Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2011/August

Major news in August include:

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

Recent events

 * Wikimania (August 2-7, Haifa, Israel) —

Upcoming events

 * New Orleans hackathon (14-16 October, New Orleans) —
 * http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/54940


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

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. The following positions opened in August:

Open Requests for Proposals:
 * Article Feedback Feature

The following positions are still open: Product Manager (Analytics), QA Lead, Operations Engineer (Networking), Director of Features Engineering, Systems Engineer (Data Analytics), Networking Contractor (Amsterdam), Software Developer (Rich Text Editing, Features), Software Developer (Front-end) and Software Developer (Back-end), Product Manager (Mobile), Software Developer (Mobile), Product Manager (New Editor Engagement)

Short news

 * Jeremy Postlethwaite, software engineer, Fundraising (announcement)
 * The team for the Internationalization and localization tools project was put together in August. It consists of Siebrand Mazeland (Product Manager, Localization), Niklas Laxström (Internationalization Engineer) and Gerard Meijssen (Internationalization / Localization Outreach Consultant).

Training and Process Improvement

 * The TechOps team got together the week of the 22nd. The goals of the meeting were:
 * Improve site recovery knowledge (documentation and training)
 * Share knowledge of new project designs
 * Review & prioritize our TechOps Projects
 * Document and communicate our EQIAD buildup milestones
 * Develop the RT management process

Site infrastructure

 * Tampa Data Center —


 * Virginia Data Center —


 * Media Storage —
 * http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/54901


 * HTTPS & IPv6 — {{Roan and Ryan have been fixing issues that surfaced during the internal testings. We have ordered new servers for the AMS and TPA to handle SSL termination processing.  Meantime, Ryan is setting up ssl boxes in eqiad, enhance Varnish to deal with x-forwarded-for and x-forwarded-proto and made (and pushed out) necessary changes to Squid

Testing environment

 * Virtualization test cluster —

Backups and data archives

 * Data Dumps —

Editing tools

 * Visual editor —
 * Internationalization and localization tools —

Content Quality and Editorial Tools

 * Article feedback —

Participation and editor retention

 * WikiLove —
 * MoodBar Dashboard —
 * GlobalProfile —
 * QuickComments —

Multimedia Tools

 * UploadWizard —

MediaWiki infrastructure

 * ResourceLoader —

Wikimedia Labs

 * TimedMediaHandler —
 * MediaWiki.next —

Mobile

 * Mobile Research — Mani Pande and Parul Vora continued to synthesize the findings from field research in India and Brazil; a research page was also created on meta. They launched user experience research in US with AnswerLab, and have started recruiting readers and editors for ethnographic research to be conducted in San Francisco, Dallas and Chicago. The mobile survey was prepared in LimeSurvey, and translations are ongoing.


 * MobileFrontend —
 * http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/08/17/calling-mobile-testers-for-round-two/
 * http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/54875
 * http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/55009
 * http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/55056
 * http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/55098
 * http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/55194

Fundraising support

 * 2011 Fundraiser —
 * http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/08/18/fundraiser-engineering-update-sprint4/
 * http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/55064

Offline

 * Wikipedia version tools —
 * http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/55065
 * Kiwix UX initiative —
 * http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/08/16/come-beta-test-offline-wikipedia/
 * http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/55217


 * http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/55141

Platform Engineering

 * http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/08/17/what-is-platform-engineering/

MediaWiki Core

 * MediaWiki 1.18 —
 * Code review management —
 * Heterogeneous deployment —
 * API maintenance —
 * Shell requests —
 * Continuous integration —
 * Wikitext scripting —
 * Projects on hold — The HipHop deployment, AcademicAccess and Disk-backed object cache projects were on hold in August.

Wikimedia analytics

 * Wikimedia Report Card 2.0 —

Technical Liaison; Developer Relations

 * Bug management —
 * Summer of Code 2011 —
 * Engineering project documentation —
 * Volunteer coordination and outreach —
 * http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/54843
 * MediaWiki architecture document —