Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2014/April

Engineering metrics in April: Major news in April include:
 * 158 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits went from around 1315 to about 1305.
 * About 30 shell requests were processed.
 * the change of format of MediaWiki localization files from PHP to JSON, and the associated modernization of the LocalisationUpdate extension;
 * the move of Wikimedia Labs to a new data center;
 * the “Heartbleed” security vulnerability and how the Wikimedia Foundation's team responded to it;
 * an explanation of how the Mobile team uses Trello to plan their development sprints;
 * a project report on a grant to create "gadgets" for VisualEditor.

''Note: We're also providing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this report that does not assume specialized technical knowledge.

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Announcements

 * Giuseppe Lavagetto joined the Operations team as Operations Engineer (announcement).
 * Aaron Schulz is now Senior Performance Engineer (announcement).
 * Dmitry Brant joined the the Mobile App Team as Software Developer (announcement).
 * Danny Horn joined the Product Development team as Product Manager (announcement).

Technical Operations
Datacenter RFP
 * The Wikimedia Foundation has chosen a winning RFP bid, a contract has been executed and implementation is underway. A public announcement is being prepared in the upcoming week.

 Wikimedia Labs Labs metrics in April:
 * Number of projects: 153
 * Number of instances: 345
 * Amount of RAM in use (in MBs): 1,454,592
 * Amount of allocated storage (in GBs): 16,515
 * Number of virtual CPUs in use: 716
 * Number of users: 3,064
 * The migration of Labs and Tool Labs to the Ashburn data center is complete, and most of the hardware in Tampa has been shut down and packed up for shipping to the new (to be announced) data center.


 * Post-migration, many projects which had public IPs are now relying on the internal Labs web proxy instead. That has caused a few unexpected bugs in project web access, but provides several benefits including HTTPS access and increased user data privacy.

Tampa data center
 * During the last month, our data center footprint in Tampa has been reduced to just 6 racks, reduced from 24 total. A copy of all essential data remains present in the Tampa facility until we've finished setting up the relevant services in our upcoming new data center.

Mobile
Wikipedia Zero (partnerships)


 * IPKO in Kosovo launched Wikipedia Zero, bringing us to a total of 28 partners in 26 countries. We delivered 68 million free page views in April. Adele Vrana, Wikipedia Zero Partner Manager, visited South Africa to meet with MTN (current Wikipedia Zero partner), prospective partners, members of Wikimedia South Africa (WMZA) and the Singenjongo High School. This trip was part of a broader strategy to promote Wikipedia in our partners' corporate social responsibility (CSR) and education initiatives, increasing awareness and impact locally. We are identifying new collaboration opportunities with MTN and local organizations, including the Wikimedia chapter in South Africa and other mission-aligned nonprofits. Additionally, we will continue to support the local initiative created by Sinenjongo High School teachers and students.

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

We have finaly released a first experimental ZIM file of the TED talks. We have packed in a unique 7GB big library the 250 talks about business. This includes not only the videos, but in addition small descriptions about the people and thousands of subtitles in more than 50 languages. We will fix soon that last critical issues and release other TED ZIM files with talks about entertainment, science, ...

We have also migrated our download server to a better one. Beside providing a better storage system and more bandwidth, it has 9TB of disk space. This was a mandatory step in our ZIM generation industrializing process and therefore necessary to allow us to generate more and more often ZIM files.

We are also working with an e-reader manufacturer to have Kiwix installed and available on its devices so that the MALeBOOKS project (eBooks for Mali) can ship e-readers with not only thousands of free eBooks but also the complete Wikipedia and WikiSource in french.

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


 * The Wikidata team got simple query functionality ready for a first demo at the WMF Metrics and Activities Meeting. The entity suggester a team of students is working on also got finishing touches and should be ready for release soon. Once it is live, it will suggest missing information on an item so it is easier to see what should be added. We also welcomed 2 interns as part of the Outreach Program for Women to help with documentation, social media outreach and mobile app concepts. Wikiquote now manages its language links via Wikidata. Additionally it is now possible to automatically add links to other sister projects in the sidebar of an article using Wikidata. A Wikidata Toolkit was released, as well as a library that lets you use Wikidata's labels for translation anywhere on the web.

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.