Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2013/December

Engineering metrics in December: Major news in December include:
 * 152 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits went from around 1230 to about 1386.
 * About 25 shell requests were processed.
 * https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/12/20/new-draft-feature/
 * https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/12/10/language-engineering-events-language-summit-fall-2013/

''Note: We're also providing 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

 * http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-December/073624.html
 * http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-December/073623.html
 * http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-December/073593.html

Technical Operations
Wikimedia Labs

Andrew did a lot of purging of empty projects and stale instances. After that, here are new, more accurate usage statistics for Labs:


 * Number of projects: 	140
 * Number of instances: 	403
 * Amount of RAM in use (in MBs): 	1,592,832
 * Amount of allocated storage (in GBs): 	21,525
 * Number of virtual CPUs in use: 	797
 * Number of users: 	2,425

Tool Labs saw a bump in usage as the winter holidays provided an opportunity for volunteers to migrate tools from the toolserver and work on new projects; there are now 531 tools managed by 435 users, ranging from simple database queries to elaborate editing adjuncts using the new OAuth infrastructure.

Work for the impending migration of Labs to the Ashburn data center is well on its way: hardware is set up, the new storage servers are configured, and a lot of fresh OpenStack puppet manifests are in progress.

Language Engineering

 * Development of the TwnMainPage extension was completed. Translatewiki.net now has a new user registration process and a new dashboard for translators that provides insight in a user's activity compared to that of other users.
 * Plural rules for MediaWiki have been updated to comply with CLDR version 24. There were consequences for existing translations. These have been updated semi-automatically, and past contributors have been informed and asked to help in reviewing the updates.
 * MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle 2013.12 was released. It is compatible with MediaWiki 1.21 and MediaWiki 1.22.
 * A performance issue in the Translate extension that prevented use of the status field for translatable pages on Meta-Wiki was resolved.

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


 * We have released two new versions of Kiwix for Android this month (1.7 & 1.8), providing many new features; most of them were developed by young new developers as part of the Google Code-in program. Work continues around tools based on Parsoid output, especially as we need to rewrite the ZIM-related code for the MediaWiki offline toolchain, currently under heavy re-engineering. We have computed the download stats for 2013 and for the first time we have reached 700.000 downloads of Kiwix a year. Work to digitally signed the OSX and Windows binaries is ongoing and is the last step before releasing 0.9rc3. We have started the experimentation to port Kiwix-plug to RaspberryPi has started and it looks good. Lots of new ZIM files were generated, we newly generate ZIM file of Wiktionary and also ZIM files without pictures.

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.