Wikimedia-l December 2012

wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

137 participants
116 discussions

Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: Wikimedia Foundation restructure (Global Dev & Engineering)
by Florence Devouard 08 Dec '12

08 Dec '12

Looks fine by me Sue. I also agree that restructuration is good,if only to avoid getting stuck in habits :) @Mathieu You argued that "if it work's, do not break it". Indeed, but precisely, the prior very wide focus of the WMF was not working so well. And some time ago, the board decided that WMF should change by narrowing its focus. Accordingly, it was mandatory that changes in the structure be made to fit the new narrowed goals of the WMF. It would have been very strange to changed goals and not adapt the structure to fit the goal. You better read these pages http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sue_Gardner/Narrowing_focus http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC 12/7/12 1:04 AM, Sue Gardner wrote: > Hello folks, > > On-passing this FYI --- I hope the formatting doesn't break too much. > If people want to discuss this, maybe the first person could put it on > a wiki page (attached to Narrowing Focus, maybe?) so the discussion is > recorded for other interested parties and can be revisited later, > rather than just being ephemeral. > > Thanks, > Sue > > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: "Sue Gardner" <sgardner(a)wikimedia.org> > Date: Dec 5, 2012 7:05 PM > Subject: Announcement: Wikimedia Foundation restructure (Global Dev & > Engineering) > To: "Staff All" <wmfall(a)lists.wikimedia.org> > > hey folks, > > The purpose of this note is to lay out some changes to the structure > of the Wikimedia Foundation. Some will take place immediately, and > others will play out over the next six months. I’m announcing it in a > single big note rather than bits & pieces because I want everyone to > have the overview: where we’re headed and why. This will be long --- > please bear with me. > > First, some context. Why are we restructuring? Basically: if an > organization’s going to function well, it needs to reorg every now and > then. As an organization grows and changes and learns, its > organizational structure gradually gets out-of-date --- it needs to be > refreshed based on our experiences and our ambitions, or else it’ll > eventually stop working. And structure should follow strategy: as > strategy evolves, structure needs to evolve as well. With the > Narrowing Focus emphasis on engineering and grantmaking, we’ve revised > our strategy, and so we need to refresh our structure too. > > So what’s the purpose of this restructure? What are the problems it’s > aiming to solve, and what coming changes do we want to be ready for? > > The whole purpose of this restructure is to support increased emphasis > on engineering and grantmaking. Some specific issues: > * The FDC is off to a good start: it’s proved it’s able to make tough > choices, and its decisions are being respected by the chapters and the > community. For the FDC to do a really good job for us next year > though, it's going to need to be able to assess the impact of the > funding it’s given out --- not just “is this organization capable of > spending this much money competently” but “to what extent is this > spending helping the movement achieve its goals.” The FDC won't be > able do that without support from us, and so we need and want to > invest in support for programmatic evaluation. At this point the > movement has very little ability to say “x kind of activity is having > a good effect” and “Y kind of activity is not” -- we need to help > equip it to do that. > * Currently more than half the organization’s staffing and spending is > concentrated in engineering. That’s great and it fits with our > strategy, but it doesn’t necessarily make sense to have half the > organization reflected at the C-level by a single person. I would like > the C-team to be less admin-heavy and more weighted towards > programmatic activities. > * Currently, as Erik has said in an earlier note, he personally makes > any trade-offs that need to be made in terms of where to focus > engineering/product resources. He believes, and so do I, that we could > get better decision quality if there were more debate at the executive > level about tradeoffs. > * After a couple of years of developing the foundations of the > engineering department, we’re ready now to upwards-prioritize user > experience, analytics, and high-level strategic planning and > assessment. We want to add more resources to those areas. > > So, what are we going to do? > > First, we’re going to revamp Global Development. Starting now, that > department will be called Grantmaking and Programs. It will be co-led > by Anasuya (grantmaking) and Frank (programs). Anasuya and Frank will > have separate direct reports and budgets, but we’re going to keep it > as a single department because neither sub-department is very large > and because the two are deeply interlinked: we wouldn’t have one > without the other. Anasuya, currently Director of Global Learning and > Grantmaking, will become Senior Director of Grantmaking, and Frank, > currently Global Education Program Director, will become Senior > Director of Programs. > > Anasuya will be responsible for running all grantmaking processes (for > both individuals and entities) and for helping movement entities, like > chapters and thematic organizations, to develop and mature. Reporting > to Anasuya will be Asaf Bartov, Jessie Wild, Oona Castro and Siko > Bouterse, as well as a Senior Program Officer for the FDC (a new > position that will be filled within the next month or so). > * The Senior Program Officer will be responsible for facilitating the > FDC process, which recommends funding allocations for the largest and > wealthiest Wikimedia organizations such as Wikimedia Germany and > Wikimedia France. > * Asaf continues to be responsible for the Wikimedia Grants Program, > supporting younger, smaller Wikimedia organizations like Wikimedia > Venezuela and Wikimedia Mexico, and for finding non-Wikimedia > organizations that we can fund to carry out good programmatic > activities in developing countries, particularly where there are no > chapters. > * Jessie will be responsible for evaluation and learning for all our > grantmaking --- both helping us internally optimize our processes, and > helping us and the grant recipients assess organizations’ development > (for Anasuya) and the impact of the programs funded by movement > dollars (for Frank). > * Oona will continue to run the Brazil program. Consistent with the > Narrowing Focus plan, she is actively seeking a partner to continue > the work in Brazil within a grants structure similar to the one we > recently negotiated with CIS in India. > * Siko is taking over responsibility from Asaf for all funding for > individuals. This will make it possible for us to grow our individual > grant-making, and it will also free up Asaf to do more small > organization development. Siko will also be responsible for > documentation and analysis of all grants except the ones funded by the > FDC. It’s important for us to grow grantmaking to individuals because > individuals create 99% of the value in the projects. They do it with > practically no funding, but in some cases a little money will be able > to make something great happen. > > Frank will be responsible for designing and implementing a > collaborative program evaluation process that will help the movement > optimize its programs, including, but not limited to, those funded by > grants. His clients for that will be fund-seeking entities (to help > them make decisions about what programs to run) and the grantmaking > groups (to help them make decisions about what requests to fund). He > will also continue to hold responsibility for the Wikipedia Zero > project and the Global Education program. > > Reporting to Frank will be Kul Wadhwa and a new Senior Program Officer > for the Global Education team (a new position that will be filled > within the next few months, and to whom Annie Lin and LiAnna Davis > will report). Frank will likely also begin to build a small team > supporting program evaluation: he is starting now to develop a plan > for that. > * The Global Education Senior Program Officer will be responsible for > running the Global Education Program, which supports Wikipedians and > educational institutions in running programs in which students write > Wikipedia articles as part of their classwork. This program, which > started a couple of years ago, has proven effective at improving > article quality without costing much money. Inside Global Ed, LiAnna > is responsible for communications (creating and improving materials > and tools for teachers, students and volunteers), and Annie is > responsible for expansion to new geographies. LiAnna and Annie’s roles > won’t change. > * Kul continues to be responsible for leading the Wikipedia Zero team > which makes deals with mobile providers giving their users access to > Wikipedia with no charges for data. > * Jessie reports to Anasuya, but will also support Frank in his > program evaluation work. And, Frank’s program evaluation plan may > result in us creating new positions for evaluation work. > > That’s Global Development. Now Engineering. > > 62% of the Wikimedia Foundation’s staff (79 of 127 people) are in > Engineering and given our increasing emphasis on engineering and > grantmaking we can expect that proportion to grow. That’s a pretty big > span of control for a single person, and so as you know over the past > month we’ve been discussing whether to split the department in two: > one focused on Engineering, and the other Product. After talking it > through (a lot), we’ve decided not to do that right now: we think it’s > possible we may be able to achieve our objectives without breaking up > the department. > > So what are going to do? > > For the moment, we’re going to keep Engineering as a single > department, incorporating Platform (Rob Lanphier), Features (Terry > Chay), Ops (CT Woo), Mobile (Tomasz Finc), Languages (Alolita Sharma) > and Product (Howie Fung). No change there. We want to > upwards-prioritize user experience, analytics, and high-level > strategic planning and assessment. Here’s what will happen next with > regards to that: > * Erik and Howie are going to hire a Director of User Experience. The > position will be posted sometime in the next few weeks, and we hope to > have the person in place around February/March. Once that happens, > Brandon Harris, Heather Walls, Munaf Assaf, Pau Giner and Vibha Bamba > will report to the Director of User Experience. > * We’re going to have a series of meetings to figure out how best to > structure analytics work. These meetings will include (in various > groupings) me, Erik, Rob, Howie and other internal analytics clients > and stakeholders, and research/analytics staff. To date, the people > working in research and analytics have been distributed throughout the > organization on different teams, reporting to different bosses. Right > now, we are leaning towards combining all those people into a single > department so that they can concentrate their energies and give the > organization maximum bang for its buck. That would include: Aaron > Halfaker, Andrew Otto, Dan Andreescu, Dario Taraborelli, David > Schoonover, Diederik Van Liere, Evan Rosen, Erik Zachte and Ryan > Faulkner. At this point, we’re operating on the assumption that we > will post and board a Director of Analytics (or some similar, possibly > more expansive title) position, probably late in the first three > months of 2013. > * Erik, Gayle and I are going to meet to discuss options for what can > come off Erik’s plate to free him up to focus more on product, > strategy, user experience and analytics and evaluation. In January, > we’ll meet with the Engineering directors to make a final decision > about whether to split the department or add more resources to > Engineering in some other fashion. > > Geoff and I are also pleased to announce a change in title for Jay > Walsh. Effective immediately, Jay’s title will change from Head of > Communications to Senior Director, Communications, owing to the > expanded duties and scope of the Foundation's communications team. > Since he started, Jay has grown the team from one to four people (Jay, > James Alexander, Matthew Roth and Tilman Bayer), and it now has a > wider range of responsibilities, including creative direction, > editorial/news production, research, and merchandise. And so, we're > pleased to recognize the considerable work of Jay and the team. (This > really isn’t a restructure-related announcement, but I’m putting it in > this note so all the news comes at once :-)) > > That’s the roadmap for where we’re headed right now. To summarize: > Global Dev’s name is changing to Grantmaking and Programs, and it will > be co-led by Anasuya (Grantmaking) and Programs (Frank). Some people’s > job functions and reporting lines will change. In Engineering, we are > adding two new positions: a Director of User Experience (search will > launch in January), and a Director of Analytics (or some similar > title) (search will launch by March). We will also be discussing in > January whether to break Engineering into two departments, Engineering > and Product & Strategy, or not. > > Last thing I want to say: We’ve been talking about this restructure > for a month or so --- it’s used up a fair bit of organizational energy > and caused some noise and anxiety. So I was interested to read the > other day a new blog post by Clay Shirky, in which he said this: “Open > systems are open. For people used to dealing with institutions that go > out of their way to hide their flaws, this makes these systems look > terrible at first. But anyone who has watched a piece of open source > software improve, or remembers the Britannica people throwing tantrums > about Wikipedia, has seen how blistering public criticism makes open > systems better.” > > I am not actually asking for your blistering public criticism :-) But > I am asking you to accept that things are going to be a little messy > for a while, and to continue to engage in good faith as we work > through this stuff. This stuff can be raw because of the implications > for people personally: I’m grateful that for the most part people seem > to have been able to set aside their individual self-interest and > think about what’s good for the organization overall --- I’d ask you > to keep trying to do that. > > If you’ve got questions about this, you can ask them here on the list, > or at the metrics meeting tomorrow morning, or speak with your boss or > me. > > Thanks, > Sue > > > > -- > Sue Gardner > Executive Director > Wikimedia Foundation > > 415 839 6885 office > 415 816 9967 cell > > Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in > the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! > > https://donate.wikimedia.org/ > > _______________________________________________ > Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l > _______________________________________________ > WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list > WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list > Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l >

