Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2013/March

Engineering metrics in March:
 * unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits went from about 830 to.
 * About shell requests were processed.
 * Wikimedia Labs now hosts projects and  users; to date  instances have been created.

Major news in March include:

''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

Fundraising
 * Built and deployed new public reporting host samarium.wikimedia.org.

Data Dumps

Wikimedia Labs

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



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

Denny and Lydia gave a short update on Wikidata's status at the metrics and activities meeting. A more detailed analysis can be found in this blog post. In addition Wikidata phase 1 (language links) has been activated on the remaining 282 Wikipedias. This means that all Wikipedias now get their language links from Wikidata. Not too long after that phase 2 (infoboxes) was activated on the first 11 Wikipedias. They can now make use of shared structured data from Wikidata in their articles. On Wikidata itself we introduced a new data type (string), extended references in statements (they can now have multiple values) and improved the search box.

We have written down how we envision queries on Wikidata and would appreciate your feedback.

As a nice demonstration of the potential of Wikidata we've seen two new projects this month: Wiri and a tree of life.

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.