Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2011/May

Major news this month include:

Berlin Hackathon 2011

 * Berlin Hackathon 2011 (May 13-15, Berlin) —
 * Wikimedia tech crowd and MediaWiki developers gather in Berlin
 * Wikimedia developers start second day of Berlin hackathon
 * Berlin hackathon continues with group coding, discussions and bug squashing
 * Developers go home after productive Berlin hackathon

Upcoming events

 * Wikimania (August 2-7, Haifa, Israel) —


 * 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.

The following positions have opened this month:
 * Operations Engineer — Special projects
 * Software Developer Front-end — General
 * Software Developer Back-end — General
 * Software Developer Back-end — General

The following positions are still open:
 * Engineering Program Manager — Data Analytics
 * Software Developer — Features
 * Systems Engineer — Data Analytics (previously Data Analytics Engineer)
 * Operations Engineer
 * Senior QA Engineer
 * Networking Contractor — Amsterdam
 * Software Engineer — Community R&D
 * Software Developer, Rich Text Editing — Features
 * Product Manager — Features

In addition, we hope to post the following positions over the next few months:
 * Release Engineer
 * Technical Writer

Short news

 * Visitors —
 * Hires —
 * Asher Feldman, Performance Engineer

Operations

 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Site operations
Virginia Data Center — Installation of a world-class primary data center for Wikimedia Foundation websites.
 * Status:

Media Storage — Improvement of our media storage architecture to accommodate expected increase in media uploads.
 * Status:

Testing environment
Virtualization test cluster — Environment to deploy temporary machines for testing and experimentation, for use by WMF staff and volunteers working on important projects (as capacity allows).
 * Status:

Backups and data archives
Backups — Improvement of backup coverage of Wikimedia-hosted data.
 * Status:

Data Dumps — Improvement of processes to create and provide public copies of public Wikimedia data.
 * Status:

Features Engineering

 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Content Quality and Editorial Tools
Article Feedback — A feature to collaboratively assess article quality and incorporate reader ratings on Wikipedia.
 * Status:
 * v3 deployed to the English Wikipedia on May 9 with new features (like the dashboard); expanded to 100,000 articles. (blog post)

FlaggedRevs — A feature to allow changes made by logged-out and new users to be reviewed before they appear as the primary version of an article.
 * Status:

Discussions and Interactions
Liquid Threads — A feature that brings threaded discussions capabilities to Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki.
 * Status:

WikiLove — An extension to encourage praise and virtual gifts between users.
 * Status:

Multimedia Tools
Upload wizard — A feature that provides an easier way of uploading files to Wikimedia Commons, the media library associated with Wikipedia.
 * Status:
 * Deployed as default uploader on Commons on May 9 (blog post)

Other projects

 * Resource loader —


 * Non-Roman character set localization —


 * Interlanguage extension design improvements —


 * Commons & multimedia strategy —


 * Parser functions —


 * Community feature prototyping —


 * HackPad: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/53614, http://hackpad.posterous.com/live-editing-mediawiki-with-hackpad

Wikimedia Labs
Media projects — A set of features to improve media handling and key infrastructure support tools, many developed with Kaltura, such as Metavid, MwEmbed, and the Video Editor.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Special projects

 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

Mobile
Mobile projects — All things Mobile and Wikimedia.
 * Status:

Mobile Research — A research project to help determine our Mobile strategy.
 * Status:

Mobile site rewrite — Port of our Ruby-based mobile gateway to PHP.
 * Status:

Fundraising support
2011 Fundraiser — Support and development for the annual fundraiser of the Foundation.
 * Status:

Offline
Wikipedia version tools — Support and development of a series of tools to select Wikipedia content for offline use.
 * Status:

OpenZim for Collections — Integration of openZim into the Collections extension.
 * Status:

Kiwix — Improvement of the user experience of the Kiwix app to access offline Wikimedia content.
 * Status:

General Engineering

 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

MediaWiki development and tools
MediaWiki 1.17 release — The upcoming MediaWiki release.
 * Status:

Code review — Review of changes made to the MediaWiki code.
 * Status:

Bugmeistering — Management of our bug tracker.
 * Status:

Summer of Code 2011 — A sponsored community program allowing students to join the community as developers.
 * Status:

Parser & gadgets — Groundwork for the next generation visual editor of MediaWiki.
 * Status:

Performance optimization
PoolCounter — A MediaWiki extension to avoid parser deadlocks on high-traffic pages.
 * Status:

Disk-backed object cache — Deployment of a disk-backed object cache to increase the parser cache hit ratio.
 * Status:

Wikimedia analytics
udp2log — A custom data analytics logging system.
 * Status:

A/B testing — A set of tools to perform A/B testing on Wikimedia sites.
 * Status:

Technical communications
Development process improvement — A project to increase transparency and organize Wikimedia Foundation's engineering efforts more efficiently.
 * Status:

Other projects

 * Bugzilla upgrade to 4.0 —


 * OpenWebAnalytics —


 * API maintenance —


 * Shell bugs —


 * Access to Subversion —


 * Migration to Git —


 * Heterogeneous deployment —


 * Report card —


 * HipHop support —