Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2013/February

Engineering metrics in February:
 * unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits went from about 650 to about 830.
 * About 69 shell requests were processed.
 * Wikimedia Labs now hosts projects and  users; to date  instances have been created.

Major news in February include:
 * Wikimedia Foundation's Wikipedia Zero peojcet got support of the Knight News Challenge grant.
 * input methods were made available for jQuery.IME.
 * A matrix detailing the requirements and availability of basic and extended features has begun being drawn up.
 * Introduction of a new iteration of the Translation Editor within the Extension.
 * The Wikimedia mobile web team released the ability log in or create an account and view or add pages to watchlist—all from mobile devices.
 * Echo: new notification system for Wikipedia.
 * Technical Operations team found to stop problems in their tracks.
 * Mobile Hits 3 Billion Monthly Page Views.

''Note: We're also proposing 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.



Announcements

 * Ed Sanders joined the Features engineering group as Software Engineer working on Visual Editor (announcement).
 * Christian Aistleitner joined as a contractor specializing in work on Gerrit (announcement).
 * Marc-Andre Pelletier joined the Technical Operations team as Operations Engineer (contractor), focusing on the Wikimedia Labs infrastructure and migration of tools (announcement).
 * Greg Grossmeier joined the Platform engineering group as Release Manager (announcement).
 * Greg Grossmeier joined the Platform engineering group as Release Manager (announcement).

Technical Operations
Production Site Switchover

Site infrastructure

Fundraising

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.

In February the first phase of Wikidata (language links) was deployed on the English-language Wikipedia. Additionally the first parts of phase 2 (infoboxes) went life on wikidata.org. It is now possible to add statements. For an example see 159. The first tools have already been written on top of this, for example Geneawiki and Reasonator. In the meantime more work has been put into additional data-types, like strings and geocoordinates, as well as the foundations of phase 3 (lists based on queries).

In other good news: Wikimedia Germany has decided to fund Wikidata development after the end of the first year of development at the end of March.

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.