Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2014/May: Difference between revisions

April 2014

Wikimedia engineering report, May 2014

June 2014

Engineering metrics in May:

• 154 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
• The total number of unresolved commits went from around 1305 to about 1440.
• About 15 shell requests were processed.

Major news in May include:

• changes to the mobile site to better show the editors behind the curtain;
• the announcement of CyrusOne in Dallas as the location of the new Wikimedia data center;
• the Zürich hackathon and Lila Tretikov's perspective on it;
• experiments by the Growth team to encourage more contributors to register;
• the one-year anniversary of the launch of Tech News;
• the launch of Wikipedia Zero in Nepal in partnership with NCELL;
• the launch of a second request for proposals for the release management of MediaWiki for third-party users.

Note: We're also providing 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
10 June 2014		ECT: Office Hour, 1600 UTC, #wikimedia-office	qgil
11 June 2014		Tech Talk: How, What, Why of WikiFont at 1900 UTC	MGalloway_(WMF)
17 June 2014		IRC Office Hour on Phabricator, #wikimedia-office, 1730 UTC	AKlapper_(WMF)
18 June 2014		MediaWiki Release Management RFP: Q&A with applicants; #wikimedia-office; 2000 UTC	Greg_(WMF)
18 June 2014		Language Engineering hangout on Content Translation	Runa Bhattacharjee
19 June 2014		Tech Talk: A Few Python Tips (video), 19:30 UTC	Sharihareswara (WMF)
25 June 2014		discussion of frontend and UX standardization , 17:30-18:30 UTC	Eloquence

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.

• VP of Engineering
• ScrumMaster
• Software Engineer - VisualEditor Team
• Software Engineer - Services
• Software Engineer - Internationalization
• Software Engineer - Mobile Partners - Frontend
• QA Tester
• Research Analyst - Fundraising
• Full Stack Developer
• Product Manager - Language Engineering
• Operations Security Engineer
• Data Center Engineer (Contractor)

Announcements

• Filippo Giunchedi joined the Operations team as Operations Engineer (announcement).
• Rob Moen moved from the VisualEditor team to the Growth team (announcement).
• Bernd Sitzmann joined the Mobile App Team as Software Developer (announcement).
• Mukunda Modell joined the new Platform Engineering team as Release Engineer (announcement).
• Alex Monk joined the Features team as a contractor (announcement).
• Abigail Ripstra joined the User Experience team as User Researcher Lead (announcement)
• Rachel diCerbo joined the Wikimedia Foundation as Director of Community Engagement (Product) (announcement).
• Dan Duvall joined the Release and QA team as Automation Engineer (announcement).

Technical Operations

Datacenter RFP

FIX: missing

Wikimedia Labs

Labs metrics in May: FIX: missing

• Number of projects: 162
• Number of instances: 392
• Amount of RAM in use (in MBs): 1,618,432
• Amount of allocated storage (in GBs): 17,860
• Number of virtual CPUs in use: 795
• Number of users: 3,259

• Labs has been upgraded to use Puppet version 3
• Ubuntu Trusty (14.04) is now available for instances
• Tool Labs now features 787 tools from 508 maintainers

Tampa data center

FIX: missing

Features Engineering

Editor retention: Editing tools

Core Features

Growth

Support

Mobile

Wikipedia Zero (partnerships)

In May we launched Wikipedia Zero with Ncell in Nepal, Sky Mobile (Beeline) in Kyrgyzstan and Airtel in Nigeria. We also added Opera Mini zero-rating in Umniah in Jordan. We served roughly 67M free page views in May across 30 partners in 28 countries. Adele Vrana, Wikipedia Zero Partner Manager, attended the Wikipedia Education Hackathon in Jordan, where she collaborated with community members from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Jordan. While there, she also visited Umniah, our local operator partner. Adele also went to Brazil, where she met with prospective partners. We kicked off the carrier portal UX design with Noble studios. 

Language Engineering

Platform Engineering

MediaWiki Core

Quality assurance

Multimedia

Engineering Community Team

Other activities

Analytics

Kiwix

The Kiwix project is funded and executed by Wikimedia CH.

FIX: missing

Wikidata

The Wikidata project is funded and executed by Wikimedia Deutschland.

It has been a busy month for Wikidata. The development team made significant progress on a number of important features. These include simple queries, the mono-lingual text datatype and redirects. We've also done a lot of research for the upcoming user interface change and started making mockups for it. Lydia held an office hour on IRC and answered a lot of questions. Two interns (Anjali and Helen) started working with the team. They will improve the user documentation and social media outreach around Wikidata. Wikidata was also well represented at the MediaWiki hackathon in Zurich. Last but not least Magnus Manske developed a number of games around Wikidata that help improve the data in it and add more. It's a resounding success so far. Give it a try!

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 annual goals, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts.