Wikimedia Platform Engineering/MediaWiki Core Team/Quarterly review, October 2013

This is an outline for a review of the MediaWiki Core team which will take place at WMF on October 15.
 * Notes summarizing this review

Auth systems / Security
Chris Steipp, Aaron Schulz, and Brad Jorsch did the bulk of the software development on this, with support from Tim Starling on software design, May Tee-Galloway, Brandon Harris, and Jared Zimmerman on user experience, and Chad Horohoe, Ryan Lane and Ori Livneh on the SSL deployment.

We had planned to wrap this up early in the quarter. It unfortunately lasted the duration of the quarter, and still isn't quite finished.


 * SUL - most work on this completed in August. We had not fully anticipated the usability concerns with our initial implementation, so substantial rework was needed.  We additionally were nagged by some pernicious high-priority bugs, the last of which we finally got to the bottom of in September.
 * SSL deployment - significant work by the MediaWiki Core group was not in plan for this quarter, but our decision to deploy this took substantial time away from other aspects of the project.
 * OAuth - this is another case where we underestimated the amount of work that was needed, in particular on usability. After substantial iteration, we have this in a pretty good place.
 * OpenID - We're relying on volunteer development for this. It will also need substantial usability work, so we would like to postpone this work until 2014.

We're happy with where SUL, SSL and OAuth are right now, but want to do better with how we get there for our next project of similar scope.

Search (ElasticSearch) deployment
This project is primarily driven by Chad Horohoe and Nik Everett in MediaWiki Core, along with support from Faidon Liambotis, Peter Youngmeister and Asher Feldman in TechOps.

We have developed the CirrusSearch extension to MediaWiki, which is an application glue layer to ElasticSearch. ElasticSearch is an externally developed search indexing component.

Italian Wiktionary, Catalan Wikipedia and English Wikisource are all running CirrusSearch now. Additionally, we deployed to all "closed" wikis. Further feature refinement and bugfixing are ongoing, with roughly 2 to 3 deployments a week. We anticipate we'll be able to complete this deployment by the end of 2013, and disable our previous search technology (lsearchd) in January 2014.

Architecture formalization
Tim Starling has largely been spearheading this work, with support from Brion Vibber and Mark Bergsma.

The Architecture guidelines document continues to progress, though there is still substantial work needed to come to consensus on many points of direction, and to make the document a well-organized and well-scoped document. Our RFC list is now much more organized, and there have now been two IRC meetings that have happened in consecutive weeks recently (September 25 and October 2).

DevOps sprint
This was postponed due to work on auth systems.

Architecture formalization
We plan to continue with RFC review meetings on IRC, more-or-less weekly.

Our first Architecture summit is planned for January 2014, where we plan to make substantial progress toward consensus on architecture changes planned in RFCs. We plan to make this an annual event.