Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2011/January

Recent events
Amsterdam Hack-a-Ton (January 14-15, the Netherlands) — A coding event for MediaWiki developers.
 * A ton of great work was accomplished by developers during this event, particularly around multimedia. Alpha tools and projects include a WordPress plugin to embed pictures from Commons, an iPhone app to directly upload photos to Commons, and the integration of license information into MediaWiki.

Data Summit (February 4th, California) — A working session about semantic data, analytics and research into data dumps.

Other events
 * StrataConf 2011 (February 1-3, 2011, Santa Clara, California) —
 * FOSDEM 2011 (February 5-6, Brussels, Belgium) —

Upcoming events

 * GNUnify 2011 (February 11-12, Pune, India) — This year's GNUnify conference will have a special focus on Wikimedia Engineering in a dedicated track, in which WMF engineers will be speaking.
 * Wikimedia Conference 2011 (May, Berlin) — Daniel Kinzler, from Wikimedia Deutschland, announced that the Berlin Developers' meeting would be separate from the Wikimedia chapters' meeting this year. Instead, the hacking event will happen in Berlin in late May.
 * Wikimania (August 2-6, Haifa, Israel) — This year's Wikimania will be preceded by two days of hacking. Mark your calendar for August 2-3! You can also submit a talk or workshop for the Technology tracks of the actual conference (August 4-7).

Hiring
Are you looking to work for Wikimedia ? We have a lot of hiring coming up this year. The following positions are currently open:
 * Volunteer Development Coordinator
 * Performance Engineer
 * Software Developer (Features)
 * Software Developer (Mobile)
 * Data Analytics Engineer
 * Operations Engineer

In addition, we hope to post the following positions over the next few months:
 * Senior QA Engineer
 * Release Engineer
 * Technical Writer
 * Network Engineer (contractor)

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

Monitoring — Operations and public monitoring system to improve overall uptime, prevent outages, increase transparency and support progress tracking.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Virtualization 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 announced the release of the OpenStackManager extension for MediaWiki, which interacts with OpenStack, the EC2 API and LDAP to manage a virtual machine infrastructure (read more).


 * 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:


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Content Quality Tools
Article Feedback — A feature to collaboratively assess article quality and incorporate reader ratings on Wikipedia.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

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: Rob Lanphier

Threaded Discussions
Liquid Threads — A feature that brings threaded discussions capabilities to Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki.
 * 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: The final Multimedia usability project report was published on meta, and the licensing tutorial was localized into more languages, including Hindi and Farsi.


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

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 Infrastructure
Resource loader — A feature to improve the load times for JavaScript and CSS in MediaWiki, enabling faster loading of the Vector skin, media extensions, and anything else that makes extensive use of Javascript and CSS.
 * Status: Trevor Parscal announced that the customized version of JSMin had been replaced by JavaScriptDistiller, another (more efficient) JavaScript minifier


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

MediaWiki development
MediaWiki 1.17 — The upcoming MediaWiki release.
 * Status:


 * 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

Technical Documentation – Improvement of our technical documentation by making small, incremental improvements to the docs and docs process.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier & Zak Greant

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


 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

OWA — Installation and customization of an Open Web Analytics (OWA) platform to process data that can help the Wikimedia movement understand how Wikimedia sites are used.
 * Status:


 * Program managers: Rob Lanphier & Tomasz Finc

Wikimedia deployment
wmsync – Replacement of our current deployment tools (e.g. "scap") with more robust software.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Fundraising
2010 Fundraiser — Engineering support for the yearly fundraiser (includes fraud prevention, CentralNotice, and the analytics upgrade).
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

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


 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

Offline
Offline — Better support for offline reading of Wikimedia content.
 * Status: Our partners from PediaPress have started to extend the Collection extension to support openZim, the file format we decided to support. We're also preparing a usability study to improve the user experience of Kiwix, an offline app to read Wikimedia content. A more detailed update on Offline-related work was recently published.
 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc