Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2014/March

Engineering metrics in March: Major news in March include:
 * 160 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits went from around 1450 to about 1315.
 * About 25 shell requests were processed.
 * an overview of webfonts, and the advantages and challenges of using them on Wikimedia sites;
 * a series of essays written by Google Code-in students who shared their impressions, frustrations and surprises as they discovered the Wikimedia and MediaWiki technical community;
 * Hovercards now available as a Beta feature on all Wikimedia wikis, allowing readers to see a short summary of an article just by hovering a link;
 * a subtle typography change across Wikimedia sites for better readability, consistency and accessibility;
 * a recap of the upgrade and migration of our bug tracking software.

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

Work with us
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Announcements

 * Chase Pettet joined the Wikimedia Operations Team as as Operations Engineer (announcement).
 * Following changes in the Engineering Community Team, Quim Gil took over as Engineering Community Manager, and Sumana Harihareswara transitioned to the role of Senior Technical Writer (announcement).
 * Kevin LeDuc joined the Wikimedia Foundation as Analytics Product Manager (announcement).

Technical Operations
Datacenter RFP
 * Final negotiations and coordination are still ongoing for the data center RFP, but we expect to be able to make an announcement soon.

 Wikimedia Labs Labs metrics in March:
 * Number of projects: 149
 * Number of instances: 310
 * Amount of RAM in use (in MBs): 1,288,704
 * Amount of allocated storage (in GBs): 14,925
 * Number of virtual CPUs in use: 635
 * Number of users: 2,907
 * The Labs Ops team has spent the month shepherding projects from the Tampa cloud to the Ashburn cloud. Dozens of volunteers contributed to the move, and all tools and projects have now been copied to or rebuilt in Ashburn. Some projects and tools are in a non-running state pending action on the part of their owners or admins. Ashburn Labs is running OpenStack Havana, with NFS for shared storage.


 * The usage stats this month are quite a bit different from last month. Quite a number of obsolete instances have been purged, and last month's stats may have included some data center duplication.

Tampa data center
 * During March, the Ops team has been decommissioning and shutting down a lot of hosts in the old Tampa data center, including all former appservers. The amount of energy consumed in the old data center has been greatly reduced. A few hosts are going to be migrated to another floor in the existing data center and physical data center work is coming up.

Mobile
Wikipedia Zero (partnerships)


 * Smart, the largest mobile operator in the Philippines, is giving access to Wikipedia free of data charges through the end of April. They announced the promotion in a press release. Ingrid Flores, Wikipedia Zero Partner Manager, visited the Philippines and arranged a meeting with local community members and Smart. They are now exploring ways to collaborate in support of education. The partnerships team kicked off account reviews with the 27 existing Wikipedia Zero partners, to update the implementation, identify opportunities for collaboration in corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives and get feedback on the program. The account reviews will continue for the next few months. Last, we continued recruiting for Wikipedia Partner Manager for the Asia region.

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


 * This month, we released a new version of Kiwix for Android that adds support for older versions of Android like Gingerbread; about 50% more devices than before are now supported.

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


 * The team worked on making ranks more useful. From now on, by default the property parser function and Lua always return the values with the "preferred" rank or, when none is available, the one with the "normal" rank. This allows for example to exclude past mayors when asking Wikidata for the mayor of a city. Additionally, considerable speed improvements have been made; browsing Wikidata is now a lot faster. Diffs between versions of pages on Wikidata have also been improved to make it easier to see what changes were made to an item. Last but not least, the user interface redesign research went on.

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.