Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2014/February

Engineering metrics in February: Major news in February include:
 * 149 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits went from around 1320 to about 1453.
 * About 22 shell requests were processed.
 * a call for volunteers to test the upcoming multimedia viewer;
 * a call for volunteers to test the upcoming multimedia viewer;

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

Upcoming events
There are many opportunities for you to get involved and contribute to MediaWiki and technical activities to improve Wikimedia sites, both for coders and contributors with other talents.

For a more complete and up-to-date list, check out the Project:Calendar.

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.


 * User Experience Research Lead
 * User Experience Research Lead
 * User Experience Research Lead
 * User Experience Research Lead
 * User Experience Research Lead
 * User Experience Research Lead
 * User Experience Research Lead
 * User Experience Research Lead
 * User Experience Research Lead
 * User Experience Research Lead
 * User Experience Research Lead
 * User Experience Research Lead
 * User Experience Research Lead

Announcements

 * Leila Zia joined the Analytics team as Research Scientist (announcement).
 * Faidon Liambotis was promoted to Principal Operations Engineer (announcement).
 * YuFei Liu joined the UX Design team as Visual Design Intern (announcement).
 * Following changes in the Language engineering team, Amir Aharoni is now the Acting Product Manager, and Runa Bhattacharjee the ScrumMaster (announcement).

Datacenter RFP

 * Final negotiations have completed with the 3 remaining data center bids in February, and the Wikimedia Operations team will make a decision in the first week of March. Expect a public announcement soon.


 * Datacenter RFP

Wikimedia Labs migration
Labs metrics in February:
 * Number of projects: 129
 * Number of instances: 458
 * Amount of RAM in use (in MBs): 1,812,992
 * Amount of allocated storage (in GBs): 24,540
 * Number of virtual CPUs in use: 906
 * Number of users: 2,714


 * The Wikimedia Labs infrastructure in the eqiad data center has been deployed with the OpenStack Havana release, and testing completed in February. Labs users will have 2 weeks to migrate their own projects & instances starting in March. During the last two weeks of March, the Wikimedia Operations team will handle the transfer of the remaining instances that have not been migrated by users themselves.

eqiad data center capacity expansion

 * The Wikimedia Foundation has expanded the capacity of its main data center site eqiad in Ashburn, Virginia by 33%. A fourth row of racks has been added, and all power & networking infrastructure has been installed and configured in February. The added rack space is available for new equipment as of February 24th.

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

For the first time, we have released a ZIM file of the Wikipedia in English with all encyclopedic articles and with thumbnails. We have at this occasion explain a little bit how we proceed now and advertise the tools with have been working, like mwoffliner or zimwriterfs. This month, we have had a young internship which has worked on the creation of ZIM files of the TED talks, the internship is now over and was a success, ZIM files will be published soon. Preparation work for our Usability Hackathon has started.

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

Wikisource now has access to the the data in Wikidata like ISBNs and the date of birth of an author. The Lua interface for Wikidata has been extended significantly to make it easier to use and more powerful. Support for article badges has seen more work and is now missing mostly the user interface part. Loading time of items on Wikidata has been improved drastically. Everyone is asked to give input for the upcoming redesign of Wikidata's user interface.

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.