Hi,
The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in August 2013 is now available.
Wiki version: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/August Blog version: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/06/engineering-august-2013-report/
We're also proposing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this report that does not assume specialized technical knowledge: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/August/summ...
Below is the full HTML text of the report.
As always, feedback is appreciated on the usefulness of the report and its summary, and on how to improve them.
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Major news in August include:
- A discussion about using the secure HTTP protocolhttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/01/future-https-wikimedia-projects/on Wikimedia sites, followed by a switch to that protocol for all registered usershttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/28/https-default-logged-in-users-wikimedia-sites/ ; - The launch of the Notifications featurehttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/30/notifications-launch-on-mobile/on the mobile site; - A discussion about how security issues are handledhttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/30/team-wikimedia-security-has-a-spot-for-you/in our community; - The Wikimania conference, which was notably an opportunity for the Language engineering teamhttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/02/join-the-language-engineer-team-at-wikimania-in-hong-kong-next-week/to meet with users and improve language support, particularly for the Javanese languagehttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/23/restoring-the-forgotten-javanese-script-through-wikimedia/ ; - A much-anticipated upgrade of the software used by our volunteer e-mail response teamhttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/09/wikimedias-email-response-upgrade/, OTRS.
*Note: We're also providing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this reporthttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/August/summarythat does not assume specialized technical knowledge. *
* * 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.
- Vice President of Engineering: Search Firm Engagement - Engineeringhttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oDVOXfw3 - User Experience Designerhttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oO8OXfwr - Software Engineer - Fundraisinghttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oawpXfwM - Software Engineer - Editor Engagement Experimentationhttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o8NJXfwl - Software Engineer - Editor Engagementhttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o6NJXfwj - Software Engineer - Language Engineeringhttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oH3gXfwH - Software Engineer - Multimedia Systemshttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oj40Wfw3 - Senior Software Engineer - Multimediahttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oC9OXfwg - QA Engineer - Manual Testing- Visual Editorhttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oNeQXfwy - FE Developer - Analyticshttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=olyGXfwg - Product Manager - Platformhttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o3vtXfwI - Dev-Ops Engineer - SREhttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ocLCWfwf
Technical Operations
*Data Dumps https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Projects/Data_Dumps* All dumps ran from the data center in Ashburn this month; only the miscellaneous and experimental services remain to be moved. GSOC student Petr Onderka completed the first incremental dump-producing codehttp://www.mail-archive.com/xmldatadumps-l@lists.wikimedia.org/msg00513.html, along with a draft specificationhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Svick/Incremental_dumps/File_format/Diff_specificationfor the new format. Test it out and let us know what you think!
*Wikimedia Labs https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs* Due to Wikimania and staff vacations, this month had a relatively low number of infrastructure changes, but we had a relatively high influx of users and tools. We ran three workshops during Wikimania and helped Toolserver users migrate their tools to Labs. We did have a few infrastructure changes, though: A change for the service group interface was merged but not yet deployed. It removes the service group interface from the project interface, reducing clutter. An API was pushed in for project and service group information, to make the information available from Wikitech, rather than LDAP. Other infrastructure changes were bugfixes, which can be found through bugzilla.
*OTRS* OTRS got a long overdue update to version 3.2.9 with the generous volunteer support of Martin and Marcel of Znuny GmbH. As part of the upgrade, the service was migrated from pmtpa to eqiad, and spam filtering was overhauled. Features Engineering https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Features_engineering Editor retention: Editing tools
*VisualEditor https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor* In August, the VisualEditor team continued work, and presented and ran workshops at Wikimania in Hong Konghttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2013to discuss how to best improve the system. The deployed version of the code was updated three times (1.22-wmf13https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf13#VisualEditor, 1.22-wmf14https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf14#VisualEditorand 1.22-wmf15https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf15#VisualEditor), with several mid-deployment releases as the code was developed to patch urgent issues. The focus in this work was in improving the stability and performance of the system, fixing a number of bugs uncovered by the community, and making some usability improvements.
*Parsoid https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid* In August, the Parsoid team continued to polish compatibility with existing wikitext. User feedback after the July VisualEditor release was instrumental in the identification of issues and the development of support for important use cases of creative templating.
