer: The design for commons app I mentioned before can be seen at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Commons_media_discovery_app.png
(11:52:51 IST) aharoni: Oh, and another cool thing!
(11:52:53 IST) aharoni: https://github.com/ershad/jquery.ime.chrome_extension
(11:53:19 IST) alolita: the chrome extension is very cool
(11:53:21 IST) Nemo_bis: hi dungodung
(11:53:27 IST) aharoni: One participant took our IMEs (the new version of Narayam) and made it into a Google Chrome extension, so they would be usable on all websites.
(11:53:29 IST) siebrand: malkum: Please take this to #mediawiki-i18n and we'll address it there in about 10 minutes, okay?
(11:53:40 IST) malkum: siebrand, Thanks
(11:53:56 IST) dungodung: hey Nemo_bis
(11:53:58 IST) Nemo_bis: aharoni: how does it interact with websites' own features?
(11:54:20 IST) aharoni: Nemo_bis: haven't tested yet :)
(11:54:39 IST) Nemo_bis: aharoni: ah ok, must be tricky
(11:55:17 IST) siebrand: malkum: Quick test gives me "థ్" for th with input method లిప్యంతరీకరణ
(11:55:20 IST) aharoni: Well, I use a similar extension in Firefox to type Russian, and it's usually painless. I'll probably switch to our IME soon.
(11:56:28 IST) alolita: anyone using chrome - please check out this extension and give us your feedback
(11:56:41 IST) alolita: file bugs please :-)
(11:56:45 IST) Nemo_bis: aharoni: wonderufl
(11:56:52 IST) malkum: siebrand, wow its cool... i have to remove the quotation now...am i right?
(11:57:11 IST) sumanah: I want to mention that we're looking for volunteer product managers or advisers https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/11/21/lead-development-process-product-adviser-manager/ for many areas, including Operations requests from the community. It?s not just shell requests. Right now we have 93 open bugs requesting attention from our systems administrators, and those requests could use prioritization and organization.
(11:57:31 IST) sumanah: We especially want people who come from diverse language communities.
(11:57:44 IST) alolita: thanks for sharing sumanah - we will spread the word
(11:57:50 IST) Nemo_bis: sumanah: do you mean "shell" requests?
(11:57:51 IST) sumanah: Thanks Alolita --
(11:58:00 IST) sumanah: Nemo_bis: go ahead and read the post for more details :-)
(11:58:25 IST) Nemo_bis: oh 'ops'
(11:58:40 IST) sumanah: both shell & ops are of interest
(11:58:44 IST) siebrand: Okay. That concludes our office hours for this week.
(11:59:02 IST) sumanah: thanks siebrand
(11:59:09 IST) sumanah: thanks Language engineering folks!
(11:59:14 IST) alolita: thank you all! for joining!

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