Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2011/September

Major news in September include:

Hover your mouse over the green question marks to see the description of a particular project.

Upcoming events

 * New Orleans hackathon (14–16 October, New Orleans, USA) —


 * Weekend of Code (18 October - 8 November, online) — A hacking contest targeting MediaWiki hackers worldwide. Awards will be presented for the best gadget, extension, and mobile app.  Banners will run on the site for the first week of the contest.  Each grand prize winner will receive an all-expenses paid trip to their choice of Wikimedia event.  Details are being fleshed out at WMF_Projects/Weekend_of_Code.
 * India hackathon (18–20 November, Mumbai, India) — A hackathon will be held concurrently with the WikiConference India 2011, and near its venue. The main focus will be on language support, mobile support and offline support for MediaWiki content. About 100–150 participants are expected (read more).
 * Brighton hackathon (19–20 November, Brighton, England) —
 * Check out the Software deployments page on the wikitech wiki for up-to-date information on the upcoming deployments to Wikimedia sites.

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 opened in September:

New and open requests for proposals:
 * Systems & Operations Engineer
 * XML Dumps Help
 * Engineering Outreach
 * Development and Operations Engineer
 * Article Feedback Feature

The following positions are still open: Product Manager (Analytics), QA Lead, Director of Features Engineering, Systems Engineer (Data Analytics), Software Developer (Rich Text Editing, Features), Software Developer (Front-end) and Software Developer (Back-end), Product Manager (Mobile), Software Developer (Mobile), Product Manager (New Editor Engagement).

Site infrastructure

 * Tampa Data Center —


 * Virginia Data Center —


 * Media Storage —


 * HTTPS — Protocol-relative URLs have been enabled on all sites by Roan Kattouw. SSL termination servers have arrived and are in the process of being installed. HTTPS should be fully enabled in the next week or two.

Testing environment

 * Virtualization test cluster — All services except for DNS are up. The puppet repository has been released in a public repository. We've switched to using git/gerrit for our production puppet process. New instances have been tested building from scratch using puppet. We've started giving accounts out to some early testers of Labs via labsconsole.

Backups and data archives

 * Data Dumps — The September English Wikipedia run completed in under 8 days.  The dump of all text revisions is now available in a number of smaller files rather than several giant ones.  The dump system has been converted to work with heterogenous deployment and has undergone some testing with the upcoming MW 1.18 codebase.

Editing tools

 * Visual editor —
 * Internationalization and localization tools —

Participation and editor retention

 * Article feedback —
 * MoodBar —
 * Feedback Dashboard —

Multimedia Tools

 * UploadWizard —

MediaWiki infrastructure

 * ResourceLoader —

Wikimedia Labs

 * TimedMediaHandler —

Mobile

 * Mobile Research — Mani Pande and Parul Vora continued to work on the report on their field research in India and Brazil. They completed phone interviews in San Francisco, Chicago and Dallas (with partner firm Answerlab) and started to schedule in-person interviews.


 * MobileFrontend —
 * http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/14/new-mobile-site-launched-on-wikipedia-soon-for-sister-wikis-too/

Fundraising support

 * 2011 Fundraiser —

Offline

 * Wikipedia version tools —
 * Kiwix UX initiative — The Kiwix team built out a beta portal for feedback this month. Users can now go to http://input.kiwix.org/ and easily submit their thoughts on using kiwix. Next we'll be adding some in app feedback to allow our users to have multiple ways of sending their ideas.

MediaWiki Core

 * MediaWiki 1.18 —
 * Code review management —
 * API maintenance —
 * Shell requests —
 * Continuous integration —
 * Wikitext scripting —
 * Git conversion —
 * Projects on hold —

Wikimedia analytics

 * Wikimedia Report Card 2.0 —

Technical Liaison; Developer Relations

 * Bug management —
 * Summer of Code 2011 —
 * http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/22/gsoc-students-reach-project-milestones/
 * Engineering project documentation —
 * Volunteer coordination and outreach —
 * MediaWiki architecture document —