Wikimedia Platform Engineering

The Platform Engineering team at Wikimedia Foundation was responsible for the MediaWiki core, managing work from volunteer developers, as well as for providing services that are used by other teams. The Platform Engineering team was managed by Rob Lanphier. It was part of Wikimedia Foundation's Engineering department.


 * Platform
 * Features
 * Mobile
 * Language
 * Analytics

See also a series of articles presenting the Platform engineering group:
 * What is “Platform Engineering”?
 * Data analytics at Wikimedia Foundation
 * Technical Liaison; Developer Relations (TL;DR) (former name of the "Engineering community team")
 * The MediaWiki Core group
 * Meet the Analytics Team
 * A Multimedia Vision for 2016

Main projects

 * HHVM
 * Admin tools development
 * Search
 * SUL finalisation
 * Library infrastructure for MediaWiki
 * Editing performance
 * Wikibase/Indexing

Continuous responsibilities

 * Shell requests
 * Security auditing and response

Planned or backburner projects

 * API/maintenance
 * Replicated session handling
 * App-level monitoring
 * AcademicAccess
 * Configuration management
 * Template profiling
 * Continuous external storage recompression
 * Database sharding
 * Code review management
 * API/REST proposal
 * Password storage update
 * Site performance and architecture
 * Auth systems
 * Deployment tooling

Recently completed projects

 * Disk-backed object cache
 * Heterogeneous deployment
 * MediaWiki 1.18/Roadmap
 * MediaWiki 1.19/Roadmap
 * MediaWiki 1.20/Roadmap
 * MediaWiki 1.21/Roadmap
 * Wikivoyage migration
 * VipsScaler
 * Lua scripting
 * Git/Conversion
 * MediaWiki 1.22/Roadmap
 * MediaWiki 1.23/Roadmap

Responsibilities
The Release Engineering team is responsible for the tooling and resources that help MediaWiki developers write better code and get that code out for our users faster.

Current activities

 * Quality Assurance
 * Quality Assurance/Browser testing

Planned or backburner projects

 * Wikimedia Release Engineering Team
 * Beta cluster
 * Continuous integration

Responsibilities
The Multimedia team is responsible for features that provide a richer experience and support more media contributions on Wikipedia, Commons, and MediaWiki sites.

We develop features to:
 * improve the viewing experience for our readers
 * develop feedback and curation tools
 * help editors add media files to articles.

We are also upgrading our current infrastructure to:
 * improve the upload pipeline
 * implement structured data
 * better integrate multimedia across all our sites.

Overview

 * Multimedia

Main projects
At this time, our two main projects are:
 * Media Viewer, an immersive multimedia browser; and
 * UploadWizard, an incremental upgrade and code refactoring of our contribution pipeline.

Next projects
Here is our Multimedia Vision for 2016, to give you a sense of what we are working on this year. In coming months, we will be working on a variety of projects to help our users view, contribute, curate and use images, sound and video files. We believe that audio-visual media offer a unique opportunity to engage a wide range of users to participate productively in our collective work.


 * UploadWizard
 * Multimedia/Structured Data

Responsibilities

 * Attract and support volunteer technologists so that they can become an even more powerful force in driving improvement on the website
 * Help nurture volunteer-developed extensions and widgets
 * Provide communications support for all groups in the engineering department
 * Develop clear documentation for MediaWiki so that new staff, volunteer developers and external users have a smooth ramp-up process to becoming MediaWiki developers

Current activities
See also Engineering Community team meetings. * Bug management
 * Phabricator/Migration
 * Outreach programs
 * Events/Coordination
 * Documentation/Improvement

Planned or backburner projects

 * Architecture process