Wikimedia Engineering

Wikimedia engineering refers to the engineering team employed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its mission is to build, improve and maintain the technical infrastructure of Wikimedia projects (software and hardware), by supporting and complementing volunteer efforts.

News

• San Francisco hackathon (21–22 January 2012, San Francisco, California, USA) — Outreach-focused developers week-end focusing on mobile, the web-accessible API and our framework for JavaScript feature development. Register now.
• Pune hackathon (10–12 February 2012, Pune, India) — Outreach-focused developers week-end focusing on the gadgets framework, mobile Wikimedia access, and internationalization.
• Activity report — What Wikimedia engineers have been up to recently (updated monthly).
• Roadmap — What Wikimedia engineers are and will be working on (updated weekly).

Get involved!

• Tell us if you run into a problem
• Become a MediaWiki developer
• Test our mobile site, or build mobile apps
• Chat with us
• Figure out ways to encourage new Wikimedia editors
• Help to update the engineering project documentation

Are you looking to work for Wikimedia? We're also hiring!

Current projects

Features engineering

The Wikimedia Foundation Features Engineering team is responsible for developing new features for MediaWiki.

• Visual editor — Initial ideas and prototypes of a visual editor for MediaWiki
• Parsoid — A new, normalized, more consistent wikitext parser. Core future project.
• Internationalization and localization tools — A set of tools to facilitate editing in languages using a non-Roman alphabet.
• Article feedback — A feature to collaboratively assess article quality and incorporate reader ratings on Wikipedia.
• LiquidThreads 3.0 — A rewrite of the LiquidThreads extension to improve its back-end and UI
• Feedback Dashboard — A dashboard allowing experienced users to answer comments and concerns coming from MoodBar
• UploadWizard — A feature that provides an easier way of uploading files to Wikimedia Commons, the media library associated with Wikipedia.
• ResourceLoader — A feature to improve the load times for JavaScript and CSS in MediaWiki.
• TimedMediaHandler — An extension to display audio and video files on wiki with timed text support, real time stream switching and server-side transcoding support.

Platform engineering

The Wikimedia Foundation Platform Engineering team is responsible for the MediaWiki core, managing work from volunteer developers, as well as for providing services that are used by multiple technology teams.

• MediaWiki 1.19 — Deployment and release of MediaWiki 1.19
• Continuous integration — A testing platform to provide continuous quality control for MediaWiki
• Git conversion — Conversion of the MediaWiki source repository from Subversion to Git
• Code review management — Review of changes made to the MediaWiki core code and extensions used on Wikimedia wikis.
• API maintenance — Perennial maintenance of the MediaWiki API
• Shell requests — Ongoing processing of Bugzilla requests that require shell access to fix
• Report Card — Streamlining and modularization of the creation process of the monthly report card
• Bug management — Management of Wikimedia's bug tracker.
• Summer of Code 2011 — A sponsored community program allowing students to join the community as developers.
• Engineering project documentation — An activity to ensure that project documentation of Wikimedia engineering activities is complete and up-to-date.
• Volunteer coordination and outreach — Coordination of volunteer efforts, technical outreach and recruitment of new volunteers
• MediaWiki architecture document — An overview of MediaWiki's architecture and decisions that led to it
• Wikimedia blog maintenance — Maintenance and new features for the Wikimedia blog

Operations

The Operations team is responsible for the technical infrastructure of Wikimedia sites: this includes the data centers, servers and network.

They document most of their work on the wikitech wiki.

• Wikimedia Labs — A test environment using virtual machines for testing and experimentation

Mobile Projects

• MobileFrontend — A PHP extension providing a mobile front-end to MediaWiki sites, to replace Wikimedia's Ruby-based gateway.
• Mobile Research — A research project to help determine our Mobile strategy.
• Android Wikipedia App — An official Wikipedia app for Android devices

Special projects

• 2011 Wikimedia fundraiser — Engineering support and development for the 2011 fundraiser of the Wikimedia Foundation

Offline

• Kiwix UX initiative — Improvement of the user experience of the Kiwix app to access offline Wikimedia content.

Tools

New to project pages? Have a question about how things work? Read the how-to guide.

See also

• Dynamic list of all projects (including those completed)