Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2010/October

(to be posted on techblog.wikimedia.org by RobLa-WMF)

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

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

 Monitoring - Enhancing both Operations 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 Bergsma

 Virtualization cluster - more easily deploy temporary machines for testing and experimentation. This cluster is intended for use not just by WMF staff, but will be available to volunteers working on important projects as capacity allows.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Content Quality Tools
 Article Feedback - Working on feature to collaboratively assess article quality and incorporate reader ratings on Wikipedia
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

 Pending Changes - 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: Rob Lanphier

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

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 Sharma

 Add media wizard - The Add-media wizard is a gadget to facilitate the insertion of media files into wiki pages. Development effort for this labs feature is supported by Kaltura (consider re-working this section to a "MediaLabs" section that can contain notes on Michael Dale's gadgets).
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

MediaWiki Infrastructure
Resource loader - The resource loader aims to improve the load times for JavaScript and CSS components on any wiki page. The intention of this work is to support faster loading of the Vector skin, media extensions, and anything else that makes use of Javascript.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

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

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

General Engineering
Test framework deployment -
 * Program manager:  Rob Lanphier

 Process improvement - Increase transparency and generally organize Wikimedia Foundation's engineering efforts more efficiently
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Code review - improving the way we provide code reviews for MediaWiki
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Technical Documentation – Improve our technical documentation by making small, incremental improvements to the docs and docs process.
 * Status:
 * Program Managers: Rob Lanphier /  Zak Greant

Fundraising
2010 Fundraiser - The engineering tasks necessary to run a successful fundraiser, with sub-projects involving fraud prevention, CentralNotice, and the analytics upgrade.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

 Credit card server upgrade - Upgrading our current payments infrastructure to support 1-click donations.
 * Status:
 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

Misc
 Hack-A-Ton - held October 22–24, 2010 just outside Washington, D.C. in the United States. This is our first developer event on the east coast of the United States, and it's designed more of a hackathon/bugsmash than the Developers' Workshop in Berlin, which focuses on demonstrations and small group discussions.