Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2013/September

Engineering metrics in September:
 * unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits went from around 1080 to about.
 * About 36 shell requests were processed.
 * Wikimedia Labs now hosts projects and  users; to date  instances have been created.
 * The tools project in Labs now hosts 325 tools and 266 members.

Major news in September include:

''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

 * Kartik Mistry joined the Language Engineering team as Software Engineer (announcement).
 * Sucheta Ghoshal joined the Language Engineering team as associate software engineer (announcement).
 * Kaity Hammerstein joined the User experience team as Associate UX Designer (announcement).
 * Aaron Halfaker joined the Analytics team as Research Analyst (announcement).
 * Oliver Keyes transitioned to the role of Product Analyst (announcement).
 * Dan Garry joined the Product development team as Associate Product Manager for Platform. (announcement).
 * Nick Wilson joined the Product development team as Community Liaison (announcement).

Technical Operations
Site infrastructure
 * Work to refactor and modularize our puppet repo continues: this month, lots of dead code got pruned out, and some tiny miscellaneous classes aggregated with more relevant components.

Data Dumps
 * The GSOC incremental dumps project has drawn to a close, but User:Svick will still be around. There's work to be done before this can go into production, as well as extensive testing and code review from folks with good C++ chops.  If you want to help with any of this, check the repo.

Wikimedia Labs
 * The DNS infrastructure of the Labs has been overhauled and much improved.
 * The hardware switch to replace the Labs' NFS server unreliable hardware is ready, and should talk place this week.

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



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

Wikidata mainly concentrated on the sister projects Wikimedia Commons and Wiktionary. For Wikimedia Commons we added the ability to store interwiki links in one central location (Wikidata) together with the ones for Wikipedia and Wikivoyage. For Wiktionary we published an analysis of all existing proposals for the integration of Wikidata and Wiktionary. On Wikidata itself we rolled out the URL datatype. This for example allows you to provide a URL as a source of a statement. Denny Vrandečić published 2 blog posts about the ideas behind Wikidata - “Wikidata Quality and Quantity” and “A categorical imperative?”. In addition he blogged about a few thoughts concerning the future of Wikidata before leaving the project at the end of the month. The development team is looking to hire another frontend developer experienced in JavaScript.

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 engineering roadmap, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts.