Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2014/May

Engineering metrics in May: Major news in May include:
 * 154 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits went from around 1305 to about 1440.
 * About 15 shell requests were processed.
 * changes to the mobile site to better show the editors behind the curtain;
 * the announcement of CyrusOne in Dallas as the location of the new Wikimedia data center;
 * the Zürich hackathon and Lila Tretikov's perspective on it;
 * experiments by the Growth team to encourage more contributors to register;
 * the one-year anniversary of the launch of Tech News;
 * the launch of Wikipedia Zero in Nepal in partnership with NCELL;
 * the launch of a second request for proposals for the release management of MediaWiki for third-party users.

''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.

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Announcements

 * Filippo Giunchedi joined the Operations team as Operations Engineer (announcement).
 * Rob Moen moved from the VisualEditor team to the Growth team (announcement).
 * Bernd Sitzmann joined the Mobile App Team as Software Developer (announcement).
 * Mukunda Modell joined the new Platform Engineering team as Release Engineer (announcement).
 * Alex Monk joined the Features team as a contractor (announcement).
 * Abigail Ripstra joined the User Experience team as User Researcher Lead (announcement)
 * Rachel diCerbo joined the Wikimedia Foundation as Director of Community Engagement (Product) (announcement).
 * Dan Duvall joined the Release and QA team as Automation Engineer (announcement).

Technical Operations
New Dallas data center
 * Planning for the new Dallas data center has continued in May, and basic data infrastructure components such as racks, PDUs, network equipment and various supplies have been ordered. About 140 servers have been sent from our Tampa data center, to be installed in Dallas. Racking and configuration work in our Dallas data center will commence in June.

Labs metrics in May:
 * Number of projects: 162
 * Number of instances: 392
 * Amount of RAM in use (in MBs): 1,618,432
 * Amount of allocated storage (in GBs): 17,860
 * Number of virtual CPUs in use: 795
 * Number of users: 3,259

 Wikimedia Labs
 * Labs has been upgraded to use Puppet version 3; Ubuntu Trusty (14.04) is now available for instances, and Tool Labs now features 787 tools from 508 maintainers.

Mobile
Wikipedia Zero (partnerships)


 * In May we launched Wikipedia Zero with Ncell in Nepal, Sky Mobile (Beeline) in Kyrgyzstan and Airtel in Nigeria. We also added Opera Mini zero-rating in Umniah in Jordan. We served roughly 67 million free page views in May across 30 partners in 28 countries. Adele Vrana attended the Wikipedia Education Hackathon in Jordan, where she collaborated with community members from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Jordan. While there, she visited Umniah, our local operator partner. Adele also went to Brazil, where she met with prospective partners. We kicked off the carrier portal UX design with Noble Studios.

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


 * The Hackathon in Zürich was our highlight for May. There, most of the team met, and a few new people joined the development effort during the 3 days in common with the Wikimedia hackathon. Most of the work done focused on preparing the final Kiwix 0.9 release, to be released in June. It was also necessary to release a new minor release (1.2) of libzim. Work on Kiwix for Android continues with the integration of a content/download manager. On the offline content side, 6 ZIM files with all TED talks were also released; it's the first time we provide files with so much multimedia content. 50 USB flash drives with Kiwix and the Wikipedia for schools were prepared and sent to WikiIndaba; 15 Kiwix-plug are also going to be prepared for Afripedia. Finally, in the scope of the Malebooks project, work to prepare an offline version of the Gutenberg project, with its 45,000 public domain books, has started.

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


 * It has been a busy month for Wikidata. The development team made significant progress on a number of important features. These include simple queries, the mono-lingual text datatype and redirects. We've also done a lot of research for the upcoming user interface change and started making mockups for it. Lydia Pintscher held an office hour on IRC and answered a lot of questions. Two interns (Anjali Sharma and Helen Halbert) started working with the team. They will improve the user documentation and social media outreach around Wikidata. Wikidata was also well represented at the MediaWiki hackathon in Zürich. Last but not least, Magnus Manske developed a number of games around Wikidata that help improve the data in it and add more. It's a resounding success so far.

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.