Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2011/March

Major news this month include:
 * strategy:Product Whitepaper & strategy:March 2011 Update
 * Brion!!11!
 * Article Feedback Phase 2, Upload Wizard 1.0

Upcoming events

 * Berlin Hackathon 2011 (May 13-15, Berlin) — Daniel Kinzler announced the dates and location of the Berlin Hackathon. Registration is open until April 10. Participants are also listing topics to work on.
 * Summer of Code 2011 — Sumana Harihareswara sent a call for students for the upcoming summer of code. Developers are now signing up as students and mentors, and projects are being discussed.
 * Wikimania (August 2-7, Haifa, Israel) — This year's Wikimania will be preceded by two days of hacking (August 2-3); the actual conference (August 4-7) will also include Technology tracks.

Personnel
Are you looking to work for Wikimedia? We have a lot of hiring coming up this year, and we really love talking to active community members about these roles.

The following positions have opened this month:
 * Engineering Program Manager - Data Analytics

The following positions are still open:
 * Performance Engineer
 * Software Developer (Features)
 * Software Developer (Mobile)
 * Data Analytics Engineer
 * Operations Engineer
 * Senior QA Engineer
 * Networking Contractor (Amsterdam)
 * Software Engineer — Community R&D

In addition, we hope to post the following positions over the next few months:
 * Rich Text Editor Engineer
 * Release Engineer
 * Technical Writer

Short news

 * Visitors —
 * Hires —
 * Peter Youngmaster, Consultant, to work as an Operations Engineer
 * Brion Vibber, Lead Architect, http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2011/03/07/brion-vibber-rejoins-wikimedia-foundation/

Operations
Virginia Data Center — Installation of a world-class primary data center for Wikimedia Foundation websites.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Media Storage — Improvement of our media storage architecture to accommodate expected increase in media uploads.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Virtualization test cluster — Environment to deploy temporary machines for testing and experimentation, for use by WMF staff and volunteers working on important projects (as capacity allows).
 * Status: . Ryan Lane released version 1.2 of his OpenStackManager extension.


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Backups — Improvement of backup coverage of Wikimedia-hosted data.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Data Dumps — Improvement of processes to create and provide public copies of public Wikimedia data.
 * Status:
 * http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/52609


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Short news

 * Topic — summary

Content Quality and Editorial Tools


Article Feedback (phase 2) — A feature to collaboratively assess article quality and incorporate reader ratings on Wikipedia.
 * Status: The second phase of this feature was released on the English Wikipedia in mid March. A major change in the interface is the ability for reviewers to specify the source of their knowledge, e.g. if they have an academic degree in a related field (see screenshot). Dario Taraborelli also published an analysis of the first phase experiment. We're currently looking at expanding the scope of the experiment to include several thousand articles, in order to get results that are more meaningful statistically.
 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Article feedback (extended review) — An interface for quality reviews of Wikipedia content.
 * Status: The "Open wiki review system" is now considered as a possible evolution of the Article feedback feature. It would offer an interface to submit detailed quality reviews, as well as a system to sort and assess reviews. Ways to surface quality indicators for readers are also being explored.
 * Commissioned by: Erik Möller

Pending Changes — A feature to allow changes made by logged-out and new users to be reviewed before they appear as the primary version of an article.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Personal image filter — A feature to allow users to selectively hide images on a wiki.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Discussions and Interactions
Liquid Threads — A feature that brings threaded discussions capabilities to Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki.
 * Status: Andrew Garrett laid down a timeline for his upcoming work on this feature. He will first focus on back-end work, before moving to documentation and front-end.
 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

SimpleSurvey 2.0 — A MediaWiki extension to create and run surveys in MediaWiki.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Editing features
Non-Roman character set localization — A set of tools to facilitate editing in languages using a non-Roman alphabet.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Multimedia Tools
Upload wizard — A feature that provides an easier way of uploading files to Wikimedia Commons, the media library associated with Wikipedia.
 * Status: Neil Kandalgaonkar and Ryan Kaldari continued to fix bugs, test functionality, and generally ready the software for a 1.0 release. These improvements were deployed to the Commons prototype and Neil sent out a call for testing to uncover remaining bugs. The 1.0 release is planned for deployment on Commons on March 30th.
 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

JavaScript parsing library — A JavaScript parsing library for wikitext.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

MediaWiki infrastructure
Resource loader — A feature to improve the load times for JavaScript and CSS in MediaWiki.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Community feature prototyping

 * http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/03/ui-design-experiments/

Short news

 * Topic — summary
 * Style guide for forms — Designer Brandon Harris published a draft style guide for forms in MediaWiki, and started a discussion on wikitech-l.

Wikimedia Labs
Media projects — A set of features to improve media handling and key infrastructure support tools, many developed with Kaltura, such as Metavid, MwEmbed, and the Video Editor.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

MediaWiki development
MediaWiki 1.17 release — The upcoming MediaWiki release.
 * Status:
 * add Mark H.'s e-mails to wikitech-l, weekly sprints, etc.


 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Test framework deployment — Creation of an automated test environment for MediaWiki using CruiseControl, Selenium, and PHPUnit.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Wikimedia analytics
udp2log — A custom data analytics logging system.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

OpenWebAnalytics — Installation and customization of an Open Web Analytics (OWA) platform to process data to support decision making
 * Status:


 * Program managers: Rob Lanphier & Tomasz Finc

Wikilytics — A toolkit to create data sets to analyze Editor Trends.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Howie Fung

Technical communications

 * Development process improvement — A project to increase transparency and organize Wikimedia Foundation's engineering efforts more efficiently.
 * Status: Guillaume Paumier revived this project and has been focusing on summary pages and versions & phases for Wikimedia-funded engineering projects. The goal is to make it easier to find this information and keep it up-to-date, for the benefit of staff, volunteer developers and users.
 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier


 * Wikimedia blog overhaul — A project to consolidate and improve the Wikimedia blogs.
 * Status: After assessing the current situation of Wikimedia blogs, Guillaume Paumier worked with the Communications team, and other departments, to collect requirements. A technical proposal was then created and a prototype set up. Implementation should now happen shortly.
 * Project manager: Guillaume Paumier

Short news

 * Topic — summary
 * http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/03/site-fixes/

Mobile
Mobile site rewrite — Port of our existing gateway to another framework for easier support & collaborative development.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

WikiSnaps for Android — Port of the mobile upload app experience with WikiSnaps to the Android platform.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

Offline
Wikipedia version tools — Support and development of a series of tools to select Wikipedia content for offline use.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

OpenZim for Collections — Integration of OpenZim into the Collections extension.
 * Status: Tomasz Finc announced that PediaPress had completed the integration of OpenZim with the Collections extension; the feature was enabled on all Wikimedia projects using the extension. Users are now able to download books generated by the Create a book feature in ZIM format, to read them with an offline app.
 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

Kiwix UX study — Evaluation of the user experience of the Kiwix mobile app to access offline Wikimedia content.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc