Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2014/January

Engineering metrics in January: Major news in January include:
 * 159 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits went from around 1386 to about 1320.
 * About 22 shell requests were processed.
 * the transition of our search engines on Wikimedia sites to ElasticSearch;
 * a presentation of how the Tech newsletter works, including a historical perspective;
 * an invitation to comment on the 2-year vision of the multimedia engineering team;
 * a request for comments on whether the MP4 video format should be supported on Wikimedia sites.

''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.

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.



Announcements

 * Shahyar Ghobadpour joined the Wikimedia Core features team as Software Engineer (announcement).
 * David Chan joined the Language Engineering team as Software Engineer (announcement).
 * Gilles Dubuc joined the Multimedia team as Senior Software Engineer and Tech Lead (announcement).
 * Charles Salvia joined the Analytics team (announcement).
 * Sam Smith joined the Features Engineering team as Software Engineer, working with the Growth team (announcement).
 * Preteek Saxena joined the UX Design team as UX Prototyping contractor (announcement).

Technical Operations
Datacenter RFP
 * The Wikimedia Operations team is in the final stages of the selection process. A short list of 4 bids has been created and final negotiations are underway. The winner of the bid will be selected in February based on the technical criteria listed in the RFP, and pricing.

Wikimedia Labs
 * The Labs Migration team consisting of Andrew Bogott and Marc-Andre Pelletier aka Coren, have made good progress with testing the newest version of Openstack called Havana and Neutron which is an OpenStack project to provide "networking as a service". The plan is when we migrate the Labs infrastructure out of Tampa we also do an upgrade of the Openstack software.

Offline
Kiwix
 * The Kiwix project is funded and executed by Wikimedia CH.


 * A really small update for this month because pretty much energy is involved in planning 2014. We have mainly worked on mwoffliner and almost achieved to compile a full English Wikipedia ZIM file with thumbnails. Upgrade of our main storage solution has started to allow us the launch of our automatic ZIM file generation solution.

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


 * In January the team worked mainly on performance improvements around Wikidata. The Quantities datatype was deployed so it is now possible to enter data like the number of inhabitants of a country. Wikisource can now manage its language links via Wikidata as well just like Wikipedia, Wikivoyage and Commons could already. Two new frontend developers, Adrian and Thiemo joined the team to help improve Wikidata's userinterface. Last but not least the team released their plan for the development of Wikidata in 2014 and beyond.

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.