Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2014/August

Major news in August include: ''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.

* VP of Engineering
 * Software Engineer - Front-end (VisualEditor)
 * Software Engineer - Services (Features)
 * Software Engineer - Front-end - Mobile
 * Software Engineer - Maps & Geo - Mobile
 * Software Engineer - Mobile - iOS
 * QA Tester
 * Full Stack Developer - Analytics
 * Lean/Agile Coach - Team Practices Group
 * Product Manager
 * Product Manager - Language Engineering
 * Operations Security Engineer
 * Technical Project Manager
 * UX Senior Designer
 * UX Senior Design Researcher
 * UX User Research Recruiter
 * Project Coordinator - Engineering
 * Mobile Partnerships Regional Manager

Technical Operations
Dallas data center

San Francisco data center

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 were fixed: 68834, 61129
 * Marc improved the DNS cache settings and resolved some long-standing DNS instability 70076
 * Marc 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 This should resolve some long-term storage space problems that led to out-of-date dumps.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


 * Free page views held steady at around 70M 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 WMPH 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 plus tech partnerships.

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



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



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.