Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2013/August

Engineering metrics in August:
 * 122 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits went from around 1280 to about 1080.
 * About 36 shell requests were processed.
 * Wikimedia Labs now hosts 171 projects and 1,743 users; to date 2,212 instances have been created.
 * The tools project in Labs now hosts tools and  members.

Major news in August include:
 * https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/01/future-https-wikimedia-projects/ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/28/https-default-logged-in-users-wikimedia-sites/
 * https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/30/notifications-launch-on-mobile/
 * https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/30/team-wikimedia-security-has-a-spot-for-you/
 * https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/02/join-the-language-engineer-team-at-wikimania-in-hong-kong-next-week/
 * https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/09/wikimedias-email-response-upgrade/
 * https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/23/restoring-the-forgotten-javanese-script-through-wikimedia/

''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.



Technical Operations
Site infrastructure

Data Dumps
 * All dumps ran out of the data center in Ashburn this month; only the miscellaneous and experimental services remain to be moved.
 * GSOC student Petr Onderka has gotten the first incremental dump-producing code out the door, along with a draft specification for the new format. Test it out and let us know what you think!

Wikimedia Labs

OTRS
 * OTRS got a long overdue update to 3.2.9 with the generous volunteer support of Martin and Marcel of Znuny GmbH. As part of the upgrade, the service was migrated from pmtpa to eqiad, and spam filtering was overhauled.

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


 * Release of the new Mediawiki offliner is a little bit delayed, we are still fixing stability bugs. This solution has already proven its efficienty, we have released 20 new ZIM files this months: a new throughput record. The ZIM incremental update GSoC project progresses too, student works on the integration of zimdiff/zimpatch in Kiwix ecosystem. Kiwix developers have had a 6 days hackathon in Hong-Kong to prepare next Kiwix release, we still need to fix a few compilation stuff before.

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


 * In August the Wikidata team was present at 3 events: COSCUP, Wikimania and a meetup about Wikidata and Incubator. A Summary of Wikidata at Wikimania can be found here. A lot of work has been put into improving the API and its documentation. The team also worked on the abiity to reorder the qualifiers and sources in a statement, improved the speed of Wikidata slightly and made progress on the ability to query for statements with a specific property and value as well as merging items. An improved proposal for the support of Wiktionary has been published. They also started the paper cuts initiative to find and fix small bugs that have a large impact on how enjoyable it is to use Wikidata. Denny and Adam gave a short overview of the state of Wikidata and answered questions during an office hour on IRC. The biggest thing for August though was the activation of data access (Wikidata phase 2) on Wikivoyage.

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 engineering roadmap, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts.