Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2014/December

Major news in December include:
 * the third version of the Content translation tool;
 * a look at collaboration practices within the mobile web engineering team;
 * lead images prominently featured in the Beta version of the Wikipedia for Android app;
 * the migration of the Technical Operations team from RT to Phabricator;
 * a retrospective on how the deployment of HHVM improved editing performance on Wikimedia sites.

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.

* Director of Engineering
 * Senior Software Engineer - Services
 * Software Engineer - Flow (Front-end)
 * Software Engineer - Mobile - Android
 * Application Security Engineer
 * Full Stack Developer - Analytics
 * Agile Coach
 * Scrum Master
 * Senior Technical Product Manager
 * Community Liaison
 * Community Liaison (PT Contract)
 * UX Senior Designer
 * UX Senior Design Researcher
 * UX Visual Design Fellowship

Announcements

 * Nirzar Pangarkar joined the User Experience team as User Experience Designer (announcement).

Technical Operations
Labs metrics in December: Tool metrics:
 * Number of projects: 155
 * Number of instances: 437
 * Amount of RAM in use (in MBs): 2,147,840
 * Amount of allocated storage (in GBs): 21,745
 * Number of virtual CPUs in use: 1,059
 * Number of users: 4,599
 * Number of tools: 1002
 * Number of tool maintainers: 559

 Wikimedia Labs
 * We've added two new large servers to the Labs virtualization cluster in eqiad. This will increases our capacity by about 40%; Andrew is now in the process of rebalancing load among servers and allocating new resources to projects that need them.
 * Yuvi has made some progress with an intermittent DNS issue. With luck this will be more stable now.
 * The toolserver is now officially decommissioned.

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

The Google Code-in project has started and we are part of it, we propose a good dozen of tasks related to Kiwix for Android.

After two years since the 0.9rc2, we have finally released Kiwix for PCs (Windows, OSX, Linux) version 0.9. This new release brings a lot of small improvements and bug fixes which should really improve the global user experience.

Most of our resources were used this month to improve mwoffliner, our solution to build a ZIM file (offline version) of any Mediawiki. These efforts to improve the performance, the features and the usability start to pay, We have built more than 400 ZIM files this month (trend increasing) and third part projects start to use it to provide their own ZIM files (like here or here).

On the operational side, we have started to setup a ZIM building farm in the Wikimedia labs. Work is ongoing but the goal is to be able to generate soon, one time a month at least, ZIM files for all our projects.

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

In December the Wikidata team released a number of new features. These are: In addition we provided support for the work on query functionality for Wikidata. Your input is requested for a new feature: article placeholders powered by Wikidata.
 * language fallbacks (so you see information in a different language if it is not available in your primary language)
 * statements on properties (this is important for mapping our properties to other databases for example)
 * a new datatype for linking to properties (this is necessary to say that one property is the inverse of another property for example - like "father" and "child")
 * performance improvements.

It was announced that Freebase will be shut down in favor of Wikidata. Lydia wrote a blog post about scaling Wikidata over the next year.

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.