Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2013/April

Engineering metrics in April:
 * 116 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
 * The total number of unresolved commits remained stable around 815.
 * About 49 shell requests were processed.
 * Wikimedia Labs now hosts projects and  users; to date  instances have been created.

Major news in April include:
 * the start of recruitment for a multimedia engineering team;
 * the deployment of a better translation interface;
 * the release of Kiwix of Android, an app to download and view Wikimedia content offline;
 * the milestone of 500 million monthly unique visitors reached in March;
 * improvements to the main page of translatewiki.net
 * the migration of Wikidata, and the English and German Wikipedias, to MariaDB 5.5;
 * the second phase of Wikidata, whose structured data can now be displayed in Wikipedia articles;
 * the deployment of VisualEditor's alpha version to 14 more language versions of Wikipedia;
 * a proposed replacement for the login and account creation interface on Wikimedia projects
 * the launch of the Language Mavens program, an advocacy and advisory body in the domain of language engineering;
 * the rampu-up of technical mentorship programs;
 * the launch of an official Wikimedia Commons app for iOS and Android

''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

 * Monte Hurd joined the Mobile engineering group as Software Engineer in the Apps team (announcement).
 * Brandon Black joined the Operations team as Site Reliability Engineer (announcement).
 * Erik Bernhardson joined the Features team as Features Engineer (announcement).
 * Nischay Nahata joined the Features team as Features Contractor (announcement).

Technical Operations
Site infrastructure

Data Dumps
 * New tools for import of partial or full content into a new wiki have been released. A step-by-step walkthrough of their use has been added to the documentation for users of the dumps on Meta.
 * True incremental dumps are now a GSOC proposal and several students have applied for this project.
 * The logging table XML dump on Wikidata was taking days to run, due in part to the high volume of edits there, much more than even the English Wikipedia. Most of those edits wind up being recorded as autopatrol in the log, making it already about half the size of the logging table for the English Wikipedia. Breaking up the database query into smaller batches works around the issue.

Wikimedia Labs

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



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


 * The team hit a big milestone with the deployment of the first iteration of phase 2 of Wikidata on all remaining Wikipedias (it had been enabled on 11 Wikipedias previously). Qualifiers were also enabled on Wikidata, making it possible to add additional information to certain data. Wikipedians are now able to make use of the data available on Wikidata in articles, allowing the data to be collaboratively collected, curated and used by all Wikipedias.
 * The team also fixed a few issues to make it possible to use Wikidata with Internet Explorer 8, and worked on the time datatype. Together with bot owners, they massively improved the time it takes for Wikidata changes to show up in the recent changes and watchlists on Wikipedia sites. The code and architecture got an external professional review; the reviewers were quite happy with the quality of the code base and gave useful tips for improvements.

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.