Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2010/September

Full list of projects

We have several other major development and operations initiatives underway this month, including:


 * Testing and deployment of the grant-funded improvements to media uploading, which, as per our contractual agreement with the funder, must be completed within a certain timeframe;
 * Testing and deployment of the new ResourceLoader, which will improve performance of our sites for all users;
 * Testing and deployment of the article feedback tool, which is timelined to coincide with the Public Policy Initiative's first semester
 * Engineering and testing for the 2010 fundraiser, including testing of a new analytics framework;
 * Build-out of a new primary data center location in Virginia, to eliminate our Tampa data-center as a single point of failure for all Wikimedia Foundation projects (not a development project, but binds operations resources needed for deployment support);
 * A bug-smash in October to resolve the backlog of general bug and maintenance requests;
 * Ongoing development of Pending Changes

Operations
Virginia Data Center - Setting up a world-class primary data center for Wikimedia Foundation properties.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Mark

Media Storage - Re-vamping our media storage architecture to accomodate expected increase in media uploads.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Mark

Monitoring - Enhancing both ops and public monitoring to a) notice potential outages sooner, b) increase transparency to the community, c) support progress tracking required in the 5-year plan.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Mark

Content Quality Tools
Article assessment - Working on feature to collaboratively assess article quality and incorporate reader ratings on Wikipedia
 * Status: Phase 1, deployed
 * Program manager: Alolita

Pending changes enwiki trial Pending Changes is a new review feature recently deployed to en.wikipedia.org, which allows changes made by anonymous and new users be reviewed before they appear as the primary version of an article.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: RobLa

Threaded discussions
Liquid Threads - LiquidThreads is an extension that brings threaded discussions capabilities to Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Alolita

Multimedia tools
Upload wizard - The upload wizard is an extension for MediaWiki providing an easier way of uploading files to Wikimedia Commons, the media library associated with Wikipedia.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Alolita

Add media wizard - The Add-media wizard is a gadget to facilitate the insertion of media files into wiki pages. Its development is supported by Kaltura.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Alolita

MediaWiki Infrastructure
Resource loader - The resource loader aims to improve the load times for JavaScript and CSS components on any wiki page.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Alolita

Central Notice - CentralNotice is a banner system used for global messaging across Wikimedia projects.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Tomasz

Analytics Revamp - Incorporate an analytics solution that can grow and answer the questions that the Wikimedia movement has.
 * Status:
 * Program managers: RobLa & Tomasz

Software Quality Infrastructure
Selenium deployment - Building an automated browser testing environment for MediaWiki.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: RobLa

Fundraising
2010 Fundraiser
 * Status: Weekly tests runs are happening every Thursday, with subprojects involving fraud prevention and the analytics upgrade
 * Program manager: Tomasz

Misc
Process improvement - Increase transparency and generally organize Wikimedia Foundation's engineering efforts more efficiently
 * Status:
 * Program managers: RobLa