Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2011/October

Major news in October include:
 * NOLA hackathon
 * Progress on visual editor
 * Translate extension on meta
 * 1.18 deployment completed
 * AOSA book
 * AOSA book

Hover your mouse over the green question marks to see the description of a particular project.

Recent events

 * New Orleans hackathon (14–16 October, New Orleans, USA) —


 * October 2011 Coding Challenge (20 October - 7 November, online) — Greg DeKoenigsberg continued to prepare for this contest, which officially started on October 20th, and will be running for one more week (see the rules). The contest offers three challenges: uploading media via a smartphone, surfacing changes in real time, and showing slideshows. The back-end, which provides a sign-up and submission process, was developed by Jeroen De Dauw and released as a MediaWiki extension. You can still participate in the challenge.

Upcoming events

 * India hackathon (18–20 November, Mumbai, India) —


 * Brighton hackathon (19–20 November, Brighton, England) —


 * Check out the Software deployments page on the wikitech wiki for up-to-date information on the upcoming deployments to Wikimedia sites, and the roadmap for Wikimedia engineering efforts.

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.


 * RFP/Mobile UI/UX Redesign

The following positions are open: Product Manager (Analytics), QA Lead, Director of Features Engineering, Systems Engineer (Data Analytics), Software Developer (Rich Text Editing, Features), Software Developer (Front-end) and Software Developer (Back-end), Product Manager (Mobile), Software Developer (Mobile), Product Manager.

The following requests for proposals are open: Networking Contractor Amsterdam, Internationalization and Localization Feature Development, Logging Analysis, Article Feedback Feature, Development and Operations Engineer, Systems & Operations Engineer, XML Dumps Help.

Short news

 * Phil Chang was hired as Product Manager for Mobile (announcement).
 * Antoine Musso, contractor working on Continuous integration (read announcement)
 * Amir Aharoni, software developer joining the Internationalization and localization tools team (announcement)
 * Gabriel Wicke joined http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-October/069983.html

Site infrastructure

 * Tampa Data Center —


 * Virginia Data Center —


 * Media Storage —


 * HTTPS — HTTPS support has been enabled on all sites. Mobile support is still to come. At some point in the future we'll be switching the log in link to default to logging in via https. Priority on future https work is low, currently.
 * http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/10/03/native-https-support-enabled-for-all-wikimedia-foundation-wikis/

Testing environment

 * Virtualization test cluster — Labs has been launched. We are starting to install instances to duplicate our production environment. We are also bringing up some instances for non-mediawiki related work. At the NOLA hackathon we worked with a team from Canonical to get the juju project access to our environment. A new project, wikidata, announced they'd be working in the Labs environment as well.

Backups and data archives

 * Data Dumps —

Editing tools

 * Visual editor —
 * Internationalization and localization tools —

Participation and editor retention

 * Article feedback —
 * LiquidThreads 3.0 —
 * Feedback Dashboard —

Multimedia Tools

 * UploadWizard —

MediaWiki infrastructure

 * ResourceLoader —

Wikimedia Labs

 * TimedMediaHandler —

Mobile

 * Mobile Research —


 * MobileFrontend —


 * Android App
 * http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/10/24/wikipedia-android-needs-developers/

Fundraising support

 * 2011 Fundraiser —

Offline

 * Kiwix UX initiative —

MediaWiki Core

 * MediaWiki 1.18 —
 * Code review management —
 * API maintenance —
 * Shell requests —
 * Continuous integration —
 * Wikitext scripting —
 * Git conversion —

Wikimedia analytics

 * Wikimedia Report Card 2.0 —

Technical Liaison; Developer Relations

 * Bug management —
 * Summer of Code 2011 —
 * Engineering project documentation —
 * Volunteer coordination and outreach —
 * MediaWiki architecture document —