Evolving the MediaWiki platform: Why we replaced Tidy with a HTML5 parser

Three years ago, the Wikimedia Foundation's Parsing Team decided to replace Tidy, a tool to fix HTML errors, with a HTML5-based tool. Here's what we did in that time period, and what kind of complexities we faced in changing pieces of the technical infrastructure powering Wikimedia wikis.

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A mockup of the new page previews feature, using the English Wikipedia's article on the Andromedia Galaxy.

Here’s everything we published from the design, development, and data process for the page previews feature

As an open and transparent organization, most of our documentation is placed online, able to be viewed and emulated by anyone. Here's a list of the documentation for one of our recently released features.

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It’s now easier to craft content for mobile devices: Responsive web design at the Wikipedia scale

A technology for editors to format content for mobile presentation.

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Improving MediaWiki’s documentation and localization practices

We constantly talk about the importance of projects like Wikipedia, but have you ever thought about the hidden things that make it all possible?

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What galleries, libraries, archives, and museums can teach us about multimedia metadata on Wikimedia Commons

Upcoming changes to Wikimedia Commons will make it easier to add, update, and find important information about individual files and entire collections. New research helps us understand what to improve, and why it matters.

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Wikimedia Foundation funds six Outreachy interns for round 15

Please join us in welcoming six new Outreachy interns to Wikimedia from Brazil, Cameroon, Germany, and India!

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You can now add automatically generated citations to millions of books on Wikipedia

Wikipedia editors can now draw on WorldCat, the world’s largest database of books, to generate citations on Wikipedia thanks to a collaboration between OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) and the Wikimedia Foundation's Wikipedia Library program.

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“It pays itself back in dividends”: NASA and MediaWiki, a natural pairing

The wiki's importance to the team became clear when the unthinkable happened—the team’s server crashed. It was then that the group realised how fundamental this wiki project, launched by three engineers and grown by countless others, had become in their daily routines.

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How we made editing Wikipedia twice as fast

The creator of the wiki, Ward Cunningham, wanted to make it fast and easy to edit web pages. Cunningham named his software after a Hawaiian word for “quick.” That’s why the Wikimedia Foundation is happy to report that editing Wikipedia is now twice as quick. Over the last six months we deployed a new technology that speeds up MediaWiki, Wikipedia’s underlying PHP-based code. HipHop Virtual Machine, or HHVM, reduces [...]

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