Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2013/August

Engineering metrics in August:
 * 122 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits went from around 1280 to about 1080.
 * About 36 shell requests were processed.
 * Wikimedia Labs now hosts 171 projects and 1,743 users; to date 2,212 instances have been created.
 * The tools project in Labs now hosts 256 tools and 300 members.

Major news in August include:
 * A discussion about using the secure HTTP protocol on Wikimedia sites, followed by a switch to that protocol for all registered users;
 * The launch of the Notifications feature on the mobile site;
 * A discussion about how security issues are handled in our community;
 * The Wikimania conference, which was notably an opportunity for the Language engineering team to meet with users and improve language support, particularly for the Javanese language;
 * A much-anticipated upgrade of the software used by our volunteer e-mail response team, OTRS.

''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.



Technical Operations
Data Dumps
 * All dumps ran from the data center in Ashburn this month; only the miscellaneous and experimental services remain to be moved. GSOC student Petr Onderka completed the first incremental dump-producing code, along with a draft specification for the new format. Test it out and let us know what you think!

Wikimedia Labs
 * Due to Wikimania and staff vacations, this month had a relatively low number of infrastructure changes, but we had a relatively high influx of users and tools. We ran three workshops during Wikimania and helped Toolserver users migrate their tools to Labs. We did have a few infrastructure changes, though: A change for the service group interface was merged but not yet deployed. It removes the service group interface from the project interface, reducing clutter. An API was pushed in for project and service group information, to make the information available from Wikitech, rather than LDAP. Other infrastructure changes were bugfixes, which can be found through bugzilla.

OTRS
 * OTRS got a long overdue update to version 3.2.9 with the generous volunteer support of Martin and Marcel of Znuny GmbH. As part of the upgrade, the service was migrated from pmtpa to eqiad, and spam filtering was overhauled.

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


 * Release of the new Mediawiki offliner was a little bit delayed; we are still fixing stability bugs. This solution has already proven its efficiency, as we have released 20 new ZIM files this month: a new throughput record. The ZIM incremental update GSoC project progresses too, as the student works on the integration of zimdiff/zimpatch in the Kiwix ecosystem. Kiwix developers have had a 6 days hackathon in Hong-Kong to prepare the next Kiwix release, after some final work on compilation.

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


 * In August, the Wikidata team was present at 3 events: COSCUP, Wikimania and a meetup about Wikidata and Incubator. A lot of work has been put into improving the API and its documentation. The team also worked on the ability to reorder the qualifiers and sources in a statement, improved the speed of Wikidata slightly, and made progress on the ability to query for statements with a specific property and value, as well as merging items. An improved proposal for the support of Wiktionary has been published. They also started the paper cuts initiative to find and fix small bugs that have a large impact on how enjoyable it is to use Wikidata. Denny and Adam gave a short overview of the state of Wikidata and answered questions during an office hour on IRC. The biggest news for August though was the activation of data access (Wikidata phase 2) on Wikivoyage.

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 engineering roadmap, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts.