Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2014/June

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

Engineering metrics in June:
 * 151 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits went from around 1440 to about 1575.
 * About 14 shell requests were processed.

Upcoming events
There are many opportunities for you to get involved and contribute to MediaWiki and technical activities to improve Wikimedia sites, both for coders and contributors with other talents.

For a more complete and up-to-date list, check out the Project:Calendar.

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.

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Announcements

 * Elliot Eggleston joined the Wikimedia Foundation as a Features Engineer in the Fundraising-Tech team (announcement).

Technical Operations
New Dallas data center
 * On-site work has started in our new Dallas (Carrollton) data-center (codfw). Racks have been installed, the equipment we moved from Tampa has been racked and cabling work has been mostly completed over the course of the month. We are now awaiting the installation of connectivity to the rest of our network as well as the arrival of the first newly-ordered server equipment, so server & network configuration can commence.

Puppet 3 migration
 * In July we migrated from Puppet 2 to Puppet 3 on all production servers. Thanks to the hard work of both volunteers and Operations staff on our Puppet repository in the months leading up to this, this migration went very smoothly.

Labs metrics in June:
 * Number of projects: 173
 * Number of instances: 424
 * Amount of RAM in use (in MBs): 1,741,312
 * Amount of allocated storage (in GBs): 19,045
 * Number of virtual CPUs in use: 855
 * Number of users: 3,356

 Wikimedia Labs
 * Last month we switched the Labs puppetmaster to Puppet 3; this month all instances switched over as well. Some cleanup work was needed in our puppet manifests to handle Trusty and Puppet 3 properly; everything is fairly stable now but a bit of mopping up remains.

Mobile
Wikipedia Zero (partnerships)


 * We launched Wikipedia Zero with Airtel in Bangladesh, our third partner in Bangladesh, and our 34th launched partner overall. We participated in the Wiki Indaba conference, the first event of its kind to be held in Africa. The event, organized by Wikimedia South Africa, brought together community members from Tunisia, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Malawi and South Africa. The attendees shared experiences and challenges to work in the region and formulated strategies to support and strengthen the movement's efforts across the continent. While in South Africa, Adele Vrana also met with local operators. Meanwhile, Carolynne Schloeder met with numerous operators and handset manufacturers in India. Carolynne joined Wikimedian RadhaKrishna Arvapally for a presentation at C-DOT, and both participated a blogger event hosted by our partner Aircel, along with other members of Wikimedia India in Bangalore. Smriti Gupta joined the group as Mobile Partnerships Manager, Asia.

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


 * The team worked on fixing bugs as well as a number of features. These include data access for Wikiquote, support for redirects, the monolingual text datatype as well as further work on queries. Interface messages where reworked to make them easier to understand. First mockups of the new interface design have been published for comments. The entity suggester a team of students worked on over the last months has been deployed. This makes it easier to add new statements by suggesting what kind of statements are missing on an item. Wikidata the Game has been extended by Magnus by 2 games to add date of birth and date of death to people as well as to add missing images.

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.