This is the weekly update for the week starting 2016-09-05

Discussions

Trey completed the analysis for optimizing language identification for the Dutch Wikipedia (nlwiki). The results were good (F0.5 = 82.3%) but not great. The small proportions of queries in the Romance languages and in German led to many more false positives than true positives and so they had to be excluded. Future work on improving confidence may help.
- We could use help translating (via translatewiki) the relevant "showing results from" messages into Dutch. We'll need English, Chinese, Arabic, Korean, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, and Russian translations.
Analysis team had a discussion on how to use better wording for phrases like "users were 1.07 times more likely to do X" and decided on using phrases similar to "we can expect 2-9 more sessions to click on a search result when they have the new feature"
Search team wrapped up researching the ElasticSearch instabilities on the eqiad search cluster on Aug 6, 2016; nothing conclusive was found.

Events and News

Interactive:
- <maplink> has been enabled on all wikis (announced via email to wikitech-l)
- Geoshapes data service is now integrated into all maps info
Search:
- turned off BM25 A/B test, awaiting analysis
- pushed into production a change that implemented ascii-folding for French
- Improved balance of nodes across rows for ElasticSearch eqiad cluster
Portal:
- Currently blocked on this check-in to gerrit

Our elasticsearch clusters now have "row aware shard allocation". This means that we can theoretically lose one row of servers in our datacenter and still serve search traffic.
Search team sent out a request for comment article that was posted to various Village Pumps asking for it to be translated.
- This was in reference to the cross-wiki search results new functionality and design articles on MediaWiki.

A study came out yesterday showing that giraffes are actually four distinct species, rather than one. (Original article and BBC report.) Of course, the English and German Wikipedia pages on giraffes[1][2] have already been updated!