The increased team size also allowed us to perform some long-standing code cleanup, make Parsoid compatible with Node 0.10, and improve testing. The round-trip testing infrastructure http://parsoid.wmflabs.org:8001/ received a much-needed overhaul. The storage back-end switched from SQLite to MySQL, which improved throughput a lot and is allowing us to test new code far more quickly than before. Performance statistics are now recorded, which will let us identify performance bottlenecks as well as catch performance regressions. During Wikimania, the Kiwix team used Parsoid output to create an offline copy of Wikivoyage. With standard HTML libraries and the rich RDFa information in the Parsoid DOM, downloading and modifying the HTML representation was done in about 1000 lines of JavaScripthttp://sourceforge.net/p/kiwix/other/ci/master/tree/mwhtmldumper/mwhtmldumper.js . Editor engagement features
*Notifications https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_%28Notifications%29* In August, we released Notifications on the French, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese and Swedish Wikipedias, after extensive testing on the English Wikipedia, as well as mediawiki.org and Meta-Wiki. This engagement tool was well received by our new communities, especially social features such as Mentions and Thanks, which enable users to communicate more effectively than before. Benny Situ led the engineering work for this deployment and fixed a number of bugs, with the help of Erik Benhardson and Matthias Mullie. Fabrice Florin managed community relations for these new releases, updating this release planhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Release_Plan_2013and reaching out to more projects, to prepare for worldwide deployments on all wiki projects in coming months. To that end, we teamed up with Philippe Beaudette, Maggie Dennis, Patrick Earley, Jan Eissfeld, Anna Koval, Keegan Peterzell, and Sherry Snyder to coordinate these releases with the communities they serve. Dario Taraborelli created new metrics dashboards for French http://ee-dashboard.wmflabs.org/dashboards/frwiki-features, Hungarian http://ee-dashboard.wmflabs.org/dashboards/huwiki-features, Polish http://ee-dashboard.wmflabs.org/dashboards/plwiki-features, Portuguese http://ee-dashboard.wmflabs.org/dashboards/ptwiki-features and Swedish http://ee-dashboard.wmflabs.org/dashboards/sewiki-featuresWikipedias. Lastly, we presented our work on Notifications in two talks at Wikimania 2013, with both a general overviewhttps://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Notificationsand a technical presentationhttps://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/How_to_enhance_your_MediaWiki_extensions_with_Echo_notifications(see slideshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Notifications_Slides_-_08-10-2013.pdf). We are very grateful to all our community champions for each language and look forward to more collaborations in the future. Our next major deployment to non-English Wikipedias will take place on Sep. 17, to be followed by weekly releases throughout the fall, as outlined in our release plan http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Release_Plan_2013. To learn more, visit the project portalhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notifications, read the help page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Notifications and join the discussion on the talk pagehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notifications .
*Flow https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal/Project_information* In August, we continued development of the Flow prototype by implementing revisioning, moderationhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal/Functional_Specifications/Moderation,_Protection,_and_Refactoring, and display code, on top of the storage and block abstractions. We have deployed this prototype to an internal labs instance to encourage the full team's involvement in development. Additionally, we participated in an agile workshophttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Flow_Team_Development_Workshopsrun by Arthur and Tomasz from the mobile team. This workshop facilitated planning the Flow MVP and setting goals for the team's first development sprint, along with providing information about agile guidelines and practices that have worked well for the mobile team.
