Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2011/March

Major news this month include:
 * strategy:Product Whitepaper & strategy:March 2011 Update
 * Brion!!11!
 * Article Feedback Phase 2, Upload Wizard 1.0

Upcoming events

 * Berlin Hackathon 2011 (May 13-15, Berlin) — Daniel Kinzler announced the dates and location of the Berlin Hackathon. Registration is open until April 10. Participants are also listing topics to work on.
 * Summer of Code 2011 — Sumana Harihareswara sent a call for students for the upcoming summer of code. Developers are now signing up as students and mentors, and projects are being discussed.
 * Wikimania (August 2-7, Haifa, Israel) — This year's Wikimania will be preceded by two days of hacking (August 2-3); the actual conference (August 4-7) will also include Technology tracks.

Personnel
Are you looking to work for Wikimedia? We have a lot of hiring coming up this year, and we really love talking to active community members about these roles.

The following positions have opened this month:
 * Engineering Program Manager - Data Analytics

The following positions are still open:
 * Performance Engineer
 * Software Developer (Features)
 * Software Developer (Mobile)
 * 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 —
 * Peter Youngmaster, Consultant, to work as an Operations Engineer
 * Brion Vibber, Lead Architect, http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2011/03/07/brion-vibber-rejoins-wikimedia-foundation/

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

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:
 * http://ryandlane.com/blog/2011/03/14/openstackmanager-version-1-2-released/


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

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:
 * http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/52609


 * Program manager: Mark Bergsma

Short news

 * Topic — summary

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


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

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 images on a wiki.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Review system — An interface for external reviews of Wikipedia content.
 * Status:


 * Commissioned by: Erik Möller

Discussions and Interactions
Liquid Threads — A feature that brings threaded discussions capabilities to Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki.
 * Status:
 * Extension:LiquidThreads/Milestones


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

SimpleSurvey 2.0 — A MediaWiki extension to create and run surveys in MediaWiki.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Editing features
Non-Roman character set localization — A set of tools to facilitate editing in languages using a non-Roman alphabet.
 * 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:
 * http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/03/uploadwizard-nearing-1-0/


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

JavaScript parsing library — A JavaScript parsing library for wikitext.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

MediaWiki infrastructure
Resource loader — A feature to improve the load times for JavaScript and CSS in MediaWiki.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Alolita Sharma

Community feature prototyping

 * http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/03/ui-design-experiments/

Short news

 * Topic — summary
 * Style guide/Forms, http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/52485

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
MediaWiki 1.17 release — The upcoming MediaWiki release.
 * Status:
 * add Mark H.'s e-mails to wikitech-l, weekly sprints, etc.


 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Test framework deployment — Creation of an automated test environment for MediaWiki using CruiseControl, Selenium, and PHPUnit.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

Wikimedia analytics
udp2log — A custom data analytics logging system.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier

OpenWebAnalytics — Installation and customization of an Open Web Analytics (OWA) platform to process data to support decision making
 * Status:


 * Program managers: Rob Lanphier & Tomasz Finc

Wikilytics — A toolkit to create data sets to analyze Editor Trends.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Howie Fung

Technical communications

 * Development process improvement — A project to increase transparency and organize Wikimedia Foundation's engineering efforts more efficiently.
 * Status: Guillaume Paumier revived this project and has been focusing on summary pages and versions and phases for Wikimedia-funded engineering projects. The goal is to make it easier to find this information and keep it up-to-date, for the benefit of staff, volunteer developers and users.
 * Program manager: Rob Lanphier


 * Wikimedia blog overhaul — A project to consolidate and improve the Wikimedia blogs.
 * Status: After assessing the current situation of Wikimedia blogs, Guillaume Paumier worked with the Communications team, and other departments, to collect requirements. A technical proposal was then created and a prototype set up. Implementation should now happen shortly.
 * Project manager: Guillaume Paumier

Short news

 * Topic — summary
 * http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/03/site-fixes/

Mobile
Mobile site rewrite — Port of our existing gateway to another framework for easier support & collaborative development.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

WikiSnaps for Android — Port of the mobile upload app experience with WikiSnaps to the Android platform.
 * Status:


 * Program manager: Tomasz Finc

Offline

 * http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2011/03/16/update-on-offline-wikipedia-projects/

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:
 * http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.archivers.openzim.devel/568


 * 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