This week, bugmeister Mark Hershberger issued a call for more developers routinely using right-to-left (RTL) interfaces to get involved in MediaWiki ("Entries in Life" blog). The main MediaWiki interface in languages which are written right-to-left is virtually a complete mirror-image of that for all other languages (in contrast to the English Wikipedia, the sidebar is on the right, for example, and Vector's search box on the left). This can cause problems when changes are developed and tested solely on left-to-right (LTR) wikis, as is often the case at the moment.
“ | Despite [internationalisation] support, MediaWiki and Wikipedia lack in some pretty important areas. One of the areas that this is most obvious is in languages that are written right-to-left (RTL) instead of left-to-right (LTR). We do try to fix these problems, but almost all of our developers work in LTR languages, so we don't notice the problems as quickly. The problems don't stare us in the face every day and wiki users in RTL languages like العربية (Arabic), فارسی (Farsi), and עברית (Hebrew) don't have proper support. | ” |
He added, "if you're an RTL developer, let me tell you clearly: We want you!".
On 27 April, the Wikimedia Techblog carried an update from developer Nimish Gautam about the progress of the Account Creation Improvement Project (ACIP). In particularly, the update included details on some of the technological developments that had accompanied their attempts to buck the (largely) downwards trend in the number of users registering and editing on the English Wikipedia over the past couple of months.
Among these, Gautam noted the deployment of the CustomUserSignup extension on 27 April. The extension allows the destination of the "Log in/create account" link to be varied between visitors, allowing the ACIP team to customise "the look and messaging of these screens to see what kind of impact that has on new editors" more easily than before, when the page had to be changed for all users for two days at a time. In addition to the raw statistics on how many potential editors successfully make it through the registration process, the project is also collecting data on users' activity levels after registering via a tracking cookie associated with a browser session rather than with an individual user or user account. Information collected includes:
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In addition, the project has also utilised an improvement to the ClickTracking MediaWiki extension, which helps to collect anonymous information on users editing habits, to allow multiple tests to be run in parallel, rather than sequentially. As of time of writing, ACP1, ACP2 and ACP3 are identical, but this will be changed shortly.
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. Those interested in the release of MediaWiki 1.17 to external sites should take note of this thread, which suggests a beta release is imminent.
Discuss this story
As a user of the Farsi, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedias (despite being unable to read any of the languages) I would suggest that many possible layout problems would be revealed by simply using the RTL layout with familiar text. Having said that the mix of RTL and LTR occurs on all projects and an introduction to techniques and use of ‏ and ‎ (((Rlm)) and ((Lrm)) for bi-directional text would be useful to many of us. I am not even sure whether the difficulties I have with the text immediately after rtl text "jumping" before it are a feature or a bug. Rich Farmbrough, 11:49, 3 May 2011 (UTC).[reply]