Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2011/January

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

Amsterdam Hack-a-Ton (January 14-15, the Netherlands) — A coding event for MediaWiki developers.


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

Upcoming events



 * August 2-3: Developers' Meetings prior to Wikimania in Haifa, Israel
 * and Wikimania 4-6; wm2011:Call for Participation


 * 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 (Spring, Berlin) —

Hiring
Are you looking to work for Wikimedia ? We have a lot of hiring coming up before the end of the year. Job descriptions are already posted for the following:
 * Performance Engineer
 * Software Developer (Features)
 * Software Developer (Mobile)
 * Data Analyst

In addition, we hope to post the following positions over the next few months: (Note: all of these positions may change as our requirements evolve.)
 * Senior QA Engineer
 * Release Engineer
 * Technical Writer
 * DBA/Storage Engineer (contractor)
 * Network Engineer (contractor)
 * Volunteer Development Coordinator

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 for MediaWiki  Extension:OpenStackManager


 * 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: m:Multimedia usability project report, more translations for the licensing tutorial, bugs fixed?


 * 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:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

MediaWiki development
MediaWiki 1.16.1 — security release
 * Status:

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 (formerly "Analytics upgrade").
 * 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:


 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc