IRC office hours/Office hours 2015-12-17

<poem style="font-family:monospace,Courier;background:#F2F2F2"> Time: 19:00-20:00 UTC Channel: #wikimedia-office Timestamps are in IST.

19:01:37 <rdaiccherlb> Hi there, welcome to the office hour for the Discovery Dept at the WMF: 19:01:38 <rdaiccherlb> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery 19:01:57 <tfinc> thanks for having us rdaiccherlb 19:02:45 <rdaiccherlb> tfinc, Deskana, ebernhardson are formally here, though many other Discovery folks are probably in the channel at the moment 19:02:57 * MaxSem waves 19:03:17 * tfinc waves back to Max and thanks him for his work on Maps 19:03:34 <Deskana> MapMax 19:03:48 * SMalyshev is here, informally 19:04:00 <rdaiccherlb> Or formally :) 19:04:10 <SMalyshev> semi-formally 19:04:57 <rdaiccherlb> Discovery was formed in April 2015 within the Foundation, and is dedicated to improving search and discovery throughout the projects. 19:05:41 <tfinc> Discovery is really interest because in some ways were a new group and in others were continuing the good work that previous staff and volunteers did 19:06:07 <tfinc> we're certainly thankful for the work that chad, nick, and many others did before us 19:07:07 <quiddity> nik* ;) 19:07:16 <tfinc> quiddity: always gets me :) 19:07:46 <tfinc> Maps has been really interesting lately as we've seen really good collaboration with the WikiVoyage community 19:08:13 <westonnh> hello Discovery! 19:08:26 <tfinc> and we're looking to expand to more WikiVoyage projects going forward https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2015-16_Q3_Goals 19:08:36 <tfinc> big props to yurik and MaxSem for getting us here 19:10:20 <westonnh> Using the beta maps on Android has been fun - what other types of projects are being built with the service tfinc 19:11:28 <tfinc> westonnh: yeah, we've seen a pretty good traffic increase as a result of the beta launch http://searchdata.wmflabs.org/maps/ , we doubled 19:12:40 <tfinc> right now were focused on wikivoyage and really providing the best experience for that community as its such a natural fit. we've had more and more conversations about what maps would look like in Wikipedia but we'll need to think about how to scale it for it 19:12:59 <tfinc> westonnh: we've had good use on several WikiVoyage pages 19:13:07 <Deskana> Here's an example of a map on Wikivoyage backed by our tile server: https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Cranbrook 19:13:13 <MaxSem> the next goal for the maps team is https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Kartographer that would make it easy for communities to use our tiles 19:13:33 <tfinc> i'm excited not only to see maps present but to see how people are overlaying different data types like transit, poi, etc 19:13:38 <Deskana> Editors on Wikivoyage are slowly adopting our tile server as the standard. Ultimately, the rate at which they do so is up to them, so we're taking feedback on what's missing. 19:14:30 <rdaiccherlb> Are there any Wikivoyage users in this channel? 19:16:59 <rdaiccherlb> Maybe we should move on to Wikidata query service? 19:17:22 <tfinc> happy to as Stas has done some really good work creating a bridge between our users and wikidata 19:18:26 <tfinc> we've seen some really cool CLI's show up https://github.com/mariushoch/asparagus / https://github.com/nichtich/wdq / https://metacpan.org/pod/App::wdq 19:18:36 <tfinc> and we've seen light but good organic growth 19:19:00 <SMalyshev> btw the UI on query.wikidata.org has been improved significantly lately 19:19:10 <tfinc> we've seen that coupling WDQS and WikiData lets us explore and think more about natural language search in the future 19:19:30 <tfinc> SMalyshev: can you point us to the natural language query tool that was written ? 19:19:38 <SMalyshev> and another improvement is pending - pagination/sorting tables, see http://wdm-rdf.wmflabs.org/ 19:20:10 <SMalyshev> tfinc: https://tools.wmflabs.org/ppp-sparql/ is one 19:20:26 <tfinc> SMalyshev: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2015-16_Q3_Goals#Wikidata_Query_Service says we're looking at Blazegraph 2.0, what new features / upgrades are you excited about ? 19:20:51 <SMalyshev> https://tools.wmflabs.org/ppp-sparql/#who%20is%20the%20mayor%20of%20New%20York 19:21:10 <SMalyshev> tfinc: geosearch mainly 19:22:04 <SMalyshev> hopefully soon we could make queries that include geographic locations 19:23:14 <tfinc> SMalyshev: that would be really powerful for our mobile users and allows us to start thinking more not just about a text corpus search tf-idf and more about relevance 19:27:39 <rdaiccherlb> Another project that you've started to work on is the wikipedia.org portal. 19:28:06 <rdaiccherlb> Please, no scrolling marquees :P 19:28:42 <tfinc> we'd like to think that the web is past marquees, counters, and construction signs :) 19:29:46 <tfinc> all of us were really surprised at the metrics for the portal. 60% of people who visit wikipedia.org don't take any additional action. 30% use the search button. 