Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2014/March

Engineering metrics in March: Major news in March include:
 * 160 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits went from around 1450 to about 1315.
 * About 25 shell requests were processed.
 * an overview of webfonts, and the advantages and challenges of using them on Wikimedia sites;
 * a series of essays written by Google Code-in students who shared their impressions, frustrations and surprises as they discovered the Wikimedia and MediaWiki technical community;
 * Hovercards now available as a Beta feature on all Wikimedia wikis, allowing readers to see a short summary of an article just by hovering a link;
 * a subtle typography change across Wikimedia sites for better readability, consistency and accessibility;
 * a recap of the upgrade and migration of our bug tracking software.

''Note: We're also providing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this report that does not assume specialized technical knowledge.

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.



Technical Operations
Datacenter RFP

 Wikimedia Labs Labs metrics in March: (Stats are greatly inflated due to overlap between pmtpa and eqiad) Labs Ops have spent the month shepherding projects from the Tampa cloud to the Ashburn cloud. Dozens of volunteers contributed to the move, and all tools and projects have now been copied to or rebuilt in Ashburn. Some projects and tools are in a non-running state pending action on the part of their owners or admins.
 * Number of projects: 126
 * Number of instances: 678
 * Amount of RAM in use (in MBs): 1,967,104
 * Amount of allocated storage (in GBs): 24,245
 * Number of virtual CPUs in use: 977
 * Number of users: 2,901

Ashburn labs is running Openstack Havana, with NFS for shared storage.

ulsfo redeployment

eqiad data center capacity expansion

shutting down machines in pmtpa data center
 * During March, ops have been decommissioning and shutting down a lot of hosts in the old Tampa datacenter including all former appservers. The amount of energy consumed in the old datacenter has been greatly reduced. A few hosts are going to be migrated to another floor in the existing datacenter and physical data center work is coming up.

Mobile
Wikipedia Zero (partnerships)

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

This month we have released a new version of Kiwix for Android which adds support for older versions of Android like Gingerbread, around 50% more devices than before are supported.

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

The team worked on making ranks more useful. From now on by default the property parser function and Lua always return the values with the rank "preferred" or when none is available the one with the rank "normal". This allows for example to exclude past mayors when asking Wikidata for the mayor of a city. Additionally further considerable speed improvements have been made so that browsing Wikidata is now a lot faster. Diffs between versions of pages on Wikidata have also been improved to make it easier to see what changes were made to an item. Last but not least the user interface redesign research went on.

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.