*Article feedback https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback* In August, we made a few feature tweaks and bug fixes for the Article Feedback Tool https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5(AFT5) on the English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ArticleFeedbackv5 and Frenchhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fr:Sp%C3%A9cial:ArticleFeedbackv5Wikipedias. Matthias Mullie released a few patches to improve the opt-in/opt-out toolhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Feature_Requirements#Enable.2Fdisable_feedback, and tested the new feedback notificationshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Watched_Page_-_Feedbackto let users know when feedback is marked as useful for a page they watch (or for a comment they posted). We also presented our work on AFT5 at Wikimania 2013, with designer Pau Giner and our French and German champions Benoît Evellin and Denis Barthel, in this sessionhttps://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Article_Feedback(see slideshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Article_Feedback_Slides_-_08-11-2013.pdf). The team plans to make the AFT5 tool available to other wiki projects interested in testing this tool later this year, as outlined in the release planhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Release_Plan_2013 . Editor engagement experiments
*Editor engagement experimentshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editor_engagement_experiments * In August, the Editor Engagement Experiments team (E3) primarily focused on development for its next and final A/B test of the Getting Startedhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GettingStartedtask suggestion system, a part of a project aimed at onboarding new Wikipedians https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Onboarding_new_Wikipedians. The team also worked on enhancements and bug fixes for the GuidedTour extension https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GuidedTour, such as adding the ability to customize default tour actions and better integration with VisualEditor https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor. During part of August, the majority of the E3 team was at Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong, and delivered three talks, including on: guided tourshttps://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Make_your_user_experience_easy_to_learn:_a_guided_tour, the team's new editor onboarding processhttps://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Forget_the_tutorials,_be_bold%21_How_one_feature_has_attracted_thousands_of_new_editors, and product managementhttps://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/What_is_a_product_manager,_and_why_does_Wikimedia_need_them%3Fat the Wikimedia Foundation. Mobile https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering
*Commons App https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Commons* This month, the Mobile Apps team pushed out additional releases of the Commons photo uploader app for iOS and Android. The iOS version includes a major UI revamp by Monte, while the Android version has received multiple incremental updates by Yuvi and Brion. Yuvi has been working on modernizing support for campaigns in UploadWizard, which will make it easier to coordinate uploads for events like Wiki Loves Monuments. Viewer, contributor, and admin user interfaces for campaigns will come to the web, with campaign-tied uploading in the web and mobile app. The team also started making plans for the next generation of the Wikipedia reader app, which will be more closely integrated with the mobile web site to ensure that new features are always available through a web view, even where we don't create specific native support. More details will be put together in the next couple months.
*Wikipedia Zero https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero* This month, the team completed version 1 of Wikipedia Zero automation tests, continued programming the re-architecture of Wikipedia Zero, implemented search engine non-indexing, and analyzed HTTPS requirements in support of a push for greater usage of HTTPS across Wikimedia projects. The Wikipedia Zero engineering team thanks Amit Kapoor from the Wikipedia Zero partnerships team, who wrapped up work with Wikimedia Foundation this month, for his hard word getting the program off the ground. And the team is also pleased to welcome Carolynne Schloeder, who joins the Wikipedia Zero program as Director of Mobile, Programs.
*Mobile web projects https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_web_projects* This month we continued to improve the mobile editing feature, monitoring and triaging bugs and expanding the feature show at the section level of articles. We also released the first iteration of mobile notifications to projects where Echo is enabled (English, French, Polish, Portuguese, Hungarian, and Swedish Wikipedia, as well as and Meta). In beta, we built a new notifications treatment to be released in later months and continued working on mobile talk pages. Language engineeringhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_engineering
*Language tools https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Language_tools* The language team continued maintenance of the UniversalLanguageSelectorhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UniversalLanguageSelector, in particular improving performance and integration testinghttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Language_Testing_Plan, and completed its integration with EventLogging, which will provide metricshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Language_tools/Impact_Measurement_and_Metricsuseful e.g. to choose the best default font for a languagehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/FAQ#What_if_the_default_font_chosen_is_not_the_best_one_for_the_language.3F_Can_this_be_changed.3F. Counts from translatewiki.nethttps://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/graph.php?r=week&z=xlarge&title=&vl=&x=&n=&hreg%5B%5D=client-side&mreg%5B%5D=%5E.*UniversalLanguageSelector.*>ype=line&glegend=show&aggregate=1&embed=1&_=1378369345031are live and a deployment plan for Wikimedia projects is under analysis. The team also releasedhttp://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-August/071529.htmlits monthly version of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB) which is used by third party developers and community members to add language support for their MediaWiki applications.
The team continued mentoring four Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students. Praveen Singh, mentored by Santhosh Thottingal, released a Chrome extensionhttps://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikimedia-input-tools/fjnfifedbeeeibikgpggddmfbaeccaohfor Wikimedia Input Tools and contributed to the Indic Font Specification, a collaborative open source project. Team members also continued to work with Red Hat on various language initiatives. The team participated at Wikimania in Hong Kong, which was an opportunity to meet face to face, as well as to interact with Wikipedians and community members to solve a variety of issues, including dealing with Chinese language variantshttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/03/language-support-at-wikimania-2013-in-hong-kong/and adding language assets for Javanesehttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/23/restoring-the-forgotten-javanese-script-through-wikimedia/. The team also presented various talkshttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/02/join-the-language-engineer-team-at-wikimania-in-hong-kong-next-week/on language engineering. Platform Engineeringhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineering MediaWiki Core
*Multimedia https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia* In August, we continued to expand our multimedia teamhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia: Bryan Davis joined us as senior platform engineer, working with product manager Fabrice Florin, front-end engineer Mark Holmquist and engineering director Rob Lanphier. We discussed multimedia plans and new feature ideas with community members in two separate events: a multimedia roundtable at Wikimania 2013 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Roundtables/Roundtable_3and an IRC chathttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2013-08-22, and updated our multimedia plan for the coming yearhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/2013-14_Goalsbased on their feedback (see slides https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Multimedia_Project_Slides.pdf). Summer contractor Brian Wolff completed the development of new gallery tags to support more appealing layouts for thumbnails, while Jan Gerber made improvements to the Score and TimeMediaHandler extensions. Mark Holmquist started development on the Media Viewerhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer, based on designs by May Tee-Galloway and Jared Zimmerman; this new tool will display images in larger size when clicking on article thumbnails, as well as display file information and a full-screen viewing option, right on the same page. We aim to test a first version of this tool as part of a beta experiment https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/multimedia/cards/2on a few pilot sites in coming weeks. To discuss these features and keep up with our work, we invite you to join this new multimedia mailing listhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/multimedia. Last but not least, we are also recruiting for two more positions for our team: a multimedia systems engineerhttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oj40Wfw3&c=qSa9VfwQand a senior software engineerhttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ouLnWfwi&c=qSa9VfwQ. Please spread the word about this unique opportunity to create a richer multimedia experience for Wikipedia and MediaWiki sites!
*Search https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Search* In August we deployed CirrusSearch to test2.wikipedia.org and mediawiki.organd we're testing there. We're actively looking for other volunteers to test out CirrusSearch. Right now, CirrusSearch is not the primary search for mediawiki.org; you have to use a URL parameter to test it. We're hoping to make it the primary in September.
*Auth systems https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Auth_systems* The team deployed OAuth to mediawiki.org on Aug 20th, and are working on enhancement requests before the extension is enabled on the rest of the WMF wikis. Several small bugs were fixed in SUL.
*Security auditing and responsehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security_auditing_and_response * The team responded to reported issues, and prepared for the next MediaWiki release, scheduled on September 3. We worked with Operations to enable HTTPS for user logins in most geographies. Quality assurance
*Quality Assurance https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance* This month QA began collaborating closely with Release Engineering to coordinate improvement of reporting, monitoring, and testing software releases. Our goal is to make our frequent software releases even more reliable than they already are, and to use the tools and systems in place today such as the beta labs cluster to make those reliable releases even more frequent.
*Browser testinghttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance/Browser_testing * This month saw a significant change to the structure and organization of browser tests, with tests and builds for CirrusSearch, UniversalLanguageSelector, and VisualEditor following the example of MobileFrontend and now residing in the git repositories for those extensions, rather than in the /qa/browsertests repository. This creates opportunities for more frequent and more accurate Jenkins builds of the tests, while also reducing the overhead required for analyzing test failures. Engineering community team
*Bug management https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management* Andre gave presentations on Improving MediaWiki quality: How everybody can help with bug report triaginghttps://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Improving_MediaWiki_quality:_How_everybody_can_help_with_bug_report_triagingand Transparency and collaboration in Wikimedia engineeringhttps://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Transparency_and_collaboration_in_Wikimedia_engineeringat Wikimania 2013 http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/. He updated Bugzilla's technical documentation https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bugzilla.wikimedia.organd documented how to test Bugzilla code changes on the Wikimedia Labs instancehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Bugzilla_Labs_instance. Bugzilla now consequently linkshttps://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?bug_id=42524,45271,52764to canonical places explaining how to write a good bug report and explaining Bugzilla's UI fields. Bugzilla also shows a new "Show other bugs" link https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46413 next to the "Component" area to make finding similar reports easier. Andre cleaned up his Greasemonkey triage helper scriptshttps://git.wikimedia.org/tree/wikimedia%2Fbugzilla%2Ftriagescriptsby providing a setting for each functionality at the beginning of the file; a blog posthttp://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/2013/08/23/bugzillatips-triage-helpertools-greasemonkey/provides more details. Bugzilla's testing instance http://boogs.wmflabs.org/ on Wikimedia Labs saw several patches deployed for testing, which after some more testing should end up in the live Bugzilla; changes include: showing the history of a bug report inline between the commentshttps://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47256and configuring the guided bug entry form https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36762for users that are new to bug reporting.