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[Wikimedia Announcements] Chapter Reports Wikimedia Canada, May to August 2012
by Benoit Rochon 07 Dec '12

07 Dec '12

Hello, Here are the reports for Wikimedia Canada from May to August 2012. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikimedia_Canada/… Best regards, Benoit Rochon Coordinator | Wikimedia Canada 1-800-249-1216 | brochon(a)wikimedia.ca _______________________________________________ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l _______________________________________________ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l

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Proposal: MediaWiki Groups
by Quim Gil 07 Dec '12

07 Dec '12

Hi, here you have a draft about MediaWiki Groups, and implicitly MediaWiki reps: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil/MediaWiki_groups Imagine MediaWiki Amsterdam Group MediaWiki HTML5 Group MediaWiki Women Group ... MediaWiki groups organize open source community activities within the scope of specific topics or geographical areas. They extend the capacity of the Wikimedia Foundation in technical events, training, promotion and other technical activities benefiting Wikipedia, the Wikimedia movement and the MediaWiki software. This proposal is being discussed in the MediaWiki context and goes in accordance with the Wikimedia Foundation short term goals [1]. Feedback from the wider Wikimedia community is welcome, especially on how to combine these groups with chapters and other existing Wikimedia entities. Note that these are intended to be _just_ groups, not formal organizations legally constituted. We are looking after simple processes for creation and management of these groups with basically zero budget. We expect these groups to become a main delegation/empowerment tool to organize more, more distributed and more diverse technical activities. They fit perfectly in the Wikimedia Foundation strategy and the way the Wikimedia movement grows. Please bring your ideas to the discussion page - or here. Thank you! [1] Find mentions to "user groups" at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2012-13_Goals#Mileston… -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: Wikimedia Foundation restructure (Global Dev & Engineering)
by Pradeep Nair 07 Dec '12

07 Dec '12

Hi, I apologize for top posting here. I read through the document and was genuinely confused as to what was happening. This may be because I have little idea on the people and their positions presently. I believe things would become more lucid if we could compare a before and after organization chart - before the announcement and after it, please? Pradeep Mohandas Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android

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[Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: Wikimedia Foundation restructure (Global Dev & Engineering)
by Sue Gardner 07 Dec '12

07 Dec '12

Hello folks, On-passing this FYI --- I hope the formatting doesn't break too much. If people want to discuss this, maybe the first person could put it on a wiki page (attached to Narrowing Focus, maybe?) so the discussion is recorded for other interested parties and can be revisited later, rather than just being ephemeral. Thanks, Sue ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Sue Gardner" <sgardner(a)wikimedia.org> Date: Dec 5, 2012 7:05 PM Subject: Announcement: Wikimedia Foundation restructure (Global Dev & Engineering) To: "Staff All" <wmfall(a)lists.wikimedia.org> hey folks, The purpose of this note is to lay out some changes to the structure of the Wikimedia Foundation. Some will take place immediately, and others will play out over the next six months. I’m announcing it in a single big note rather than bits & pieces because I want everyone to have the overview: where we’re headed and why. This will be long --- please bear with me. First, some context. Why are we restructuring? Basically: if an organization’s going to function well, it needs to reorg every now and then. As an organization grows and changes and learns, its organizational structure gradually gets out-of-date --- it needs to be refreshed based on our experiences and our ambitions, or else it’ll eventually stop working. And structure should follow strategy: as strategy evolves, structure needs to evolve as well. With the Narrowing Focus emphasis on engineering and grantmaking, we’ve revised our strategy, and so we need to refresh our structure too. So what’s the purpose of this restructure? What are the problems it’s aiming to solve, and what coming changes do we want to be ready for? The whole purpose of this restructure is to support increased emphasis on engineering and grantmaking. Some specific issues: * The FDC is off to a good start: it’s proved it’s able to make tough choices, and its decisions are being respected by the chapters and the community. For the FDC to do a really good job for us next year though, it's going to need to be able to assess the impact of the funding it’s given out --- not just “is this organization capable of spending this much money competently” but “to what extent is this spending helping the movement achieve its goals.” The FDC won't be able do that without support from us, and so we need and want to invest in support for programmatic evaluation. At this point the movement has very little ability to say “x kind of activity is having a good effect” and “Y kind of activity is not” -- we need to help equip it to do that. * Currently more than half the organization’s staffing and spending is concentrated in engineering. That’s great and it fits with our strategy, but it doesn’t necessarily make sense to have half the organization reflected at the C-level by a single person. I would like the C-team to be less admin-heavy and more weighted towards programmatic activities. * Currently, as Erik has said in an earlier note, he personally makes any trade-offs that need to be made in terms of where to focus engineering/product resources. He believes, and so do I, that we could get better decision quality if there were more debate at the executive level about tradeoffs. * After a couple of years of developing the foundations of the engineering department, we’re ready now to upwards-prioritize user experience, analytics, and high-level strategic planning and assessment. We want to add more resources to those areas. So, what are we going to do? First, we’re going to revamp Global Development. Starting now, that department will be called Grantmaking and Programs. It will be co-led by Anasuya (grantmaking) and Frank (programs). Anasuya and Frank will have separate direct reports and budgets, but we’re going to keep it as a single department because neither sub-department is very large and because the two are deeply interlinked: we wouldn’t have one without the other. Anasuya, currently Director of Global Learning and Grantmaking, will become Senior Director of Grantmaking, and Frank, currently Global Education Program Director, will become Senior Director of Programs. Anasuya will be responsible for running all grantmaking processes (for both individuals and entities) and for helping movement entities, like chapters and thematic organizations, to develop and mature. Reporting to Anasuya will be Asaf Bartov, Jessie Wild, Oona Castro and Siko Bouterse, as well as a Senior Program Officer for the FDC (a new position that will be filled within the next month or so). * The Senior Program Officer will be responsible for facilitating the FDC process, which recommends funding allocations for the largest and wealthiest Wikimedia organizations such as Wikimedia Germany and Wikimedia France. * Asaf continues to be responsible for the Wikimedia Grants Program, supporting younger, smaller Wikimedia organizations like Wikimedia Venezuela and Wikimedia Mexico, and for finding non-Wikimedia organizations that we can fund to carry out good programmatic activities in developing countries, particularly where there are no chapters. * Jessie will be responsible for evaluation and learning for all our grantmaking --- both helping us internally optimize our processes, and helping us and the grant recipients assess organizations’ development (for Anasuya) and the impact of the programs funded by movement dollars (for Frank). * Oona will continue to run the Brazil program. Consistent with the Narrowing Focus plan, she is actively seeking a partner to continue the work in Brazil within a grants structure similar to the one we recently negotiated with CIS in India. * Siko is taking over responsibility from Asaf for all funding for individuals. This will make it possible for us to grow our individual grant-making, and it will also free up Asaf to do more small organization development. Siko will also be responsible for documentation and analysis of all grants except the ones funded by the FDC. It’s important for us to grow grantmaking to individuals because individuals create 99% of the value in the projects. They do it with practically no funding, but in some cases a little money will be able to make something great happen. Frank will be responsible for designing and implementing a collaborative program evaluation process that will help the movement optimize its programs, including, but not limited to, those funded by grants. His clients for that will be fund-seeking entities (to help them make decisions about what programs to run) and the grantmaking groups (to help them make decisions about what requests to fund). He will also continue to hold responsibility for the Wikipedia Zero project and the Global Education program. Reporting to Frank will be Kul Wadhwa and a new Senior Program Officer for the Global Education team (a new position that will be filled within the next few months, and to whom Annie Lin and LiAnna Davis will report). Frank will likely also begin to build a small team supporting program evaluation: he is starting now to develop a plan for that. * The Global Education Senior Program Officer will be responsible for running the Global Education Program, which supports Wikipedians and educational institutions in running programs in which students write Wikipedia articles as part of their classwork. This program, which started a couple of years ago, has proven effective at improving article quality without costing much money. Inside Global Ed, LiAnna is responsible for communications (creating and improving materials and tools for teachers, students and volunteers), and Annie is responsible for expansion to new geographies. LiAnna and Annie’s roles won’t change. * Kul continues to be responsible for leading the Wikipedia Zero team which makes deals with mobile providers giving their users access to Wikipedia with no charges for data. * Jessie reports to Anasuya, but will also support Frank in his program evaluation work. And, Frank’s program evaluation plan may result in us creating new positions for evaluation work. That’s Global Development. Now Engineering. 62% of the Wikimedia Foundation’s staff (79 of 127 people) are in Engineering and given our increasing emphasis on engineering and grantmaking we can expect that proportion to grow. That’s a pretty big span of control for a single person, and so as you know over the past month we’ve been discussing whether to split the department in two: one focused on Engineering, and the other Product. After talking it through (a lot), we’ve decided not to do that right now: we think it’s possible we may be able to achieve our objectives without breaking up the department. So what are going to do? For the moment, we’re going to keep Engineering as a single department, incorporating Platform (Rob Lanphier), Features (Terry Chay), Ops (CT Woo), Mobile (Tomasz Finc), Languages (Alolita Sharma) and Product (Howie Fung). No change there. We want to upwards-prioritize user experience, analytics, and high-level strategic planning and assessment. Here’s what will happen next with regards to that: * Erik and Howie are going to hire a Director of User Experience. The position will be posted sometime in the next few weeks, and we hope to have the person in place around February/March. Once that happens, Brandon Harris, Heather Walls, Munaf Assaf, Pau Giner and Vibha Bamba will report to the Director of User Experience. * We’re going to have a series of meetings to figure out how best to structure analytics work. These meetings will include (in various groupings) me, Erik, Rob, Howie and other internal analytics clients and stakeholders, and research/analytics staff. To date, the people working in research and analytics have been distributed throughout the organization on different teams, reporting to different bosses. Right now, we are leaning towards combining all those people into a single department so that they can concentrate their energies and give the organization maximum bang for its buck. That would include: Aaron Halfaker, Andrew Otto, Dan Andreescu, Dario Taraborelli, David Schoonover, Diederik Van Liere, Evan Rosen, Erik Zachte and Ryan Faulkner. At this point, we’re operating on the assumption that we will post and board a Director of Analytics (or some similar, possibly more expansive title) position, probably late in the first three months of 2013. * Erik, Gayle and I are going to meet to discuss options for what can come off Erik’s plate to free him up to focus more on product, strategy, user experience and analytics and evaluation. In January, we’ll meet with the Engineering directors to make a final decision about whether to split the department or add more resources to Engineering in some other fashion. Geoff and I are also pleased to announce a change in title for Jay Walsh. Effective immediately, Jay’s title will change from Head of Communications to Senior Director, Communications, owing to the expanded duties and scope of the Foundation's communications team. Since he started, Jay has grown the team from one to four people (Jay, James Alexander, Matthew Roth and Tilman Bayer), and it now has a wider range of responsibilities, including creative direction, editorial/news production, research, and merchandise. And so, we're pleased to recognize the considerable work of Jay and the team. (This really isn’t a restructure-related announcement, but I’m putting it in this note so all the news comes at once :-)) That’s the roadmap for where we’re headed right now. To summarize: Global Dev’s name is changing to Grantmaking and Programs, and it will be co-led by Anasuya (Grantmaking) and Programs (Frank). Some people’s job functions and reporting lines will change. In Engineering, we are adding two new positions: a Director of User Experience (search will launch in January), and a Director of Analytics (or some similar title) (search will launch by March). We will also be discussing in January whether to break Engineering into two departments, Engineering and Product & Strategy, or not. Last thing I want to say: We’ve been talking about this restructure for a month or so --- it’s used up a fair bit of organizational energy and caused some noise and anxiety. So I was interested to read the other day a new blog post by Clay Shirky, in which he said this: “Open systems are open. For people used to dealing with institutions that go out of their way to hide their flaws, this makes these systems look terrible at first. But anyone who has watched a piece of open source software improve, or remembers the Britannica people throwing tantrums about Wikipedia, has seen how blistering public criticism makes open systems better.” I am not actually asking for your blistering public criticism :-) But I am asking you to accept that things are going to be a little messy for a while, and to continue to engage in good faith as we work through this stuff. This stuff can be raw because of the implications for people personally: I’m grateful that for the most part people seem to have been able to set aside their individual self-interest and think about what’s good for the organization overall --- I’d ask you to keep trying to do that. If you’ve got questions about this, you can ask them here on the list, or at the metrics meeting tomorrow morning, or speak with your boss or me. Thanks, Sue -- Sue Gardner Executive Director Wikimedia Foundation 415 839 6885 office 415 816 9967 cell Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! https://donate.wikimedia.org/ _______________________________________________ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l _______________________________________________ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: Wikimedia Foundation restructure (Global Dev & Engineering)
by Abbas Mahmood 07 Dec '12

07 Dec '12

Hi Sue, What will happen to Oona once she identifies a suitable org willing to take over the Brazil programs? Abbas.

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REMINDER: WMF Metrics/Activities Meeting Begins in 30 Minutes
by Praveena Maharaj 06 Dec '12

06 Dec '12

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Praveena Maharaj <pmaharaj(a)wikimedia.org> Date: Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 2:40 PM Subject: ***UPDATED*** Invitation to WMF November 2012 Metrics and Activities Meeting: Thursday, Dec. 6, 19:00 UTC To: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Hi everyone, Some important corrections to my previous email, please see below: *Meeting Time: 7:00 PM UTC (11 AM PST)* *IRC channel: #wikimedia-office* Thank you, Praveena On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 12:51 PM, Praveena Maharaj <pmaharaj(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > Dear all, > The next WMF metrics and activities will take place on Thursday, December 6, 2012 at 6:30 PM UTC (10:30 AM PST). The IRC channel is #wikimedia-metrics-meetings on irc.freenode.net and the meeting will be broadcast as a live YouTube stream. > > The current structure of the meeting is: > * Review of key metrics including the monthly report card, but also specialized reports and analytics* Review of financials* Welcoming recent hires* Brief presentations on recent projects, with a focus on highest priority initiatives* Update and Q&A with the Executive Director, if available > Please review https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings for further information about how to participate. > > We'll post IRC logs and the video recording publicly after the meeting. > > Thank you, > > Praveena > > -- > Praveena Maharaj > Executive Assistant to the VP of Engineering and Product Development > +1 (415) 839 6885 ext. 6689 > www.wikimedia.org >

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[Wikimedia Announcements] Wikimedia engineering November 2012 report
by Guillaume Paumier 06 Dec '12

06 Dec '12

Hi, The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in November 2012 is now available. Wiki version: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2012/November Blog version: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/12/06/engineering-november-2012-report/ Like last month, we're also proposing a shorter and simpler version of this report for less technically-savvy readers: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2012/November/s… Below is the full HTML text of the report, as previously requested. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Major news in November include: - the soft-launch of Wikivoyage.org <https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/>; - the launch of a new HTML5 video player<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/11/08/introducing-wikipedias-new-html5-vide…>, with support for WebM video, subtitles and multiple resolution derivatives; - the first version of the Analytics Hadoop cluster put into service; - the opening up of the product management process to volunteers<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/11/21/lead-development-process-product-advi…> . *Note: Like last month, we're proposing a shorter and simpler version of this report<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2012/November/s…>for less technically savvy readers. * Personnel Work with us <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/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. - Software Engineer - Experimental Features<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=opDhWfwZ> - Software Engineer - Visual Editor<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=otYPWfwW> - Software Engineer - Editor Engagement<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ovvXWfwD> - Software Engineer (Partners)<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oX2hWfwW> - Software Engineer (Mobile)<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o1H6Vfwt> - Software Developer General (Mobile)<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o4cKWfwG> - Git and Gerrit software development (Contract)<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o4gIWfwI> - Release Manager <http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oZrQWfwW> - Senior Software Engineer<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ouLnWfwi> - Product Manager (Mobile)<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oGWJWfw1> - Visual Designer <http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oomJWfw9> - Operations Engineer<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ocLCWfwf> - Operations Engineer/Database Administrator<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=obMOWfwr> - RFP-Lucene Search Operations Engineer<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oC5fWfwC> Announcements - Quim Gil joined the Engineering Community Team of the Platform engineering group as "Technical Contributor Coordinator (IT Communications Manager)" (announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-November/064412.html> ). - Juliusz Gonera joined the Mobile team as Software Developer ( announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-November/064526.html> ). Technical Operations *Site Infrastructure* Mark Bergsma made a breakthrough in resolving an old and elusive instability issue in Varnish which occurs when they are under extreme load or experiencing hanging connections/packet load. The problem turned out to be the slow epoll thread. When under load and once the pipe buffer (64 KB) is full, the writing Varnish worker threads block, and the server situation deteriorates rapidly. Mark fixed this issue by moving the reading of the sessions earlier in the epoll event loop, before the thread does anything else, thereby reducing the size of the pipe buffer. With this enhancement, Mark is confident he could further reduce the number of Varnish servers in our caching infrastructure.Asher Feldman is happy to report that the memcached instances on the app servers in Tampa are no longer in use. This will give us back an extra 2GB of RAM on many of the app servers (which only have 8 or 12GB to begin with) which can go towards increasing PHP capacity. It also improves the stability of the site by addressing some of the root causes of multiple site outages, and brings with it multiple client improvements including consistent hashing, igbinary serialization, and better timeout handling. The total cache pool has increased from 140GB to 1392GB, enough to currently meet full parser cache requirements from RAM. Sessions are no longer stored in memcached at all but have been migrated to redis, which will provide replication to the stand-by datacenter. In addition, performance is quite a bit better as well, as can be seen by comparing the max value in the 90th and 99th percentile times in the attached graph. In recent months, we've seen a high hardware failure rate with our batch of Swift servers. After discussion with our vendor, they agreed to replace all those servers with newer hardware. All the required servers to replace the Tampa Swift servers have just arrived. We are in the process of migrating data from the old servers to the new ones, but it will take time to drain traffic, remove the old hardware from production and slowly ramp up the new machines. Ariel Glenn's current plan<http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Swift/Deploy_Plan_-_R720xds_in_tampa>is to add 2 servers per week. After several months of testing and tweaking, Peter Youngmeister finally rolled out the new Apache-on-Precise build on all our Tampa app and imagescaler servers. This will be the same (and tested) image that we'll be using on the Ashburn App servers in the coming month. Thanks to the efforts of Leslie Carr and Mark Bergsma, we are now a RIPE NCC member<http://www.ripe.net/lir-services/member-support/become-a-member>, and with this membership, we may be eligible to receive a one-time allocation of a /22 of IPv4 address space from the last of /8 of IPv4 address space. This is particularly important to us since we have run out of IPv4 addresses in Europe. The SSL cluster was upgraded to Ubuntu Precise which provided a newer version of nginx and openssl, closing out the CRIME vulnerability and giving us the possibility of using HTTP 1.1 to the back-end. Testing of HTTP 1.1 for proxying will occur in the future. *Fundraising* The fundraising season started. Jeff Green and Leslie Carr rolled out the new Ashburn Fundraising server cluster and it is currently handling all payments. Leslie applied and tested firewall rules for the new cluster. There were lots of bug fixes and small improvements to configuration management, monitoring, and logging to cluster administration by the Operations and the Fundraising tech teams. Jeff built out the second payments messaging box (ActiveMQ) as a hot standby. A new wiki was deployed for the Fundraising email unsubscribe page, to segregate it from sensitive services (payments, CiviCRM). Specifications for new payments bastion hosts were started. *Data Dumps <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Projects/Data_Dumps>* Media bundles are back in business at your.org<http://ftpmirror.your.org/pub/wikimedia/imagedumps/tarballs/>now that the network issues have been fixed. Work has started on upgrading the OS on the servers that produce the dumps, rebuilding the necessary packages and testing. The 'add/changes' experimental dumps have been running stably long enough that we've made them available on the gluster public data volume accessible to all Labs projects. *Wikimedia Labs <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs>* Andrew Bogott continues to work on some long-term OpenStack issues. There's a new project, Moniker, which should (eventually) allow us to properly integrate the Labs cloud with our DNS back-end and provide better stability and a bit more user control. He continues to work on other more basic OpenStack work which will eventually trickle into Labs.Andrew has also been fiddling quite a bit with the usability of OpenStackManager, which is the GUI for labsconsole. The interface is now marginally easier to use and understand, and improvements are ongoing. *Others* Chris Johnson has relocated from Tampa to work in our Ashburn datacenter. Steven Bernardin is now the main Tampa data center engineer. Features Engineering <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Features_engineering> Editor retention: Editing tools *VisualEditor <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=VisualEditor/status&action=edit> ] In November, the team worked primarily on finalizing the code re-engineering of VisualEditor so that it is more modular and easier to extend, and on the integration ahead of deploying it for wider testing in December. The early version of the VisualEditor on mediawiki.org was updated twice (1.21-wmf4<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21/wmf4#VisualEditor>and -wmf5 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21/wmf5#VisualEditor>), fixing a number of bugs and missing wikitext compatibility, and wide-spread improvements to much of the user interface code so that it will be easier to change in future. *Parsoid <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Parsoid/status&action=edit> ] In preparation for the upcoming deployment on the English Wikipedia, the Parsoid team concentrated on the preservation of existing content. Automated round-trip testing on 100,000 randomly chosen pages from the English Wikipedia using distributed test runners helped to identify many issues, which were fixed and often resulted in new minimal test cases being added to the parser test suite. Currently, 79.4% test articles (up from about 65% last month) round-trip without any differences at all, an additional 18% round-trip with only minor (whitespace, quote style etc) differences, and the remaining 2.6% of pages have differences that still need fixing (down from about 15% last month). Selective serialization will further avoid dirty diffs in unmodified parts of a page by using the original wikitext for those. This will help further fix the 20% of pages that had any kind of difference in wikitext. The implementation of this algorithm is currently being finalized. Editor engagement *Article feedback <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Article_feedback/status&action=…> ] This month, we continued to develop final features for Article Feedback<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5>, and researched how people are using this tool on the English Wikipedia. With the help of community members, we designed new features<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Feature_Requireme…>to reduce the editor workload, including improved moderation