Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2011/September

Major news in September include:
 * The successful deployment of native HTTPS for all wikis;
 * Major progress by our new Internationalization & localization team;
 * The deployment of our new mobile front-end, now the default mobile experience;
 * The start of the deployment of MediaWiki 1.18 to Wikimedia sites;
 * The completion of the Google Summer of Code project;
 * Ongoing preparation for the upcoming coding events in the USA, the UK, India and online;
 * A revamped, and now maintained, roadmap for Wikimedia engineering efforts.

Hover your mouse over the green question marks to see the description of a particular project.

Upcoming events

 * New Orleans hackathon (14–16 October, New Orleans, USA) — Ryan Lane and Sumana Harihareswara continued to plan this coding event, which will focus on tools and infrastructure, and Wikimedia Labs. Discussions about the upcoming migration to git are also planned.
 * Weekend of Code (18 October - 8 November, online) — Weekend of code is a planned hacking contest targeting developers worldwide. Awards will be presented for the best gadget, extension, and mobile app. The contest will be advertised via different channels.
 * India hackathon (18–20 November, Mumbai, India) — A hackathon will be held concurrently with the WikiConference India 2011, and near its venue. The main focus will be on language, mobile and offline support for MediaWiki content. About 100–150 participants are expected (read more).
 * Brighton hackathon (19–20 November, Brighton, England) — Lewis Cawte is preparing a hackathon in Brighton dedicated to general MediaWiki hacking.
 * 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.

New and open requests for proposals:
 * Networking Contractor Amsterdam
 * Internationalization and Localization Feature Development
 * Logging Analysis
 * Article Feedback Feature
 * Development and Operations Engineer
 * Systems & Operations Engineer
 * XML Dumps Help

The following positions are still open: Product Manager (Analytics), QA Lead, Director of Features Engineering, Systems Engineer (Data Analytics), Software Developer (Rich Text Editing, Features), Software Developer (Front-end) and Software Developer (Back-end), Product Manager (Mobile), Software Developer (Mobile), Product Manager.

Site infrastructure

 * Tampa Data Center —


 * Virginia Data Center —


 * Media Storage —


 * HTTPS — Protocol-relative URLs have been enabled on all sites by Roan Kattouw. SSL termination servers have arrived and are in the process of being installed. HTTPS should be fully enabled in the next week or two.

Testing environment

 * Virtualization test cluster — All services except for DNS are up. The puppet repository has been released in a public repository. We've switched to using git/gerrit for our production puppet process. New instances have been tested building from scratch using puppet. We've started giving accounts out to some early testers of Labs via labsconsole.

Backups and data archives

 * Data Dumps — The September English Wikipedia run completed in under 8 days. The dump of all text revisions is now available in a number of smaller files rather than several giant ones. The dump system has been converted to work with heterogeneous deployment and has undergone some testing with the upcoming MediaWiki 1.18 codebase.

Editing tools

 * Visual editor —
 * Internationalization and localization tools —

Participation and editor retention

 * Article feedback —
 * LiquidThreads 3.0 —
 * MoodBar —
 * Feedback Dashboard —
 * Article creation and patrol — In response to a request by a majority of English Wikipedia community members to restrict new page creation to autoconfirmed users, discussions are underway to improve the article creation workflow and the user interface for new page patrolling as alternative strategies to cope with the new page creation backlog and reduce high-friction interactions with new users.

Multimedia Tools

 * UploadWizard —

MediaWiki infrastructure

 * ResourceLoader —

Wikimedia Labs

 * TimedMediaHandler —

Mobile

 * Mobile Research — Mani Pande and Parul Vora continued to work on the report on their field research in India and Brazil. They completed phone interviews in San Francisco, Chicago and Dallas (with partner firm Answerlab) and started to schedule in-person interviews.


 * MobileFrontend —

Fundraising support

 * 2011 Fundraiser —

Offline

 * Wikipedia version tools —
 * Kiwix UX initiative — The Kiwix team built out a beta portal for feedback this month, where users can now easily submit their thoughts on using Kiwix. Next, we'll be adding some in-app feedback to offer multiple ways of sending ideas and feedback.

MediaWiki Core

 * MediaWiki 1.18 —
 * Code review management —
 * API maintenance —
 * Shell requests —
 * Continuous integration —
 * Wikitext scripting —
 * Git conversion —

Wikimedia analytics

 * Wikimedia Report Card 2.0 —

Technical Liaison; Developer Relations

 * Bug management —
 * Summer of Code 2011 —
 * Engineering project documentation —
 * Volunteer coordination and outreach —
 * MediaWiki architecture document —