Wikimania and some Diff updates

It’s been a while since we’ve talked about Diff and we wanted to give folks an update and let you know our plans for Wikimania.

First, we’ll still be publishing your posts, but some of our team (Movement Communications) will be in Singapore supporting – and participating in – Wikimania. This means our publishing will be a bit slower for a few weeks, until 30 August. If something is urgent, please reach out to the team at diff@wikimedia.org.

We’ll be reporting from Wikimania with daily recaps, highlights, interviews, and photos. If you see anyone from the team at Wikimania – in person or online – please say hello!

Updates

Second, we have some updates to share. The team has been busy keeping things running, adding some features and fixing some bugs.

• Fixed an issue where non-admins were seeing administrative banners. Thanks to TheDJ for bringing this to our attention!
• We updated all of our documentation and are now in the process of having it translated into seven languages.
• The date a post was published in right-to-left languages now displays the date in the correct order.
• Sticky posts no longer appear duplicated when the post appears on the grid of posts on the home page.
• The Diff search is now using a different engine. This engine favors more recent posts and allows for queries that include categories, tags, and author names.
• Since late last year we’ve added support for new languages upon community request. Estremeñu, Euskera, Galician, Igbo, Javanese, Kiswahili, Lombard, Tagalog, Wayuunaiki, and Mirandés. That brings the number of languages that Diff supports up to 73.
• Added a preview of the community calendar to the Diff homepage and individual posts. This should bring more visibility to your events and the calendar in general.

Upcoming work

As we head into the latter half of the year we’re working on a few improvements to the calendar. Making it easier to filter by region, adding an optional tag for secondary languages, and having tags appear more predominantly on events. One request we’re working on is making it easier to search for languages to add to an event as well. We’re also investigating the ability to import and sync events from Meetup, Eventbrite, and Google calendar.

Search on Diff is also something we want to improve. Right now the search is separated by language. We’re working on the ability to search across all languages. We’re also working on making it more clear in the results what is a post, page, or event.

Our translation workflow – where readers can click on the “Translate This Post” link to start a translation – is also seeing some improvements. In the first version of this feature you had to start from a post that is in English. We’re working to open this workflow up so you can start from any post and translate to any language Diff supports.

If you see anything amiss, or have ideas for improving Diff, please do get in touch. We know there’s more to do and appreciate everyone who’s bugged us (that’s a bug joke) about an idea or issue.

Thank you

“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”

David McCullough

We want to highlight the work of a few contributors here on Diff. Most notably the work of Eugene Ormandy in publishing about their work in the Japanese community. Learn about the evolution of BIG BOX Takadanobaba or creating CC-licensed memes on Commons, or why you should edit articles on topics you’re not interested in.

Also a shout out to Sebastian Wallroth for taking the time to translate so many posts into German, including this over 6,000 word essay on search!

We appreciate everyone who takes the time to write and share their experiences, success, challenges, and milestones here on Diff. Just in the last quarter alone (April-June), we’ve seen 456 posts from 257 authors. That’s about five posts a day!

Quick Diff stats

In case you’re curious, in the last quarter Diff had 51,144 visitors and 108,230 views for an average of 562 visitors per day from nearly all parts of the world. Thirty nine events were added to the community calendar in the same quarter. So far in 2023, Diff has seen 278,223 views from over 152,000 visitors. Search engines were our largest referral source of traffic. We now have over 890 subscribers who receive every published post in their inbox.

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