tools and a more prominent feedback link. These features will be developed next month, once we've completed code re-factoring to improve database performance. We also analyzed new research data to track how moderators use the feedback page <http://toolserver.org/%7Edartar/fp/>, and measure how many readers who post feedback become editors or registered users. Next month, we will invite Wikipedians to evaluate the usefulness of feedback posts and the effectiveness of our new moderation tools. Once these tasks are done, we plan to release Article Feedback v5 to 100% of the English Wikipedia in early 2013. For more information about this tool, check our project overview<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_feedback> . *Page Curation <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Curation>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Page_Curation/status&action=edit> ] Page Curation <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Page_Curation> is now in 'maintenance mode', following its release on the English Wikipedia in September 2012. We have been tracking the impact of this tool with a metrics dashboard <http://toolserver.org/%7Edartar/pc/>, which confirms that it is being used actively, with over 27,000 pages reviewed since launch. To learn more, visit our introduction page<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Page_Curation/Introduction>, watch this video tour<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Page_Curation/Video>or read this tutorial <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Page_Curation/Tutorial>. If you are an experienced editor, try out the final version<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Special:NewPagesFeed>on the English Wikipedia. *MicroDesign <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Micro_Design_Improvements>* [ edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Micro_Design_Improvements/statu…> ] The Agora extension moves ever-closer to completion, with help from Munaf Assaf, Trevor Parscal, Rob Moen and Vibha Bamba. Several templates on the English-language Wikipedia have been redesigned to reduce interface clutter, with some already implemented. *Editor engagement experiments<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editor_engagement_experiments> * [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Editor_engagement_experiments/s…> ] In November, the Editor Engagement Experiments team (E3) deployed the third and final A/B test of the new account creation page<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ACUX>, including client-side validation. Results from basic data analysis of all three tests were published on Meta, and the project will now move to the productization stage. Extension:PostEdit<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PostEdit>was put in maintenance mode after being deployed to a further seven Wikipedias, including French and Portuguese. On the analytics side, E3 transitioned permanently to Extension:EventLogging<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:EventLogging>for data collection purposes, and collaborated with the mobile team to track activity on Wikipedia's mobile beta. Last but not least, the team also deployed a small design improvement to the personal tools<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Personal_tools>menu in MediaWiki core. Multimedia *UploadWizard <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UploadWizard>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=UploadWizard/status&action=edit> ] The work of Ankur Anand (a.k.a drecodream) on Flickr integration, done during GSoC, has now been merged, and Wikimedia engineers are working towards its deployment in the near future. Specifically, several bugs related to Internet Explorer were fixed. Once all the bug fixes are deployed, the feature will be turned on for Commons (hopefully in early December). Initially it will only be available to administrators. Architecture & Platform support *Notifications <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_%28Notifications%29>* [ edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Echo_%28Notifications%29/status…> ] This month, we designed and started building key features of the Notifications project (code-named 'Echo'), towards a first experimental deployment in early 2013. Fabrice Florin wrote detailed feature requirements<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements>for our first release, and Vibha Bamba designed the first components of the user experience <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_User_Experience>. Ryan Kaldari and Benny Situ developed the main features of this application, including the notifications flyout, the all-notifications archive, as well as email notifications and preferences. To test our work in progress, visit our first prototype <http://ee-prototype.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page>(create an account and post on your talkpage from a separate account). New employee Luke Welling <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:LWelling>is also starting work on an HTML email module for this project. For more information, visit our project hub <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo>, or check our overview slides<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Echo-Overview-Slides-10-18-2012.pdf> . *Messaging <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Flow/status&action=edit> ] The official start of Flow will follow Echo<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo>development. An initial team will be forming next month to explore solutions here. Support *2012 Wikimedia fundraiser<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/2012_Wikimedia_fundraiser> * [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=2012_Wikimedia_fundraiser/statu…> ] November has been a busy month for Fundraising as the team helped to kick-off the annual 2012 fundraiser on November 26th with heavy testing before then. So far the 2012 fundraiser has been a resounding success raising over $12M in the 5 full days and limited testing days since November 15th. For current information, see the live stats<https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserStatistics> . Shortly before the full launch, it was announced that the annual fundraiser would be splitting into an English-language fundraiser in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, the United States and New Zealand during the traditional November/December period with other languages and all countries in April. For more details see the announcement on wikimedia-l<https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-November/122811.html> . Mobile <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering> The Mobile team (Jon Robson, Juliusz Gonera, Arthur Richards and Max Semenik) deployed several features to our beta and production mobile web infrastructure this month. To beta, we deployed experimental edit functionality, reformatted tables, random article support, simpler layout for cleanup templates, and watchlists. For production, we added log-in support. *GeoData Storage & API<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GeoData_Storage_%26_API> * [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=GeoData_Storage_%26_API/status&…> ] We plan to start deploying Solr-based GeoData in early December. *Wikipedia Zero <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_Zero/status&action=ed…> ] This month we've worked with volunteer developers at the Bangalore DevCamp on our SMS feature, and are preparing for the launch of additional partners in the next few weeks. *J2ME App <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MobileFrontend/J2ME_app>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=MobileFrontend/J2ME_app/status&…> ] We approved the initial J2ME app and are exploring next steps for deployment and creating additional versions to support a larger base of handsets. *Wikipedia over SMS & USSD<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_over_SMS_%26_USSD> * [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_over_SMS_%26_USSD/sta…> ] This month, we've worked with volunteer developers at the Bangalore DevCamp<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bangalore_DevCamp_November_2012>to start supporting an important variant of our upcoming text messaging support. We currently have the SMS/USSD combination working and awaiting launch, and we are now working on the SMS-only version for carriers that cannot support USSD. *Mobile QA <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_QA>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Mobile_QA/status&action=edit> ] We have created several automated Mobile browser-based tests that are now running our Cloud Bees/Sauce Lab Continuous Integration configuration. Both Platform engineering and Mobile QA are leveraging Watir Webdriver and Cucumber <https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber/wiki/Given-When-Then/>. We also continue to add to our Mobile Browser Regression Tests<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_Browser_Regression_Tests> . Offline *Kiwix <http://www.kiwix.org>* A new project, Phpzim <http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Phpzim>, was started with the support of Wikimedia CH. This project will create a binding in PHP of the zimlib <http://www.openzim.org/Zimlib>, allowing any PHP developer to easily create and read ZIM files. This is the first stone of a bigger project to allow quick ZIM file generation in Mediawiki (and also other PHP CMSes). Work on ZIM Autobuild <http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/ZIM_Autobuild>continues and Kiwix ZIM throughput increases slowly (4 files in November). Small testing stage of Kiwix 0.9rc2 <http://changelog.kiwix.org> will finally start in early December, followed by the release. Platform Engineering <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineering> MediaWiki Core *MediaWiki 1.21 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21/Roadmap>* [ edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki_1.21/Roadmap/status&a…> ] Wikimedia engineers deployed 1.21wmf3<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21/wmf3>and 1.21wmf4 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21/wmf4> to all Wikimedia sites, and began deploying 1.21wmf5<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21/wmf5>(with a momentary breakage<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-November/064718.html>). These updates included many significant improvements, including one-click (AJAX) patrolling, for both new page and diff patrol, and a Template Sandbox<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:TemplateSandbox>, which lets