Topics from the past edit

Sept 13: Discernatron & BM25 demo / luncheon
- Went really well
- Got a bit of questionable data (as expected)
- Solitaire UI was well-received
- Unsurprisingly, people didn’t like having to score so many results
Updates from Product/Tech meetings last week?
- It was a very good meeting; many want it to happen 2x/year
- Didn’t change our plans dramatically, but raised awareness of other work in the foundation that we need to pay attention to (e.g. services offline work)
- Requirements for generalized A/B test platform are being collected now (contact Nuria if you are interested)
  - Would allow multiple simultaneous buckets that don’t interfere w/each other
Reading web is “Improving search exp in mobile web”
- Dan will research this
Reading web is “Shipping wikidata descriptions in mobile web to some wikis”
- Dan will research this
Ops offsite Sept 26-30, Guillaume will have limited availability

Announcements, Information, Questions edit

[wikitech-l] As of Sept 20: tl;dr: All wikis are staying at 1.28.0-wmf.18 for now
- Yuri pointed out this handy tool: https://tools.wmflabs.org/versions/
From SoS and REMINDER email from GregG:
- Due to the Wikimedia Technical Operations Team having their team offsite that week and generally being less than normally available there will be no non-emergency deploys the week of September 26th (aka: next week)
From GregG email:
- The week of October 17th will be a "no train deploys" week
[Engineering] Sept 20: “it is now required to include any long running tasks in the deployment calendar.”
- Some unclarity about what this really means
[Engineering] Sept 21, from Nuria: “Scaleconf is looking for someone that can speak as to our philosophy woes, ideas and issues when it comes to scaling Wikipedia. Sounds like they are happy to fly the speaker to Cape Town”
Experiment with larger search sprint planning meetings started Sept 20; making them longer will start Sept 27
Dev Summit 2017 is Jan 9-11.
- Not yet clear who should attend.
- Awaiting details from the organizers; current plan is "by invitation only"
- If you’re really interested in going, let Katie know this week
All-hands 2017 is Jan 12-13.
- Assumption is that all Discovery full-timers will be invited; await further details

Are we blocked?

Are we blocking? (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/blocked-on-search/)

Other dependencies (in either direction) which don’t need to be called out as “blocked” (e.g. are progressing smoothly, have no urgency, etc.)

(Status below last updated 2016-09-21. Completed/dropped goals are not shown.)

Search
- Make BM25 algorithm the default
  - (No increase in zero results rate or decrease in search user engagement rate)
  - Won’t happen this quarter; should be early Oct
- Evaluate and devise plan for using cross-project indices, which would allow users to search across all projects in any given language.
  - Basically done; working on details
Interactive: Maps/Graphs/...
- Make <maplink> tag available for all wiki projects, and <mapframe> available everywhere except Wikipedia.
  - <maplink> DONE!
  - <mapframe> DONE
- Offer community a way to migrate away from GeoHack
  - Yellow status. Unlikely to be in the condition we had hoped.
Portal
- Graduate translations for sister wiki project descriptive text into production
  - Have been blocked, but not any more. On track.
- Continue to update article stats on a regular basis (last updated: Sep 14)
  - DONE for Q1

Next Showcase (“CREDIT”): Scheduled October 5
- Signup: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/CREDIT
Next All-Discovery retro October 10