Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2014/July

June 2014

Wikimedia engineering report, July 2014

August 2014

Tech Forum

Tech News

Tech Ambassadors

Product and Technology

MediaWiki

Major news in July include:

• a recap of how the Operations team collaborated with the RIPE NCC to measure the delivery of Wikimedia sites to users in Asia and elsewhere;
• an analysis of the impact of the San Francisco data center on the speed of Wikimedia sites;
• the launch of the new native Wikipedia app for iOS;
• a first look at the content translation tool.

Note: We're also providing a shorter and translatable version of this report.

Engineering metrics in July:

• 164 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
• The total number of unresolved commits went from around 1575 to about 1642.
• About 31 shell requests were processed.

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.

[edit or add events] [] [view credits]

Date	Type	Event	Contact
6 August 2014–7 August 2014		Wikimania 2014 Hackathon (London, England)	Wikimania 2014 Hackathon
13 August 2014		IRC discussion of several RfCs for next actions, 2100-2200 UTC in #wikimedia-office connect.	Sumana Harihareswara

Personnel

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.

• VP of Engineering
• Software Engineer - Front-end (VisualEditor)
• Software Engineer - Services
• Software Engineer - Front-end
• Software Engineer - Maps & Geo
• Software Engineer - Mobile - iOS
• QA Tester
• Software Engineer - Full Stack
• Lean/Agile Coach
• Product Manager
• Product Manager - Language Engineering
• Operations Security Engineer
• UX Senior Designer
• UX Senior Design Researcher
• UX User Research Recruiter
• Project Coordinator - Engineering
• Mobile Partnerships Regional Manager
• Program Evaluation Internship

Announcements

• Arthur Richards is now Team Practices Manager (announcement).
• Kristen Lans joined the Team Practices Group as Scrum Master (announcement).
• Joel Sahleen joined the Language Engineering team as Software Engineer (announcement).

Technical Operations

Dallas data center

Throughout July, the cabling work of all racked servers and other equipment was nearly completed. We're still awaiting the installation of the first connectivity to the rest of our US network in early August before we can begin installation of servers and services.

San Francisco data center

Due to a necessary upgrade to power & cooling infrastructure in our San Francisco data center (which we call ulsfo), our racks have been migrated to a new floor within the same building on July 9. The move completed in a very smooth fashion without user impact, and the site was brought back online serving all user traffic again in less than 24 hours.

PFS enabled

Through the help of volunteer work and research, our staff enabled Perfect Forward Secrecy on our SSL infrastructure, significantly increasing the security of encrypted user traffic.

Labs metrics in July:

• Number of projects: 173
• Number of instances: 464
• Amount of RAM in use (in MBs): 1,933,824
• Amount of allocated storage (in GBs): 20,925
• Number of virtual CPUs in use: 949
• Number of users: 3,500

Wikimedia Labs

We've made several minor updates to Wikitech: we added OAuth support, fixed a few user interface issues, and purged the obsolete 'local-*' terminology for service groups.

OPW Intern Dinu Sandaru has set forms for structured project documentation. This should will help match new volunteers with existing projects, and will make communication with project administrators more straightforward.

Sean Pringle is in the process of updating the Tool Labs replica databases to MariaDB version 10.0. This may reduce replag, and should improve performance and reliability.

We're setting up new storage hardware for the project dumps. This will resolve our ongoing problems with full drives and out-of-date dumps.

Features Engineering

Editor retention: Editing tools

Services

Core Features

Growth

Mobile

Wikipedia Zero (partnerships)

We served an estimated 68 million free page views in July through Wikipedia Zero. We continue to bring new partners into the program, though none launched in July. Adele Vrana met with prospective partners and local Wikimedians in Brazil. We published our operating principles to increase transparency.

Language Engineering

Platform Engineering

MediaWiki Core

Release Engineering

Multimedia

Engineering Community Team

Analytics

Kiwix

Screenshot of the first Project Gutenberg ZIM file

The Kiwix project is funded and executed by Wikimedia CH.

We have pre-release binaries of the next 0.9 (final) release. Except for OSX everything seems to work file as far. The support of RaspberryPi was finally merged to the kiwix-plug master branch; this offers new perspectives because the price to create a Kiwix-Plug has dropped to around USD 100. We also started an engineering collaboration with ebook reader manufacturer Bookeen (in the scope of the Malebooks project) to be able offer an offline version of Wikipedia on e-ink devices.

We participated in the Google Serve Day at Google Zurich. The goal was to meet Google engineers during one day and have them work on open source projects. The result was a dozen of fixed bugs and implemented features, mostly on Kiwix for Android, but also in Kiwix for desktop and MediaWiki.

Four developers had a one-week hackathon in Lyon, France to develop an offline version of the Gutenberg library. We're currently polishing the code and plan a release soon; our partners and sponsors plan the first deployments in Africa in Autumn.

Last but not least, a proof-of-concept of a Kiwix iOS app was made, so we might release a first app before the end of the year.

Wikidata

The Wikidata project is funded and executed by Wikimedia Deutschland.

The biggest improvement around Wikidata in July is the release of the entity suggester. It makes it a lot easier to see what kind of information is missing on an item. Helen and Anjali, Wikidata's Outreach Program for Women interns, continued improving user documentation and outreach around Wikidata as well as worked on a new design for the main page. Guided Tours were published, helping newcomers find their way around the site. The developers further worked on supporting badges (like "featured article"), redirects between items, the monolingual text datatype (to be able to express things like the motto of a country) as well as the first implementation steps for the new user interface design. Additionally the first JSON dumps were published.

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.