Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2011/June

Major news this month include:

Upcoming events

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


 * 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 have opened this month:
 * Product Manager — Analytics
 * QA Lead

The following positions are still open:
 * Software Developer — Features
 * Systems Engineer — Data Analytics (previously Data Analytics Engineer)
 * Operations Engineer
 * Senior QA Engineer
 * Networking Contractor — Amsterdam
 * Software Developer, Rich Text Editing — Features
 * Product Manager — Features
 * Software Developer Front-end — General
 * Software Developer Back-end — General

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

Operations

 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

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

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

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:

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

Other activities

 * Backups —


 * HTTPS & IPv6 —


 * m.wikimedia.org —

Features Engineering

 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Editing tools
Visual editor 0.1 — Exploratory work to identify & prototype initial ideas for a visual editor for MediaWiki.
 * Status:

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

Discussions and Interactions
Liquid Threads — A feature that brings threaded discussions capabilities to Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki.
 * Status:

WikiLove 1.0 — An extension to encourage praise and virtual gifts between users.
 * Status:

MoodBar 0.1 — A feature to encourage new users to provide feedback.
 * Status:

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

Other projects

 * ResourceLoader 2.0 —


 * Non-Roman character set localization —


 * German Wikipedia editor survey support —


 * Mobile survey support —

Wikimedia Labs

 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

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:

Special projects

 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

Mobile projects
Mobile Research — A research project to help determine our Mobile strategy.
 * Status:

Mobile site rewrite — Port of our Ruby-based mobile gateway to PHP.
 * Status:

Fundraising support
2011 Fundraiser — Support and development for the annual fundraiser of the Foundation.
 * Status:

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

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

Kiwix — Improvement of the user experience of the Kiwix app to access offline Wikimedia content.
 * Status:

Short news

 * Mobile issues (500)

General Engineering

 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

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

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

Bugmeistering — Management of our bug tracker.
 * Status:

Summer of Code 2011 — A sponsored community program allowing students to join the community as developers.
 * Status:

Parser — Groundwork for the next generation visual editor of MediaWiki.
 * Status:

Wikimedia analytics
Wikimedia Report Card 2.0 — Usability improvements and streamlining of the creation of the monthly report card.
 * Status:

Technical communications
Engineering project documentation — An activity to ensure that project documentation of Wikimedia engineering activities is complete and up-to-date.
 * Status:

Engineering communications support — Perennial communication support for Wikimedia engineering projects and staff.
 * Status:

Other activities

 * Disk-backed object cache (DBOC) —


 * API maintenance —


 * Shell bugs —


 * Access to Subversion —


 * Heterogeneous deployment —


 * HipHop support —


 * udp2log —


 * App-level monitoring —


 * A/B testing —


 * Configuration management —