Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2011/November

Major news in November include:

Hover your mouse over the green question marks to see the description of a particular project.

Recent events

 * October 2011 Coding Challenge (20 October - 7 November, online) —


 * India hackathon (18–20 November, Mumbai, India) —


 * Brighton hackathon (19–20 November, Brighton, England) —

Upcoming events

 * San Francisco event (21-22 January 2012) —

Job openings
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.


 * Developers and engineers:
 * Systems Engineer (Data Analytics)
 * Software Developer (Back-end, Data Analytics)
 * Software Developer (Rich Text Editing, Features)
 * Software Developer (Front-end)
 * QA Lead
 * Software Developer (Mobile)
 * Software Security Engineer.


 * Management & Product:
 * Director of Features Engineering
 * Product Manager
 * Product Manager (Analytics)


 * Requests for proposals:
 * API Logging Analysis — Help us analyze the query logs of our API to better understand third party application usage of Wikimedia content and services.
 * Labs virtualization project — Help us build our Labs Virtualization Project for our community and volunteers, to support their effort to prototype, develop, test and deploy their tools and extensions.
 * XML Dumps — Help us improve the infrastructure used to build XML dumps of Wikipedia content, for backups and reuse by third parties.
 * Mobile UX — Help us redesign our mobile platform and apps as more and more visitors access Wikipedia and its sister sites via mobile devices.

Short news

 * Benny Situ and Rob Moen joined the Features engineering team as Software Developers, to work on Editor Engagement features (announcement for Benny, announcement for Rob).

Site infrastructure

 * Data Centers —


 * Media Storage —


 * HTTPS —

Testing environment

 * Virtualization test cluster —

Backups and data archives

 * Data Dumps — While the dumps keep rolling along, we are talking with another organization interested in mirroring.  If you know someone with several terabytes of space who might be interested, please send them our way!  All hosts had their kernel updated for security reasons, and new dump code deployed as well.  We rolled out a new experimental service this month of daily adds/changes dumps for all projects.  No information about deleted/undeleted/moved pages from previous dumps is included, but it does include all new content since the run of the previous day. The first adds/changes run for the English language Wikipedia took less than 30 minutes!

Editing tools

 * Visual editor —
 * Internationalization and localization tools —

Participation and editor retention

 * Article feedback —
 * LiquidThreads 3.0 —
 * Feedback Dashboard —

Multimedia Tools

 * UploadWizard —

MediaWiki infrastructure

 * ResourceLoader —

Media Labs

 * TimedMediaHandler —

Mobile

 * Mobile Research —


 * MobileFrontend —


 * Android Wikipedia App —

Fundraising support

 * 2011 Fundraiser —

Offline

 * Kiwix UX initiative —

MediaWiki Core

 * MediaWiki 1.18 —
 * Code review management —
 * Shell requests —
 * Continuous integration —
 * Git conversion —

Wikimedia analytics

 * Wikimedia Report Card 2.0 —

Technical Liaison; Developer Relations

 * Bug management —
 * Summer of Code 2011 —
 * Engineering project documentation —
 * Volunteer coordination and outreach —
 * MediaWiki architecture document —
 * Wikimedia blog maintenance —

Future
The engineering management team continues to update the Software 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.