*Mentorship programs https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs*
The 20 Google Summer of Codehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2013projects passed the official mid-term evaluation at the beginning of August, and the Outreach Program for Womenhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_Program_for_Women/Round_6project is on track as well. Katie Filbert https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Aude (Aude), David Cuencahttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Micru(Micru) and Quim Gil https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil (Qgil) will participate at GSoC Mentors Summit in Mountain View (CA, USA) on October 19-20.
Monthly reports from the projects:
- Refactoring of ProofreadPage extensionhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Proofread_Page/GSoC#August - Section handling in Semantic formshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Himeshi/GSoC_2013/Project#August - jQuery.IME extensions for Firefox and Chromehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Prageck/GSoC_2013_Application#Monthly_Report:_August_2013 - Android app for MediaWiki translationhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Orsagi/GSoC_2013_proposal#Monthly_Report:_August_2013 - Mobilizing Wikidatahttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Pragunbhutani/GSoC_2013_Updates#Monthly_Report:_August_2013 - Improve support for book structureshttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Book_management/Progress#August - Incremental data dumpshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Svick/Incremental_dumps#August_report - Language Coverage Matrix Dashboardhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Harsh4101991/GSoC_2013#August - Internationalization and Right-To-Left Support in VisualEditorhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Mooeypoo/GSOC_2013_Proposal:_RTL_Support_in_VisualEditor#Monthly_Report:_August_2013 - Browser test automation for Visual Editorhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Rachel99/proposal1#August - VisualEditor plugin for source codehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Beanixster#August - UploadWizard: Book upload customizationhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Rasel160/GSoC2013/Status#2013-08-monthly - Prototyping inline commentshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Rjain/Gsoc2013/Project_Updates#August - Improvement of glossary toolshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GSOC_2013_Improvement_of_glossary_tools#August - Incremental updates for Kiwixhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Kiran_mathew_1993/ZIM_incremental_updates_for_Kiwix#Reports - Pronunciation Recording Toolhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Rahul21/Gsoc2013/Project_Updates#August - Bayesian Spam Filterhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Anubhav_iitr/Bayesan_spam_filter/Project_updates - Wikidata language fallback and conversionhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Liangent/wb-lang/updates#August
*Technical communicationshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_communications * Guillaume Paumier https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Guillom continued to focus on the VisualEditor deployment effort, working on communications, documentation and liaising with the French Wikipedia. Work on technical communications mostly focused on perennial activities like Tech newshttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/Newsand ongoing communications support to the engineering staff.
*Volunteer coordination and outreachhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Volunteer_coordination_and_outreach * We had a team presentation at Wikimania: Transparency and collaboration in Wikimedia engineeringhttp://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Submissions/Transparency_and_collaboration_in_Wikimedia_engineering, explaining how volunteers can make a difference. Following the work on Community metrics https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_metrics, the five key performance indicatorshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_metrics#Key_performance_indicators(KPIs) were discussed and agreed upon. We are focusing on the first one: who contributes codehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_metrics#Who_contributes_code. A list of Key Wikimedia software projectshttps://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Key_Wikimedia_software_projectshas been created to define the scope of these KPIs. Recruiting automated browser testers keeps being our top priority. We are organizing the next workshop in San Francisco and online on September 18: Epic fail: figuring out Selenium test resultshttp://www.meetup.com/wikimedia-tech/events/137381022/ . Analytics https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics
*Analytics infrastructurehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Infrastructure * We continue to pursue the initiatives listed in our planning document. We've had one analyst accept a job offer (welcome Aaronhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EpochFail!) and are in discussions with a software engineer. We continue to have a solid pipeline and are spending a lot of time interviewing. Wikimetrics is on target for an early September release and we've made good progress against our hadoop infrastructure goals. In co-operation with Ops, we've completed our reinstall of the Hadoop cluster and run several days of reliability testing over the labor day weekend. We are currently investigating replacing the Oracle JDK with the Open JDK to be in line with our goals of using open source whenever possible. Our project to replace udp2log with Kafka is making steadily progress. Varnishkafka, which will replace varnishncsa, has been debianizedhttps://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/78782/and the first performance tests of compressing the message sets are very encouraging. We created a test environment in Labs to test Kafka failover modes and we have been prototyping with Camushttps://github.com/linkedin/camusto consume the data from a broker and write it to HDFS. We are right now thinking about how to set up Kafka in a multi data-center environment. The Zookeepers have been reinstalled through Puppet as well.
*Analytics Visualization, Reporting & Applicationshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Visualization,_Reporting_%26_Applications * In close collaboration with Dario, Jaime and Jessie, we have worked on new features for Wikimetrics. In particular, we are adding new metrics such as survival, pages created https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/80659/, aggregation of metrics https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/76742/, metadata in the CSV output https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/81261/, a support pagehttps://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/79457/and we have now more than 90% test coverage https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/81153/ of the codebase. In preparation for the reinstallation of the Hadoop cluster, we moved all Wikipedia Zero jobs off the cluster. We took this opportunity to add additional monitoring to the creation of Wikipedia Zero dashboards. We have worked with Wikipedia Zero to identify a problem with Geolocation of requests that has created large jumps in total traffic. We spent quite some time creating a more robust process for updating and monitoring gp.wmflabs.org. This dashboard is used by various internal stakeholders and receives its information from different datastreams using different scripts. We have been working on running these scripts under the general purpose stats user, adding additional monitoring to prevent stale data and puppetized some of the jobs.
*Data Releases https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Data_Releases* In August, we attended WikiSym and Wikimania. Dario Taraborellihttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DarTargave a keynote address on actionable Wikipedia researchhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_research_keynote_WikiSym_2013.pdfat WikiSym, where several other Wikipedia research papershttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2013/Augustwere presented. At Wikimania, we hosted two sessions focused on Wikimedia datahttps://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Datafying_Wikimediaand analytics tools https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:UserMetrics_Wikimania_2013.pdf. We also worked with Platform engineering this month on analyzing and visualizing HTTPS failure rates by countryhttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ams-fyukCIlMdFRwMWJ3czFRQ0NEeVliNklYTDhfdHc#gid=3, in preparation for the switch to HTTPS as a default. We released new dashboards for the launch of notifications on 5 other Wikipedias and continued to provide ad-hoc support to teams in Editor Engagement. Last, we continued screening and interviewing candidates for an open research analyst position. Kiwix http://www.kiwix.org
*The Kiwix project is funded and executed by Wikimedia CHhttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CH .* Release of the new Mediawiki offlinerhttp://sourceforge.net/p/kiwix/other/ci/master/tree/mwhtmldumper/was a little bit delayed; we are still fixing stability bugs. This solution has already proven its efficiency, as we have released 20 new ZIM files this month: a new throughput record. The ZIM incremental update GSoC projecthttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Kiran_mathew_1993/ZIM_incremental_updates_for_Kiwixprogresses too, as the student works on the integration of zimdiff/zimpatch in the Kiwix ecosystem. Kiwix developers have had a 6 days hackathon in Hong-Kong to prepare the next Kiwix release http://www.kiwix.org, after some final work on compilation. Wikidatahttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata
*The Wikidata project is funded and executed by Wikimedia Deutschlandhttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Deutschland/en .* In August, the Wikidata team was present at 3 events: COSCUP, Wikimaniahttp://blog.wikimedia.de/2013/08/22/wikidata-and-other-technical-bits-at-wikimania/and a meetup about Wikidata and Incubator. A lot of work has been put into improving the API and its documentation. The team also worked on the ability to reorder the qualifiers and sources in a statement, improved the speed of Wikidata slightly, and made progress on the ability to query for statements with a specific property and value, as well as merging items. An improved proposal https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiktionary for the support of Wiktionary has been published. They also started the paper cuts https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Paper_cuts initiative to find and fix small bugs that have a large impact on how enjoyable it is to use Wikidata. Denny and Adam gave a short overview of the state of Wikidata and answered questions during an office hourhttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2013-08-26on IRC. The biggest news for August though was the activation of data access (Wikidata phase 2) on Wikivoyagehttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:PC#Data_acccess_for_Wikivoyage_and_bugfixes_plus_testing_needed_for_the_URL_datatype . Future The engineering management team continues to update the * Deployments https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments* page weekly, providing up-to-date information on the upcoming deployments to Wikimedia sites, as well as the *engineering roadmaphttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Roadmap *, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts. ------------------------------
*This report was written collaboratively by Wikimedia engineers and managers. See revision historyhttps://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/August&action=historyand associated status pages. A wiki versionhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/Augustis also available. *