Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2013/October

Engineering metrics in October: Major news in October include:
 * 134 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits went from around 1020 to about 1122.
 * About 35 shell requests were processed.
 * A report on the Open Access Media Importer, a tool that transfers multimedia files from scientific publications to Wikimedia Commons;
 * A request for proposals for a new datacenter in the continental US, published by the Operations team;
 * The creation of the Autonym Font, which allows language names to be displayed properly without degrading page loading time.

''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.



Announcements

 * Ori Livneh transitioned to the Platform Engineering group as Senior Performance Engineer (announcement).
 * Gergő Tisza joined the Platfom Engineering group as Software Engineer on the Multimedia team (announcement).
 * Leslie Carr and Ryan Lane were both promoted to the position of Senior Operations Engineer (announcement).
 * Rummana Yasmeen joined the Platfom Engineering group as Software Test Engineer on the QA team, working primarily on VisualEditor (announcement).
 * Vibha Bamba was promoted to the position of Senior User Experience Designer (announcement).

Technical Operations
Site infrastructure
 * The team continued to heavily refactor the Puppet configuration: manifests for MySQL, nginx, SSH, puppetmaster, and several others are now properly organized as modules. Alexandros Kosiaris has made considerable progress towards supporting multiple puppetmasters on our cluster, which will greatly improve Puppet performance.

Wikimedia Labs
 * Andrew Bogott has been working with Yuvaraj Pandian to get the new proxy system properly deployed; this will greatly reduce our need to hand out public IPs to labs users. We're close to hiring a contractor to help with the upcoming migration of Labs from Tampa to Ashburn.

Language Engineering

 * The Language Engineering team worked on building a new Main Page for translatewiki.net, the primary translation platform for MediaWiki projects. This includes a new sign-in screen and project displays. A special feature is also being introduced for new translators through which they can provide a limited set of translations for evaluation.


 * As part of the enhancements towards Universal Language Selector (ULS), a new font has been developed for displaying Language Names in their own scripts. This is known as the Autonym font and contains only the characters needed for the language names. Significantly small in size, this font will soon be deployed on Wikimedia projects. The team also worked on fixing a font inheritance issue for the edit area (bug 53734).


 * The monthly release of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB) was also completed.


 * The team prepared for the open-source language summit to be held in Pune, India on November 18−19 in collaboration with Red Hat and other open-source internationalization developers.

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


 * We have released a new version (1.4) of Kiwix for Android; besides other improvements, we have introduced a localized user interface. We continue our efforts to speed-up the ZIM throughput; Wikipedia is now available offline in more than 60 languages. The last flash drives from our Deaddrops & Geocaching pilot were sent; we hope to get them walled up before the end of the year. We have also submitted a few proposals about Kiwix for Android for the Google Code-In program.



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


 * At the beginning of the month, Lydia Pintscher took over the product management for Wikidata. In a blog entry, she elaborated her goals for the future. The developers continued their work on the numbers datatype, sorting of statements and simple queries. In addition, a prototype for a multilingual picture dictionary was published, as well as a tool to visualize time and location data from Wikidata and another one to build lists based on data in Wikidata.


 * October was also the month to celebrate Wikidata's first birthday. Enjoy some essays, interviews and more from the community.

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.