users preview changes to a template by previewing an example page where it's used. *Git conversion <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Git/Conversion>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Git/Conversion/status&action=ed…> ] We're still very much looking forward to deploying the latest version of Gerrit (see last month's update), but unfortunately remain blocked on a complicated LDAP propagation issue. Chad Horohoe is working with the Gerrit developers on finalizing the fix for this issue. Chad also attended the Gerrit Developer Summit in November, and both Chad and Rob Lanphier attended the Gerrit Users Summit (notes<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-November/064550.html> ). *TimedMediaHandler <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/TimedMediaHandler>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=TimedMediaHandler/status&action…> ] We have deployed TimedMediaHandler to all wikis. Jan Gerber and Michael Dale continue to fix bugs. Jan Gerber and Aaron Schulz are working on an improved file upload mechanism in UploadWizard to make larger file uploads more practical. *Wikidata deployment <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_deployment>* [ edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata_deployment/status&acti…> ] Chris Steipp and Chad Horohoe have reviewed the Wikibase set of extensions, as well as DataValues. Deployment of these extensions is planned for December. *Wikivoyage migration <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikivoyage_migration>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikivoyage_migration/status&act…> ] Wikivoyage was launched into public beta on November 10. The site is running on Wikimedia servers, and accounts and text content was migrated. Images from the old site have not been automatically imported, because some contain non-free content, and need to be added to each language wiki in accordance with the Exemption Doctrine Policy<https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Non-free_content#Exemption_Doctri…>for that site. Public announcement and promotion of the site is delayed while the community is working on the image transfer. *SwiftMedia <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/SwiftMedia>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=SwiftMedia/status&action=edit> ] Thumbnails (and math/timeline files) are now written to nas1 and Swift. More improvements have been made to FileBackend to avoid extra HEAD requests for 404 errors. Webm thumbnails use temporary Swift URLs to support range requests. Feature requests and bugs reports are filed against Ceph as MediaWiki takes advantage of other Swift features. *Lua scripting <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua_scripting>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Lua_scripting/status&action=edit> ] Brad Jorsch and Chad Horohoe have joined Tim Starling on this project. Brad has built a template sandbox<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:TemplateSandbox>which will help in debugging both Lua scripts and regular templates. Chad is working on a shared repository for scripts, and Tim has been extending the API. His latest work has been around adding multilingual APIs for handling things like plurals within Lua. We're currently seeking a volunteer product manager<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/11/21/lead-development-process-product-advi…>to help out with the roll-out of this. *Site performance <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Site_performance>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Site_performance/status&action=…> ] Various improvements to the job queue have been made to avoid CPU time wasted on duplicate jobs and redundant page cache purges. Changes have also been made to make it possible to edit heavily used templates without timeouts. *Incremental architectural improvements<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Incremental_architectural_improvements> * [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Incremental_architectural_impro…> ] Support needed for more complex data structures (lists, sets) in memcached (with atomic updates) is awaiting more review and testing. The coding is essentially done (changeset <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/25879/>). *Admin tools development<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development> * [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Admin_tools_development/status&…> ] The team's work continued on writing an interface for Stewards to mass-lock user accounts<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development/CentralAuth_Locking>and on being able to use AbuseFilter extension <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AbuseFilter> across all wikis at once. *MediaWiki 1.20 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.20/Roadmap>* [ edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki_1.20/Roadmap/status&a…> ] Mark Hershberger published the MediaWiki 1.20<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.20>stable tarball on November 7th. Chris Steipp published a security update (1.20.1) on November 29th. *REST proposal <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API/REST_proposal>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=API/REST_proposal/status&action…> ] Wikia wants to attract motivated app developers and companies using Wikia's products to use the API. They also want to make the API more standards-compliant (a RESTful interface, using HTTP verbs), but that's a high-level goal. Mobile-related work is first, but this redesign would improve the whole platform, including the enterprise. The Wikimedia Foundation and Wikia want to work together on this; The Wikimedia Foundation also wants to avoid boxing ourselves into special-purpose, specific apps. Wikia developer Federico Lucignano is currently working on a Request for comments on the REST proposal. *Security auditing and response<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security_auditing_and_response> * [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Security_auditing_and_response/…> ] The team continued to respond to several reported vulnerabilities, and released new versions of all supported MediaWiki branches (1.20.1, 1.19.3, 1.18.6) to address vulnerabilities in core. Significant security reviews continued for Wikidata and Wikivoyage extensions. Quality assurance *QA and testing <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/QA_and_testing>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=QA_and_testing/status&action=ed…> ] The team contributed to the community QA draft strategy<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/QA/Strategy>and presented the Acceptance Test-Driven Development concept to Wikimedia Product/Project managers. Regression testing of software deployments is ongoing. *Beta cluster <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Beta_cluster>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Beta_cluster/status&action=edit> ] We deployed ArticleFeedbackv5<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ArticleFeedbackv5>to the beta cluster, which is the primary host for AFTv5 testing, including browser test automation. New Page Patrol<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NPP>is being maintained there as well. We are still working on issues of ongoing maintenance, and this cluster played a role<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-November/064718.html>in catching a defect that recently escaped to production. *Continuous integration<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Continuous_integration> * [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Continuous_integration/status&a…> ] A continuous integration summit<http://filipin.eu/utrecht-amsterdam-2012/>occurred during the Netherlands Hackathon <https://nl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon_2012/en>. integration-jenkins2 is now fully operational with Jenkins / Gerrit and a Zuul installation. Antoine Musso has generated the new MediaWiki core Jenkins jobs. Zuul<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Continuous_integration/Zuul>has been deployed in production successfully. It triggers a new set of Jenkins jobs that will eventually replace the old MediaWiki-.* ones. The new Jenkins jobs for MediaWiki core (triggered by Zuul) have been tested in production and are successful. The new workflow<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Continuous_integration/Workflow>has been documented. *Browser testing <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Browser_testing>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Browser_testing/status&action=e…> ] In November, the QA team created a backlog of tests to be automated<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/QA/test_backlog>, ported existing tests from RSpec to Cucumber, and is now working on browser testing architecture, creating basic new tests (see the qa/browsertestsrepository in Gerrit), and refactoring tests for cleanliness. Chris McMahon began discussing automated browser tests with Wikimedia tech managers to get developers writing those tests as they develop extensions deployed on Wikimedia sites; public announcement will be coming very soon, when the existing example tests are in final or near-final form. Noisy tests failing for known reasons have been removed from the suite, which is now completely green (that is, passing); the team will soon be writing and adding more tests. Browser tests in November identified a serious regression in UploadWizard running on test2 <http://test2.wikipedia.org> and prevented its release to production. Analytics *Kraken (Analytics Cluster)<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Kraken> * [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Analytics/Kraken/status&action=…> ] The Analytics team has received all of the hardware purchased back in the Spring. The Hadoop nodes have been moved onto their final homes. Evan Rosen from the Global Development team is helping us test this setup with real use cases for his team. Kafka has been puppetized and installed. It is currently consuming all of Banner Impression- and Wikpedia Zero-related logs. As a proof of concept, the Zero logs are being fed daily into Hadoop for analysis by the Global Development team. Debs for Storm have been built. Storm has been puppetized and is running on several of the Cisco nodes. *Limn <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Limn>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Analytics/Limn/status&action=ed…> ] David Schoonover and Dan Andreescu are working on a major rework of Limn, using Knockout.js and d3.js. The team hopes to have this ready to present the metrics for the December 6 metrics meeting at the Wikimedia Foundation. Engineering community team *Bug management <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Bug_management/status&action=ed…> ] Andre Klapper <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Malyacko> improved and cleaned up updated large parts of the bug management<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management>and Bugzilla documentation. This includes the beginnings of a triage guide <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/How_to_triage>. He also published his Greasemonkey scripts in a Git repository<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=wikimedia/bugzilla/triagescripts.gi…>and went through obsolete extensions and updated their Bugzilla descriptions. Andre started analyzing how Wikimedia engineering teams use Bugzilla and their related workflows. He also investigated a potential upgrade of Bugzilla to version 4.2 by doing some basic testing. Furthermore, a wikitech-l discussion<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-November/064531.html>on standardizing the meaning of "highest priority" in Bugzilla resulted in creating a new "Immediate" priority status. *Mentorship programs <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs>* [ edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Mentorship_programs/status&acti…> ] The first phase of the Outreach Program for Women<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_Program_for_Women>(OPW) has been completed, receiving the submissions of more than 15 firm candidates, delivered to 8 mentors available. The Wikimedia Foundation is funding 4 full-time internship positions between January and March 2013. There is a possibility to obtain more, depending on external sponsors of the program. The selected candidates will be announced on December 11. The OPW is organized by the GNOME Foundation and 11 FLOSS projects are taking part. *Technical communications<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_communications> * [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Technical_communications/status…> ] Management reviewed options to determine the direction this activity would follow in future months. In the meantime, Guillaume Paumier<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Guillom>cleaned up and expanded the Wikimedia glossary <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Glossary> with terms related to Wikimedia technology and engineering, and volunteers & engineers came to expand it further. He also followed up on the consultation process<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_communications/Fall_2012_consultat…>initiated in October to identify how to improve dialogue between technical communities and user communities. He's now in the process of widening this discussion to more communities. Sumana Harihareswara<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Sharihareswara_%28WMF%29>sent a call for volunteers<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/11/21/lead-development-process-product-advi…>to lead or advise Wikimedia engineering staff on select activities, and followed up on the offers. *Volunteer coordination and outreach<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Volunteer_coordination_and_outreach> * [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Volunteer_coordination_and_outr…> ] Sumana Harihareswara <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Sumanah> started sharing new volunteer coordination tasks with Quim Gil<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil>, the new technical contributor coordinator who started working with the Wikimedia foundation in November. They continued to follow up on contacts (such as those gained at October's Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing), recruit new contributors to the Wikimedia tech community, and mentor newer contributors. The weekly online tech chats<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Meetings>continued on Thursdays. Sumana and others continued to grant developer access <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_access> and work on Gerrit project ownership requests<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Git/Gerrit_project_ownership> . Language engineering<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_engineering> *Language tools <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Language_tools>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Language_tools/status&action=ed…> ] In November 2012, the Language Engineering team travelled to India for 10 days together with the Mobile team for 6 events in total: the two-day Language Summit <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Pune_LanguageSummit_November_2012>at the Red Hat offices in Pune, a Language Engineering Community Meetup in Pune<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Pune_Language_Engineering_Meetup_November_20…>, the three-day DevCamp 2012 Bangalore<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bangalore_DevCamp_November_2012>, a Language Engineering Community Meetup in Bangalore<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bangalore_Language_Engineering_Meetup_Novemb…>, a presentation by Erik Moeller<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Eloquence>on the current state of tech in the Wikimedia Foundation, and *Coffee with Arky*, a meetup of Mozilla users. The rest of the month, development time was spent on completing the Universal Language Selector, and getting it to a state where it could be put in maintenance mode for a few months. In April 2013, phase two of the ULS will start, will consist of adding content language selection. The Language Engineering designers completed the design for the Translation UX <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Translation_UX> project, for which development has commenced end of November, and will continue for 8 sprints of a fortnight<https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/internationalization/cards/1962>, until mid-March 2013. *Milkshake <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Milkshake>* [edit<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Milkshake/status&action=edit> ] The first phase of the Universal Language Selector<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector>(ULS) was completed in November. The jQuery modules jQuery.ULS <https://github.com/wikimedia/jquery.uls>, jQuery.IME<https://github.com/wikimedia/jquery.uls>, jQuery Webfonts <https://github.com/wikimedia/jquery.webfonts> and jQuery i18n <https://github.com/wikimedia/jquery.i18n> have had their first stable version. The Universal Language Selector<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector>MediaWiki extension is now being used on Wikidata <https://en.wikidata.org/wiki/>. During the DevCamp in Bangalore<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bangalore_DevCamp_November_2012>, experimentations were done with ULS in Android, a Chrome extension was created to make jQuery.IME usable in the Chrome web browser, and an extension for Firefox implementing the input methods is underway. The first contributions by non-Wikimedia developers have been made, which indicates that the jQuery extensions are getting some attention. The Wikimedia Language Engineering team will now put the modules and MediaWiki extension in maintenance mode until April 2013. Wikidata <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata> *The Wikidata project is funded and executed by Wikimedia Deutschland<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Deutschland/en> .* The repository side of Wikidata has been launched<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-10-29/Tech…>on http://www.wikidata.org. It contains the results of phase 1 (language links) and has already attracted a community to maintain the wiki. Meanwhile, the Wikidata team has continued work on Phase 2 of Wikidata (Infoboxes) to add statements with values to the items in the Wikidata repository. The team improved the propagation of changes from the repository to the client and the messaging in Recent Changes. There is a constant exchange with Wikimedia Foundation engineers about the upcoming deployment cycle. Feedback and questions are welcome on the mailing list<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l>and on meta <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikidata>. Future The engineering management team continues to update the *Software deployments<http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Software_deployments> * page weekly, providing up-to-date information on the upcoming deployments to Wikimedia sites, as well as the *engineering roadmap<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Roadmap> *, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts. -- Guillaume Paumier Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation https://donate.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l _______________________________________________ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l

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Banners are too bright, too long
by Mono 06 Dec '12

06 Dec '12

The facts banners started out being clean and nice. They are now expanded by default, bright yellow, full of text, and really quite annoying.

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[Wikimedia Announcements] The Signpost -- Volume 8, Issue 49 -- 03 December 2012
by Wikipedia Signpost 05 Dec '12

05 Dec '12

News and notes: Wiki Loves Monuments announces 2012 winner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-12-03/News_a… Discussion report: Concise Wikipedia; standardize version history tables http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-12-03/Discus… WikiProject report: The White Rose: WikiProject Yorkshire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-12-03/WikiPr… Featured content: The play's the thing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-12-03/Featur… Technology report: MediaWiki problems but good news for Toolserver stability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-12-03/Techno… Single page view http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signpost/Single PDF version http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-12-03 http://identi.ca/wikisignpost / https://twitter.com/wikisignpost -- Wikipedia Signpost Staff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost _______________________________________________ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l _______________________________________________ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l

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Wikimedia-l December 2012