10% use the language links 19:29:50 <tfinc> http://searchdata.wmflabs.org/portal/#action_breakdown 19:30:42 <tfinc> Moiz and team has been working toward trying to understand why the abandonment has been so high 19:30:49 <rdaiccherlb> It looks like the "no action" line dropped on the 8th. 19:31:12 <rdaiccherlb> then "search" increased on the same day 19:31:21 <tfinc> Deskana: i'll let you speak to the data that is coming in 19:31:59 <Deskana> Indeed. We launched a test where we changed the search box, but there was a data collection problem with it. The changes are probably artefacts of the data collection issue. 19:32:16 <Deskana> Artifact, even. 19:33:00 <tfinc> wikipedia.org gets over 150+ million pages views a week just to put those %'s into perspective 19:33:53 <tfinc> we have a number of tests that are being worked on right now that we hope to release in January 19:34:30 <tfinc> but outside of the portal we do have a test that is going out today that ebernhardson can speak to 19:34:55 <ebernhardson> we are pushing out a replacement for the search as you type that goes in the top right corner of all wiki* pages 19:35:41 <ebernhardson> the previous implementation was a strict prefix search, meaning it could not handle typos beyond redirects that were manually curated by our users. This new completion suggester finds pages up to 2 single character edits away from existing pages 19:35:53 <rdaiccherlb> Where can people read more about that? 19:36:32 <Deskana> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CirrusSearch/CompletionSuggester 19:37:33 <ebernhardson> This is a beta feature This is intially a beta feature, it is currently live on the beta cluster ( http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/ ) and will be live on all production wiki's in about 5 hours 19:38:08 <tfinc> we're really excited to see users opt in and give us feedback about what the experience is like 19:39:44 <tfinc> outside of this test we have a page on mw.org to think about the future of where discovery is going https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/RFC 19:40:30 <tfinc> there are a number of community areas that we're discussing and need your feedback 19:41:23 <tfinc> topics that have come up include public curation of relevance and potential boosting per project, thinking about new data sources alongside OSM, and what else we can do for multi project and multi lingual search 19:41:32 <tfinc> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Discovery/RFC <--- do jump in 19:41:49 <legoktm> are things like the beta feature going to be advertised in tech news? 19:41:49 <tfinc> ostriches: thanks for jumping into the discussion 19:42:02 <Deskana> legoktm: Yes 19:42:33 <Deskana> legoktm: I spoke to Johan to make sure it'd feature in there. :-) 19:42:33 <quiddity> it is, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/2015/52 19:43:27 <legoktm> great :) 19:44:13 <tfinc> for those search api consumers out there we have a dev summit tasks to find out what work / what doesnt https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T113540 19:46:37 <rdaiccherlb> It's been pretty quiet today - but where can people connect with Discovery on different projects? 19:47:02 <tfinc> you can find us on irc in #wikimedia-discovery and on email at discovery@lists.wikimedia.org 19:47:08 <Theo10011> I am new or I guess old. What exactly is discovery? 19:47:46 <tfinc> Theo10011: we're the beginning of most peoples journey on Wikipedia, a lot of search really 19:48:12 <Theo10011> So the search functionality….team? 19:48:23 <Theo10011> I mean is it a department or a project 19:48:30 <tfinc> Theo10011: we own the elastic search cluster which powers search across all project, we created the maps service to allow for new discovery of content, and we launched wdqs to better bridge the gap between wikidata and our users 19:48:35 <Deskana> Theo10011: We're a department. :-) 19:48:35 <rdaiccherlb> It's a department 19:48:50 <Deskana> Theo10011: There's more full info here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery 19:50:53 <tfinc> Theo10011: how do you feel about your search experience on Wikipedia right now? 19:54:51 <rdaiccherlb> Or maybe we can follow up onwiki :) 19:55:37 <legoktm> So the maps are only being used on Wikivoyage right now? 19:56:02 <tfinc> legoktm: correct. their live on RU wiki and EN is actively looking at what's missing before they adopt them 19:56:07 <Deskana> legoktm: The Android app makes very prominent usage of them as well. 19:57:08 <rdaiccherlb> We have a few minutes left, and it's been pretty quiet.. 19:57:10 <Deskana> legoktm: But yeah, their usage is quite limited right now. That's why our investment in maps in terms of staff time is pretty modest (~1.5 FTE) 19:57:44 <Deskana> ( For those that aren't aware of what FTE means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-time_equivalent ) 19:59:21 <rdaiccherlb> Thanks to those who were watching, and I'm happy to take feedback on how to make these more engaging 20:00:01 <rdaiccherlb> #endmeeting