Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2013/February

January 2013

Wikimedia engineering report, February 2013

March 2013

Engineering metrics in February:

• 110 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
• The total number of unresolved commits went from about 650 to about 830.
• About 69 shell requests were processed.
• Wikimedia Labs now hosts FIX: missing

projects and FIX: missing
users; to date FIX: missing
instances have been created.

Major news in February include:

• Wikimedia Foundation's Wikipedia Zero peojcet got support of the Knight News Challenge grant.
• input methods were made available for jQuery.IME.
• A matrix detailing the requirements and availability of basic and extended features has begun being drawn up.
• Introduction of a new iteration of the Translation Editor within the Extension.
• The Wikimedia mobile web team released the ability log in or create an account and view or add pages to watchlist—all from mobile devices.
• Echo: new notification system for Wikipedia.
• Technical Operations team found to stop problems in their tracks.
• Mobile Hits 3 Billion Monthly Page Views.

Note: We're also proposing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this report that does not assume specialized technical knowledge.

Upcoming events

There are many opportunities for you to get involved and contribute to MediaWiki and technical activities to improve Wikimedia sites, both for coders and contributors with other talents.

For a more complete and up-to-date list, check out the Project:Calendar.

[edit or add events] [] [view credits]

Date	Type	Event	Contact
7 March 2013		QA: General MediaWiki reports Bug Triage	AKlapper, Valeriej
13 March 2013–15 March 2013		QA: Browser automation testing for Wikipedia Search	Zeljko.filipin, Qgil, Cmcmahon
14 March 2013		Lua meets Wikipedia (San Francisco, CA, USA)	Qgil
18 March 2013–22 March 2013		QA: LiquidThreads (LQT) Bug Triage	AKlapper, Valeriej
19 March 2013		Office hour about Wikimedia's issue tracker and Bug management in #wikimedia-office connect	AKlapper
20 March 2013–22 March 2013		SMWCon Spring 2013 (New York City, USA)
22 March 2013–24 March 2013		LibrePlanet (Cambridge, MA, USA)
31 March 2013–7 April 2013		Offline Hackathon 2013 (Paris, France)

Personnel

Work with us

Are you looking to work for Wikimedia? We have a lot of hiring coming up, and we really love talking to active community members about these roles.

• Software Engineer - Apps
• Software Engineer - Mobile
• Software Engineer - Multimedia Systems
• Software Engineer - Multimedia User Interfaces
• Software Engineer - Search
• Product Manager - Mobile
• Director of User Experience
• Visual Designer
• Partner Solutions Engineer
• Dev-Ops Engineer (SRE)
• Operations Engineer - Database Administrator
• Senior Program Manager - Mobile

Announcements

• FIX: update

• Ed Sanders joined the Features engineering group as Software Engineer working on Visual Editor (announcement).
• Christian Aistleitner joined as a contractor specializing in work on Gerrit (announcement).
• Marc-Andre Pelletier joined the Technical Operations team as Operations Engineer (contractor), focusing on the Wikimedia Labs infrastructure and migration of tools (announcement).
• Greg Grossmeier joined the Platform engineering group as Release Manager (announcement).

Technical Operations

Production Site Switchover

FIX: missing

Site infrastructure

FIX: missing

Fundraising

FIX: missing

Data Dumps

FIX: missing

Wikimedia Labs

FIX: missing

Features Engineering

Editor retention: Editing tools

Editor engagement features

Editor engagement experiments

Support

Mobile

Platform Engineering

MediaWiki Core

Quality assurance

Analytics

Engineering community team

Language engineering

Kiwix

The Kiwix project is funded and executed by Wikimedia CH.

FIX: missing

Wikidata

The Wikidata project is funded and executed by Wikimedia Deutschland.

In February the first phase of Wikidata (language links) was deployed on the English-language Wikipedia. Additionally the first parts of phase 2 (infoboxes) went life on wikidata.org. It is now possible to add statements. For an example see d:159. The first tools have already been written on top of this, for example Geneawiki and Reasonator. In the meantime more work has been put into additional data-types, like strings and geocoordinates, as well as the foundations of phase 3 (lists based on queries).

In other good news: Wikimedia Germany has decided to fund Wikidata development after the end of the first year of development at the end of March.

Future

The engineering management team continues to update the Deployments page weekly, providing up-to-date information on the upcoming deployments to Wikimedia sites, as well as the engineering roadmap, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts.