Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2010/December

(to be posted on techblog.wikimedia.org by RobLa-WMF)

Welcome to the January monthly report from WMF Engineering! As always, we're reporting on what we've been working on and what's coming up. In December, ...

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Operations
Virginia Data Center - Setting up a world-class primary data center for Wikimedia Foundation websites
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Media Storage - Re-working our media storage architecture to accommodate expected increase in media uploads.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Monitoring - Enhancing both Operations and public monitoring to a) notice potential outages sooner, b) increase transparency to the community, c) support progress tracking required in the 5-year plan.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Virtualization cluster - more easily deploy temporary machines for testing and experimentation. This cluster is intended for use not just by WMF staff, but will be available to volunteers working on important projects as capacity allows.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Backups - Improve backup coverage of Wikimedia-hosted data
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Content Quality Tools
Article Feedback - Feature to collaboratively assess article quality and incorporate reader ratings on Wikipedia.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Pending Changes - Pending Changes is a new review feature deployed to English Wikipedia, which allows changes made by anonymous and new users to be reviewed before they appear as the primary version of an article.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Threaded Discussions
Liquid Threads - LiquidThreads is an extension that brings threaded discussions capabilities to Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Multimedia Tools
Upload wizard - The upload wizard is an extension for MediaWiki that provides an easier way of uploading files to Wikimedia Commons, the media library associated with Wikipedia.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Media Projects - improved media handling and key infrastructure support tools. Many media components are developed in an open source development partnership with Kaltura, including Metavid, MwEmbed, and the Video Editor.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

MediaWiki Infrastructure
Resource loader - The resource loader aims to improve the load times for JavaScript and CSS in MediaWiki. This will enable faster loading of the Vector skin, media extensions, and anything else that makes extensive use of Javascript and CSS.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

General Engineering
Analytics Revamp - Incorporate a web analytics solution that can help the Wikimedia movement understand how Wikimedia sites are used. This project ncludes reworking our primary system (udp2log) as well as augmenting it with other systems (like Open Web Analytics)
 * Status:
 * Program managers: Rob Lanphier & Tomasz Finc

Test framework deployment - Build an automated test environment for MediaWiki using CruiseControl, Selenium, and PHPUnit.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Code review - improving the way we provide code reviews for MediaWiki
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Technical Documentation – Improve our technical documentation by making small, incremental improvements to the docs and docs process.
 * Status: -  Zak Greant is currently pairing up with many of the core committers in documentation sessions.
 * Program Managers: Rob Lanphier / Zak Greant

wmsync – Replace our current deployment tools (e.g. "scap") with more robust software.
 * Status: Tim Starling and Mark Bergsma are in the very early stages of collaborating on the design of this, with some prototype software written in Python.
 * Program Managers: Rob Lanphier

Fundraising
2010 Fundraiser - The engineering tasks necessary to run a successful fundraiser, with sub-projects involving fraud prevention, CentralNotice, and the analytics upgrade.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

Credit card server upgrade - Upgrading our current payments infrastructure to support 1-click donations.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

Mobile
Mobile site rewrite - Porting our existing gateway for easier support, development and participation
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

Offline
Offline - better support for offline reading of Wikimedia projects
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

Misc
Data summit -