Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2011/December

Major news in December include:

Hover your mouse over the green question marks to see the description of a particular project.

Upcoming events

 * San Francisco hackathon (21–22 January 2012) — Erik Möller and Sumana Harihareswara continued to plan and publicize this outreach-focused developers' week-end. Heather Walls developed a more attractive homepage for the event. Sumana began arranging for tutorials and activities for the event, focusing on mobile, the web-accessible API and our framework for JavaScript feature development.  Registration opened and more than 70 participants registered.


 * Pune hackathon (10-12 February 2012) — Preparation began and registration opened for an outreach-focused developers' week-end to take place in Pune, India, and led by Alolita Sharma. Approximately 70 participants are expected, focusing on the gadgets framework, mobile Wikimedia access, and internationalisation.


 * GLAMCamp in Washington, DC (10-12 February 2012) — Ryan Kaldari and Asaf Bartov planned to attend the technical track of this GLAM conferece. Engineers will work on mass upload and analytics functionality.

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.


 * Developers and engineers:
 * Systems Engineer (Data Analytics)
 * Software Developer (Back-end, Data Analytics)
 * Software Developer (Rich Text Editing, Features)
 * Software Developer (Front-end)
 * QA Lead
 * Software Developer (Mobile)
 * Software Security Engineer.


 * Management & Product:
 * Director of Features Engineering
 * Product Manager


 * Requests for proposals:
 * API Logging Analysis — Help us analyze the query logs of our API to better understand third party application usage of Wikimedia content and services.
 * XML Dumps — Help us improve the infrastructure used to build XML dumps of Wikipedia content, for backups and reuse by third parties.
 * Mobile UX — Help us redesign our mobile platform and apps as more and more visitors access Wikipedia and its sister sites via mobile devices.

Site infrastructure

 * Data Centers —


 * As part of our preparation for the migration of our media service to SWIFT, a distributed storage backend, we need to keep the current system afloat a bit longer. We noticed an abrupt uptick in the rate at which disk space for thumbs storage was used, but we've traced it to the source and now have a plan for dealing with it.  In the meantime, we reclaimed some space by purging thumbnails not newly generated and not in use on any of our projects.


 * HTTPS —

Testing environment

 * Wikimedia Labs —

Backups and data archives

 * Data Dumps — The end of the year closed out with another full dump of the English language Wikipedia on schedule.  More work was done on code to allow restart of the history phase of a dump from a specified point without a long catchup delay.  An experimental service was tested this month: a newly formatted file of article content and an accompanying index, more convenient for data analysts and for use with offline readers.  The first such files, only available for the English Wikipedia, are available here along with a brief explanation of their contents here.

Editing tools

 * Visual editor —
 * Internationalization and localization tools —

Participation and editor retention

 * Article feedback —
 * Feedback Dashboard —

Multimedia Tools

 * UploadWizard —

MediaWiki infrastructure

 * ResourceLoader —

Media Labs

 * TimedMediaHandler —

Mobile

 * Mobile Research —


 * MobileFrontend —


 * Android Wikipedia App —

Fundraising support

 * 2011 Fundraiser —

Offline

 * Kiwix UX initiative —

MediaWiki Core

 * The "MediaWiki Core" team was featured on the Wikimedia Tech blog this month.


 * MediaWiki 1.19 —
 * Continuous integration —
 * Git conversion —
 * VipsScaler —
 * SwiftMedia —
 * HipHop deployment —

Wikimedia analytics

 * Wikimedia Report Card 2.0 —

Technical Liaison; Developer Relations

 * Bug management —
 * Summer of Code 2011 —
 * Engineering project documentation —
 * Volunteer coordination and outreach —
 * MediaWiki architecture document —
 * Wikimedia blog maintenance —

Future
The engineering management team continues to update the Software 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.