Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2011/April

Major news this month include:

Upcoming events

 * Berlin Hackathon 2011 (May 13-15, Berlin) —


 * Summer of Code 2011 —


 * Wikimania (August 2-7, Haifa, Israel) —

Job openings
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.

The following positions have opened this month:

The following positions are still open:
 * Engineering Program Manager — Data Analytics
 * Performance Engineer
 * Software Developer — Features
 * Software Developer — Mobile
 * Systems Engineer — Data Analytics (previously Data Analytics Engineer)
 * Operations Engineer
 * Senior QA Engineer
 * Networking Contractor — Amsterdam
 * Software Engineer — Community R&D

In addition, we hope to post the following positions over the next few months:
 * Rich Text Editor Engineer
 * Release Engineer
 * Technical Writer

Short news

 * Visitors —


 * Hires —

Site operations
Virginia Data Center — Installation of a world-class primary data center for Wikimedia Foundation websites.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Media Storage — Improvement of our media storage architecture to accommodate expected increase in media uploads.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Testing environment
Virtualization test cluster — Environment to deploy temporary machines for testing and experimentation, for use by WMF staff and volunteers working on important projects (as capacity allows).
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Backups and data archives
Backups — Improvement of backup coverage of Wikimedia-hosted data.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Data Dumps — Improvement of processes to create and provide public copies of public Wikimedia data.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Short news

 * Item — Summary
 * http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/04/thumbnail-issues-being-resolved/

Content Quality and Editorial Tools
Article Feedback (phase 2) — A feature to collaboratively assess article quality and incorporate reader ratings on Wikipedia.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Article feedback (extended review) — An interface for quality reviews of Wikipedia content.
 * Status:


 * Commissioned by: Erik Möller

Pending Changes — A feature to allow changes made by logged-out and new users to be reviewed before they appear as the primary version of an article.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Personal image filter — A feature to allow users to selectively hide media files on a wiki.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Discussions and Interactions
Wikilove 0.1 — A user script to encourage praise and virtual gifts between users.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Multimedia Tools
Upload wizard — A feature that provides an easier way of uploading files to Wikimedia Commons, the media library associated with Wikipedia.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Engineering support
Editor survey — Integration work between LimeSurvey and MediaWiki to support
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Other projects

 * Style guide for forms —


 * Liquid Threads —


 * SimpleSurvey 2.0 —


 * JavaScript parsing library —


 * Resource loader —


 * Non-Roman character set localization —

Wikimedia Labs
Media projects — A set of features to improve media handling and key infrastructure support tools, many developed with Kaltura, such as Metavid, MwEmbed, and the Video Editor.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

MediaWiki development and tools
MediaWiki 1.17 release — The upcoming MediaWiki release.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Code review — Review of changes made to the MediaWiki code.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Bugzilla 4.0 upgrade — Upgrade of our bug tracker to the latest version of Bugzilla.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Performance optimization
PoolCounter — A MediaWiki extension to avoid parser deadlocks on high-traffic pages.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Ehcache deployment — Deployment of a disk-backed object cache to increase parser cache hit ratio.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Wikimedia analytics
udp2log — A custom data analytics logging system.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

A/B testing — A set of tools to perform A/B testing on Wikimedia sites.
 * Status:


 * Program managers: Rob Lanphier

Report card — A monthly report of key metrics to measure community health.
 * Status:


 * Program managers: Rob Lanphier

Technical communications
Development process improvement — A project to increase transparency and organize Wikimedia Foundation's engineering efforts more efficiently.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Wikimedia blog overhaul — A project to consolidate and improve the Wikimedia blogs.
 * Status:


 * Project manager: Guillaume Paumier

Other projects

 * MediaWiki 1.17 deployment —


 * Test framework deployment —


 * OpenWebAnalytics —


 * API maintenance —


 * Shell bugs —


 * Access to Subversion —


 * Migration to Git —


 * Heterogeneous deployment —


 * Software deployments tracking —

Mobile
Mobile — All things Mobile and Wikimedia.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

Offline
Wikipedia version tools — Support and development of a series of tools to select Wikipedia content for offline use.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

OpenZim for Collections — Integration of OpenZim into the Collections extension.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

Kiwix UX study — Evaluation of the user experience of the Kiwix mobile app to access offline Wikimedia content.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc