Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2014/August

Major news in August includes: Note: We're also providing a shorter version of this report.
 * the Wikimania 2014 conference in London, and the associated hackathon;
 * a statement on Wikipedia Zero and net neutrality;
 * progress on the new content translation tool and its passing the milestone of 100 translated articles.

Engineering metrics in August:
 * 160 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits went from around 1640 to about 1695.
 * About 22 shell requests were processed.

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.

* Senior Software Engineer - Services
 * Software Engineer - Services
 * Software Engineer - Maps & Geo - Mobile
 * Software Engineer - Mobile - iOS
 * Release Engineer
 * Technical Writer
 * Full Stack Developer - Analytics
 * Research Analyst
 * Agile Coach/ScrumMaster - Team Practices Group
 * Operations Security Engineer
 * Technical Project Manager
 * UX Senior Designer
 * UX Senior Design Researcher
 * UX User Research Recruiter
 * UX Visual Design Fellowship
 * Mobile Partnerships Regional Manager
 * Project Coordinator - Engineering

Technical Operations
Dallas data center
 * On August 21, our first connectivity to the new Dallas data center (codfw) came online, connecting the new site to the Wikimedia network. The following week, all network equipment was configured to prepare for server installations. The first essential infrastructure services (install server, DNS, monitoring etc.) were brought online in the days following August 25, and we are now working on deploying the first storage & data base servers to start replication & backups from our other data centers.

Labs metrics in August:
 * Number of projects: 170
 * Number of instances: 480
 * Amount of RAM in use (in MBs): 2,116,096
 * Amount of allocated storage (in GBs): 22,600
 * Number of virtual CPUs in use: 1,038
 * Number of users: 3,718

 Wikimedia Labs
 * Andrew fixed a few sudo policy UI bugs (68834, 61129). Marc improved the DNS cache settings and resolved some long-standing DNS instability (70076). He also set up a new storage server for wiki dumps. This should resolve some long-term storage space problems that led to out-of-date dumps.
 * Andrew laid the groundwork for wikitech to be updated via the standard WMF deployment system. We're investigating the upstream OpenStack user interface, 'horizon'.

Mobile
Wikipedia Zero & Partnerships


 * Wikipedia Zero page views held steady at around 70 million in August. We launched Wikipedia Zero with three operators: Smart and Sun in the Philippines (related companies) and Timor Telecom in East Timor. That brings our total numbers to 37 partners in 31 countries. Smart has been collaborating with Wikimedia Philippines for months, and they previously offered free access to Wikipedia on a trial basis. Just announced, Smart has now officially joined Wikipedia Zero and brought in their sister brand Sun, covering a combined 70 million subscribers in the Philippines. Timor Telecom launched Wikipedia Zero with a press event including the Vice Minister of Education and much promotion. Timor Telecom is keen to support growth in the Tetun Wikipedia by raising awareness in universities, with resources from the Wikipedia Education Program. In Latin America, we made progress toward app preloads by completing testing for the Qualcomm Reference Design (QRD) program. The Wikipedia Android app is now certified for preload on QRD. We made terrific connections with Global South community members at Wikimania, which will lead to more direct local collaboration between partners and Wikimedia communities. Smriti Gupta, partnerships manager for Asia, moved to India where she will work remotely. We're recruiting our third partnerships manager to cover South East Asia and tech partnerships.

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


 * August was a very busy month for Wikidata. The main page was redesigned and is now much more inviting and useful. A lot of new features were finished and deployed. Among them are:
 * Redirects: allowing you to turn an item into a redirect.
 * Monolingual text datatype: allowing you to enter new kinds of data like the motto of a country.
 * Badges: allowing you to store badges for articles on Wikidata. This includes "featured article" and "good article". More will be added soon.
 * In other projects sidebar as a beta feature: allowing you to show links to sister projects in the sidebar of any article.
 * Special:GoToLinkedPage: allowing you to go to a Wikipedia page based on its Wikidata Q-ID. This will be especially useful if you want to create links to articles that don't change even if the article is moved.
 * Wikinews: Wikinews has been added as a supported sister project. Wikinews can now maintain their sitelinks on Wikidata. Access to the other data will follow in due time.
 * Wikidata: Sitelinks to pages on Wikidata itself can now also be stored on Wikidata. This is useful to connect for example its help pages with those on the other projects.
 * Change of the internal serialization format: The internal serialization format changed to be consistent with the serialization format that is returned by the API.
 * In addition, the team worked on a lot of under-the-hood changes towards the new user interface design and started the discussions around structured data support for Commons. The log of the IRC office hour is available.

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 annual goals, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts.