Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2013/November

Engineering metrics in November: Major news in November include:
 * unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits went from around 1122 to about.
 * About shell requests were processed.

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

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.



Announcements

 * Jeff Hall http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/qa/2013-November/000686.html
 * Aaron Arcos joined the Platform engineering group as a volunteer developer working with the Multimedia team. (announcement).

Technical Operations
Site infrastructure

Wikimedia Labs

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



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

The Wikidata developers held an office hour to give a status update and answer questions. The log is now available. In addition they worked on ranks, ordering of statements and the quantities datatype. The quantities datatype is needed to for example enter the number of inhabitants of a country in Wikidata. It is available for testing now on http://test.wikidata.org. Ranks will allow for certain statements to be marked as preferred or deprecated. This is for example useful to indicate a previous majors of a city or the number of inhabitants of a country in 1900.

Magnus Manske wrote a gadget that allows you to additionally show Wikidata search results when doing a search on Wikipedia. He also extended the Reasonator tool to now also work for cities. So far it only supported people and species.

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.