More Improvements to Diff

Following up from our last update in May, we’d like to share a few recent improvements made to the site. This batch of updates is mostly around writing and submitting articles, and substantial improvements to the translation interface.

Authoring posts

• When submitting a post for review, the button now says “Submit for Review” instead of “Publish”. That’s hopefully a little less confusing (and less stressful!).
• When submitting a post for publication we now explicitly note that the submission will be licensed under Creative Commons 3.0. Authors will need to acknowledge this when submitting posts and events.
• When writing a post, authors can now add their affiliation in their profile under “Biographical Info” and it will appear in the byline of an article. Like this one! This affiliation can be added for any language that Diff supports.
• Author archives (example) have nice clean URLs (with redirects for old URLs) and the author affiliation will be displayed if present.
• When writing a post, the number of categories to wade through has been limited to the six that appear in the site navigation.
  • Many of the previous categories were from the older blog archives, and are not consistent. Tags can be added freely to all posts, and are encouraged!
• The issue with multiple languages appearing when viewing a list of posts in the dashboard has been fixed. This issue made the list of posts very narrow and hard to read. The language column has been removed.
  • The list of languages and options to translate still exist in the “Language” sidebar when editing a post.

Translating posts

• Articles now have a link at the top to indicate an article can be translated.
• There is now a translation workflow that can be accessed easily by anyone. Clicking on the “Translate This Post” link will start a process to translate the current article. You can log in with your Wikimedia account, select a language to translate the current post into, and the editor will load with a copy of the post. You can then translate the post and submit for review. 
• All language versions of Diff now also show English posts alongside the current language. This makes readers of the site in any language more aware of articles that may not be in the current language. And more apparent that an article needs to be translated (example). (This feature was changed back after community feedback and a few bugs were discovered. The team is evaluating).

Other

• There’s now a single Portuguese language version of the site instead of separate PT and PT-BR versions.
• Upon community request (ok, it was just SJ who asked) we now have an archive of all blog headlines going back to 2008 on Meta-wiki. This will be updated quarterly.
• Lots of small updates to the software (WordPress and related plugins) that make the site easier to use; like more consistent buttons and colors across the site, and fixing little issues such as disabling “Liking” comments after comments are closed.
  • Shameless plug: we included an update to the most recent version of the Wikipedia Preview plugin.

Coming in the future

• We are working on updating the documentation for Diff and making translations available in other languages.
• Improved search results. We’re approaching 5,000 published articles in the archive. A better search makes it easier to find information on the site.
• We’re working on making it easier to add attribution information for photo credits in the editor. So that we are following good attribution practices. 

Have a suggestion? See a problem? Drop us a note.