Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2014/February

Engineering metrics in February: Major news in February include:
 * 149 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits went from around 1320 to about 1453.
 * About 22 shell requests were processed.
 * a call for volunteers to test the upcoming multimedia viewer;
 * improvements to VisualEditor's media and template editors;
 * the launch of the Flow discussion system on two pilot talk pages on the English Wikipedia;
 * the launch of guided tours to 31 more language versions of Wikipedia, including all of the top 10 projects by number of page views;
 * improvements to the tools and process used to deploy code to Wikimedia production sites;
 * the release of the first archive of the entire English Wikipedia with thumbnails, for offline use.

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

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.


 * User Experience Research Lead
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Announcements

 * Leila Zia joined the Analytics team as Research Scientist (announcement).
 * Faidon Liambotis was promoted to Principal Operations Engineer (announcement).
 * YuFei Liu joined the UX Design team as Visual Design Intern (announcement).
 * Following changes in the Language engineering team, Amir Aharoni is now the Acting Product Manager, and Runa Bhattacharjee the ScrumMaster (announcement).

Technical Operations
Datacenter RFP
 * Final negotiations have completed with the 3 remaining data center bids in February, and the Wikimedia Operations team will make a decision in the first week of March. Expect a public announcement soon.

 Wikimedia Labs Labs metrics in February:
 * Number of projects: 129
 * Number of instances: 458
 * Amount of RAM in use (in MBs): 1,812,992
 * Amount of allocated storage (in GBs): 24,540
 * Number of virtual CPUs in use: 906
 * Number of users: 2,714
 * The Wikimedia Labs infrastructure in the eqiad data center has been deployed with the OpenStack Havana release, and testing completed in February. Labs users will have 2 weeks to migrate their own projects & instances starting in March. During the last two weeks of March, the Wikimedia Operations team will handle the transfer of the remaining instances that have not been migrated by users themselves.

ulsfo redeployment
 * During a short deployment of our West Coast data center ulsfo in October 2013 several reliability problems were found with some of our network service providers, which forced us to take this site out of service until they could be resolved. We have worked since to improve reliability and increase redundancy of network transit and transport to this site. As of the week of February 3rd ulsfo is in full production usage again, and is now serving traffic for the US west coast, Oceania and large parts of Asia. A blog post is being prepared describing the improvements in user perceived site performance.

eqiad data center capacity expansion
 * The Wikimedia Foundation has expanded the capacity of its main data center site eqiad in Ashburn, Virginia by 33%. A fourth row of racks has been added, and all power & networking infrastructure has been installed and configured in February. The added rack space is available for new equipment as of February 24th.

Mobile
Wikipedia Zero (partnerships)
 * In February, we launched Wikipedia Zero with MTN South Africa (Opera Mini browser only). MTN South Africa responded directly to the kids of Sinenjongo High School with an open letter to the students and the youth of South Africa. They said they agree that Wikipedia could give a boost to their education system, and that offering Wikipedia Zero is a small thing that could change everything (see video on YouTube).
 * We also launched Wikipedia Zero with Safaricom, the largest operator in Kenya. We now have three partners in Kenya, covering 90% of all mobile subscribers. South Africa is our 23rd country to launch, and Safaricom is our 27th operator partner.
 * The Mobile Partnerships team attended Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where we met with existing operator partners, prospective partners and tech companies who want to support the mission. At the conference, our Wikipedia Text pilot with Airtel Kenya and the Praekelt Foundation was nominated as a finalist for the GSMA Global Mobile awards in the education category.

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


 * For the first time, we have released a ZIM file of the entire Wikipedia in English with all encyclopedic articles and thumbnails (download the 40GB file via torrent). In our announcement, we've also explained how we generate those archives and advertised the tools we've been working with, like mwoffliner and zimwriterfs. This month, a student also worked on the creation of ZIM files containing TED talks. The internship is now over and was a success; ZIM files will be published soon. Preparation work for our Usability Hackathon has started.

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


 * Wikisource now has access to the the data in Wikidata like ISBNs and the date of birth of an author. The Lua interface for Wikidata has been extended significantly to make it more powerful and easier to use. Support for article badges has seen more work and is now missing mostly the user interface part. Loading time of items on Wikidata has been improved drastically. Everyone is asked to provide input for the upcoming redesign of Wikidata's user interface.

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.