Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2012/December

Engineering metrics in December:
 * 113 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits went from about 535 to about 648.
 * About 39 shell requests were processed.
 * As of December 2012, users can self-register on Wikimedia Labs (and get access to git/Gerrit). It is no longer necessary to request an account for developer access.
 * Wikimedia Labs now hosts 148 projects, 847 users; to date 1378 instances have been created.

Major news in December include:
 * https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/12/07/inventing-as-we-go-building-a-visual-editor-for-mediawiki/ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/12/12/try-out-the-alpha-version-of-the-visualeditor/
 * https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/12/20/article-feedback-new-research-and-next-steps/
 * https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/12/10/introducing-mediawiki-community-metrics/
 * https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/12/11/welcome-to-floss-outreach-program-for-women-interns/
 * [https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/12/12/translation-interface-makeover-in-progress/
 * [https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/12/12/translation-interface-makeover-in-progress/

''Note: Like last month, we're proposing a shorter and simpler version of this report that does not assume specialized technical knowledge.

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

 * Matthew Flaschen joined the Wikimedia Features engineering team as Features Engineer (announcement).
 * Mike Wang joined the Operations team as part time Labs Ops Engineer (consultant) (announcement).

Technical Operations
Site Infrastructure

Fundraising
 * There were no major changes on the fundraising infrastructure because of the fundraiser itself. We ordered/received bastion hosts for which we're in the process of deploying. Monitoring got an overhaul and we're now sending send alerts to fundraising-tech and/or techops depending on metric.

Data Dumps

Wikimedia Labs

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

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

New code and bugfixes have been deployed (detailed changes here and here and test2.wikipedia.org now gets language links from Wikidata. Changes on Wikidata that concern articles on test2 are shown in the recent changes of test2 as well. If there are no problems deployment on the Hungarian Wikipedia will be in January 14th. Other Wikipedias are going to follow later.

For the second phase of Wikidata representation of values is the central focus. We published a draft for this and discussions have started. We'd appreciate your feedback.

Additionally Denny and Lydia held office hours on IRC again. (logs in English and German)

More detailed summaries about what is happening around Wikidata are available here.

Future

 * The engineering management team continues to update the Software deployments page weekly, providing up-to-date information on the upcoming deployments to Wikimedia sites, as well as the engineering roadmap, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts.