Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2012/November

Engineering metrics in November:
 * unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits went from about 440 to.
 * About shell requests were processed.
 * About developers got access to Git and Wikimedia Labs.
 * Wikimedia Labs now hosts projects,  users; to date  instances have been created.

Major news in November include:
 * Wikivoyage.org soft-launched (image transfer and small fixes still ongoing)
 * New HTML5 video player launched with support for WebM video, subtitles and multiple resolution derivatives
 * First version of analytics Hadoop cluster put into service
 * We opened up the process of product management to volunteers with the announcement of a search for Volunteer Product Managers

''Note: As of last month, we're proposing a shorter and simpler version of this report for less technically savvy readers.

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.

Technical Operations
Site Infrastructure

West Coast caching center

Data Dumps
 * Media bundles are back in business at now that the network issues have been fixed.  Work has started on upgrading the OS on the servers that produce the dumps, rebuilding the necessary packages and testing.  The 'add/changes' experimental dumps have been running stably long enough that we've made them available on the gluster public data volume accessible to all labs projects.

Wikimedia Labs

Mobile

 * Prod
 * Login
 * Beta
 * Edit
 * Reformatted tables
 * Random
 * Cleanup template collapse
 * Watchlists

Offline
Kiwix New project Phpzim started with the help of Wikimedia CH. This project will create a binding in PHP of the zimlib ; allowing any PHP developer to easily create and read ZIM files. This is the first stone of a bigger project to allow quick ZIM file generation in Mediawiki (and also other CMS coded in PHP). Works on ZIM Autobuild continues and Kiwix ZIM throughput increases slowly (4 files in November). Small testing stage of 0.9rc2 will finally start in the next days, followed by the release.

Wikidata
The Wikidata project is funded and executed by Wikimedia Deutschland.

The repo side of Wikidata has been launched on http://www.wikidata.org. It contains the results of phase 1 (language links) and has already attracted a community to maintain the wiki. Meanwhile, the Wikidata team has continued work on Phase 2 of Wikidata (Infoboxes) to add statements with values to the items in the Wikidata repo. The team improved the propagation of changes from the repo to the client and the messaging in Recent Changes. There is a constant exchange with WMF about the upcoming deployment cycle. Feedback and questions are welcome on the mailing list and on meta.

Future
The engineering management team continues to update the Software 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.