Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2011/April

Major news this month include:

Upcoming events

 * Berlin Hackathon 2011 (May 13-15, Berlin) — This event will be almost entirely devoted to hacking, with short presentations happening throughout the week-end. The overall schedule is now available.
 * Wikimania (August 2-7, Haifa, Israel) —

Job openings
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.

The following positions have opened this month:
 * Software Developer, Rich Text Editing — Features
 * Product Manager — Features

The following positions are still open:
 * Engineering Program Manager — Data Analytics
 * Performance Engineer
 * Software Developer — Features
 * Systems Engineer — Data Analytics (previously Data Analytics Engineer)
 * Operations Engineer
 * Senior QA Engineer
 * Networking Contractor — Amsterdam
 * Software Engineer — Community R&D

In addition, we hope to post the following positions over the next few months:
 * Rich Text Editor Engineer
 * Release Engineer
 * Technical Writer

Short news

 * Visitors —


 * Hires —
 * Software developer, Mobile.
 * Krinkle, Features contractor

Site operations
Virginia Data Center — Installation of a world-class primary data center for Wikimedia Foundation websites.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Media Storage — Improvement of our media storage architecture to accommodate expected increase in media uploads.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Testing environment
Virtualization test cluster — Environment to deploy temporary machines for testing and experimentation, for use by WMF staff and volunteers working on important projects (as capacity allows).
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Backups and data archives
Backups — Improvement of backup coverage of Wikimedia-hosted data.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Data Dumps — Improvement of processes to create and provide public copies of public Wikimedia data.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Short news

 * Item — Summary
 * http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/04/thumbnail-issues-being-resolved/

Content Quality and Editorial Tools
Article Feedback (phase 2) — A feature to collaboratively assess article quality and incorporate reader ratings on Wikipedia.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Article feedback (extended review) — An interface for quality reviews of Wikipedia content.
 * Status:


 * Commissioned by: Erik Möller

Pending Changes — A feature to allow changes made by logged-out and new users to be reviewed before they appear as the primary version of an article.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Personal image filter — A feature to allow users to selectively hide media files on a wiki.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Discussions and Interactions
Wikilove 0.1 — A user script to encourage praise and virtual gifts between users.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Multimedia Tools
Upload wizard — A feature that provides an easier way of uploading files to Wikimedia Commons, the media library associated with Wikipedia.
 * Status:
 * Extension:UploadWizard/2011Q2 Design Pass
 * 


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Community feature prototyping

 * Extension:CustomUserSignup

Engineering support
Editor survey — Integration work between LimeSurvey and MediaWiki to support
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Other projects

 * Style guide for forms —


 * Liquid Threads —


 * SimpleSurvey 2.0 —


 * JavaScript parsing library —


 * Resource loader —


 * Non-Roman character set localization —
 * File:Narayam-proposal-annotated.pdf (Trevor)
 * Special:Code/MediaWiki/85504 (+Esperanto, Brion)

Wikimedia Labs
Media projects — A set of features to improve media handling and key infrastructure support tools, many developed with Kaltura, such as Metavid, MwEmbed, and the Video Editor.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

MediaWiki development and tools
MediaWiki 1.17 release — The upcoming MediaWiki release.
 * Status:


 * http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/04/mediawiki-1-16-3-security-release/
 * http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/04/mediawiki-1-16-4-security-release/
 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Code review — Review of changes made to the MediaWiki code.
 * Status: Tim Starling, Sam Reed and Chad Horohoe devoted part of their time to code review. Despite their efforts, the backlog of unreviewed new commits is still increasing. A new feature in the CodeReview tool since the deployment of MediaWiki 1.17 is the ability to "sign off" on commits. Developers are encouraged to test and sign off on commits, in order to help the team prioritize what is ready for review.
 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Bugmeistering —
 * Status: Mark Hershberger reached out to other open-source communities (like Mozilla) to look for best practices in bug management and workflow; he started to experiment with a new "unprioritized" value for the "priority" field. He has also been organizing weekly bug triage sessions, at different times to allow for participation from different timezones.
 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Summer of Code 2011 —
 * Status: More than 25 proposals were submitted. Sumana Harihareswara announced the eight students and projects that were selected for this year's Google Summer of Code. The projects include interface improvements using AJAX, extension release management and work on Semantic MediaWiki. Students and mentors have now entered the "community bonding" period. (Read more.)
 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Parser & gadgets stuff —
 * Status: Brion Vibber is laying the groundwork for exploratory tools for the upcoming parser work, integral to the future Visual editor. He created a JavaScript tool to compare the parse tree and output of several parsers. On a related note, he also worked on tools to facilitate the development and use of gadgets, for example by embedding a JavaScript syntax highlighting editor.
 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Performance optimization
PoolCounter — A MediaWiki extension to avoid parser deadlocks on high-traffic pages.
 * Status: This extension was deployed and is now in production.
 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Disk-backed object cache — Deployment of a disk-backed object cache to increase the parser cache hit ratio.
 * Status: Issues that arose during the testing of EHcache convinced Tim Starling to use another tool. Implementation is planned to happen after the MediaWiki 1.17 release.
 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Wikimedia analytics
udp2log — A custom data analytics logging system.
 * Status: Nimish Gautam completed a patch for our Squids to implement multicast logging, but issues with the Squids upgrade (which caused a site outage) delayed the deployment of the patch.
 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

A/B testing — A set of tools to perform A/B testing on Wikimedia sites.
 * Status: Nimish Gautam continued to work on the ClickTracking extension, to allow us to put users into buckets. Deployment is expected this week, in order to use this tool to try out different designs for the account creation improvement project led by the Community department. (read more)
 * Program managers: Rob Lanphier

Technical communications
Development process improvement — A project to increase transparency and organize Wikimedia Foundation's engineering efforts more efficiently.
 * Status: Guillaume Paumier set up a set of pages, templates and tools to facilitate the maintenance of the project pages. The new system allows to pull project information from one central place per project, using the Labeled Section Transclusion extension, which was installed on mediawiki.org for this purpose.
 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Wikimedia blog overhaul — A project to consolidate and improve the Wikimedia blogs.
 * Status: Rob Halsell set up a test blog and a process to allow for quick recovery. Technical issues with the back-end delayed the implementation, but Rob resolved them with Ryan Lane's help.
 * Project manager: Guillaume Paumier

Other projects
Report card — Erik Zachte and Nimish Gautam are investigating visualization toolkits to use in this monthly report of key metrics to measure community health.
 * Bugzilla upgrade to 4.0 — Priyanka Dhanda fixed a few bugs following the upgrade to Bugzilla 4.0 back in March. Our bug tracker is pretty stable now.
 * OpenWebAnalytics — Integrating a full-fledged OWA framework with our infrastructure proved to be difficult, so we decided to scale down our efforts. A postmortem will be published, notably to help the new dedicated analytics team decide if they want to use individual components of OWA for specific uses like heatmaps.
 * API maintenance — Besides general maintenance and bug fixing, Sam Reed worked on app-level system health monitoring, by creating a job queue monitor
 * Shell bugs — Mark Hershberger's triage meetings have been used as an opportunity to go through shell bugs by Priyanka Dhanda, Rob Halsell and.
 * Access to Subversion — The team (composed of Rob Lanphier, Priyanka Dhanda, Chad Horohoe and Tim Starling) are now meeting briefly every Wednesday to go through the commit access requests.
 * Migration to Git — The migration to git will be a major topic of discussion during the upcoming Berlin Hackathon in May.
 * Heterogeneous deployment — Priyanka Dhanda is working on a project plan. Implementation is scheduled to happen after the deployment of the disk cache component.
 * HipHop support: Special:Code/MediaWiki/85327

Mobile
Mobile — All things Mobile and Wikimedia.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

Offline
Wikipedia version tools — Support and development of a series of tools to select Wikipedia content for offline use.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

OpenZim for Collections — Integration of OpenZim into the Collections extension.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

Kiwix UX study — Evaluation of the user experience of the Kiwix mobile app to access offline Wikimedia content.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc