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 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 the month of February, Wikidata team has successfully completed the following tasks:
 * Deployed new features and bugfixes including diffs for statements and the ability to enter items and properties by their ID
 * Updated demo system
 * Database maintainance (Wikidata was in read-only mode for a bit)
 * Implemented first version of a string data type
 * Worked on better error reporting from the API
 * Ported Lua function mw.wikibase.getEntity to Wikibase extension
 * Worked on making the search box suggest items and properties while typing
 * Improved the behaviour of the entity selector (thingy that lets you select items and entities)
 * Improved debugging experience in JavaScript when dealing with prototypical inheritance
 * Worked on cleanup of local entity store
 * Generalized generation of localizable edit summaries

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.