Major news in June include:
- the release of the new Wikipedia for Android app, preceded by its beta version;
- the decision to move away from Bugzilla in favor of Phabricator;
- A new tablet view for Wikimedia sites.
Note: We’re also providing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this report that does not assume specialized technical knowledge.
Engineering metrics in June:
- 151 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
- The total number of unresolved commits went from around 1440 to about 1575.
- About 14 shell requests were processed.
Contents
Personnel
Work with us
Are you looking to work for Wikimedia? We have a lot of hiring coming up, and we really love talking to active community members about these roles.
- VP of Engineering
- Software Engineer – Front-end (VisualEditor)
- Software Engineer – Services
- Software Engineer – Internationalization
- Software Engineer – Front-end
- Software Engineer – Mobile – iOS
- QA Tester
- Software Engineer – Full Stack
- Product Manager
- Product Manager – Language Engineering
- Operations Security Engineer
- Project Coordinator – Engineering
- Partner Manager – Wikipedia Zero (Latin America)
Announcements
- Elliot Eggleston joined the Wikimedia Foundation as a Features Engineer in the Fundraising-Tech team (announcement).
Technical Operations
New Dallas data center
- On-site work has started in our new Dallas (Carrollton) data-center (codfw). Racks have been installed, the equipment we moved from Tampa has been racked and cabling work has been mostly completed over the course of the month. We are now awaiting the installation of connectivity to the rest of our network as well as the arrival of the first newly-ordered server equipment, so server & network configuration can commence.
Puppet 3 migration
- In July we migrated from Puppet 2 to Puppet 3 on all production servers. Thanks to the hard work of both volunteers and Operations staff on our Puppet repository in the months leading up to this, this migration went very smoothly.
Labs metrics in June:
- Number of projects: 173
- Number of instances: 424
- Amount of RAM in use (in MBs): 1,741,312
- Amount of allocated storage (in GBs): 19,045
- Number of virtual CPUs in use: 855
- Number of users: 3,356
Wikimedia Labs
- Last month we switched the Labs puppetmaster to Puppet 3; this month all instances switched over as well. Some cleanup work was needed in our puppet manifests to handle Trusty and Puppet 3 properly; everything is fairly stable now but a bit of mopping up remains.
Features Engineering
Editor retention: Editing tools
In June, the Parsoid team continued with ongoing bug fixes and bi-weekly deployments; the selective serializer, improving our parsing support for some table-handling edge case, nowiki handling, and parsing performance are some of the areas that saw ongoing work. We began work on supporting language converter markup.
We added CSS styling to the HTML to ensure that Parsoid HTML renders like PHP parser output. We continued to tweak the CSS based on rendering differences we found. We also started work on computing visual diffs based on taking screenshots of rendered output of Parsoid and PHP HTML. This initial proof-of-concept will serve as the basis of more larger scale automated testing and identification of rendering diffs.
The GSoC 2014 LintTrap project saw good progress and a demo LintBridge application was made available on wmflabs with the wikitext issues detected by LintTrap.
We also had our quarterly review this month and contributed to the annual engineering planning process.
Core Features
In June, the Flow team finished an architectural re-write for the front-end, so Flow will be easier to keep updating in the future. This will be released to mediawiki.org the first week of July, and Wikipedia the following week.
The new feature in this release is the ability to sort topics on a Flow board. There are now two options for the order that topics appear on the board: you can see the most recently created threads at the top (the default), or the most recently updated threads. This new sorting option makes it easier to find the active conversations on the board.
We’ve also made a few changes to make Flow discussions easier to read, including: a font size now consistent with other pages; dropdown menus now easier to read; the use of the new button style, and the WikiGlyphs webfont.
Growth
Support
Mobile
The Mobile Apps team released the new Android Wikipedia app and it is now available to be downloaded through the Google Play store on Android devices.
Core features of the app include the ability to save pages for offline reading, a record of your browsing history, and the ability to edit either as a logged in user or anonymously. Therefore the app is the first mobile platform that allows anonymous editing! The app also supports Wikipedia Zero for participating mobile carriers.
Additional work done this month includes the start of implementing night mode for the Android app (by popular demand), creating an onboarding experience which is to be refined and deployed in July, and numerous improvements to the edit workflow.
During the last month, the team deployed the refactored Wikipedia Zero codebase that replaces one monolithic extension with multiple extensions. The JsonConfig extension, which allows a wiki-driven JSON configuration system with data validation and a tiered configuration management architecture, had significant enhancements to make it more general for other use cases.
Additionally, the team enabled downsampled thumbnails for a live in-house Wikipedia Zero operator configuration, and finished Wikipedia Zero minimum viable product design and logging polish for the Android and iOS Wikipedia apps. The team also supported the Wikipedia apps development with network connection management enhancements in Android and iOS, with Find in page functionality for Android, and response to Wikipedia for Android Google Play reviews.
The team facilitated discussions on proxy and small screen device optimization, and examined the HTML5 app landscape for the upcoming fiscal year’s development roadmap. The team also created documentation for operators for enabling zero-rating with different connection scenarios. Bugfixes were issued for the mobile web Wikipedia Zero and the Wikipedia for Firefox OS app user experience.
Routine pre- and post-launch configuration changes were made to support operator zero-rating, with routine technical assistance provided to operators and the partner management team to help add zero-rating and address anomalies. Finally, the team participated in recruitment for a third Partners engineering teammate.
Wikipedia Zero (partnerships)
- We launched Wikipedia Zero with Airtel in Bangladesh, our third partner in Bangladesh, and our 34th launched partner overall. We participated in the Wiki Indaba conference, the first event of its kind to be held in Africa. The event, organized by Wikimedia South Africa, brought together community members from Tunisia, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Malawi and South Africa. The attendees shared experiences and challenges to work in the region and formulated strategies to support and strengthen the movement’s efforts across the continent. While in South Africa, Adele Vrana also met with local operators. Meanwhile, Carolynne Schloeder met with numerous operators and handset manufacturers in India. Carolynne joined Wikimedian RadhaKrishna Arvapally for a presentation at C-DOT, and both participated a blogger event hosted by our partner Aircel, along with other members of Wikimedia India in Bangalore. Smriti Gupta joined the group as Mobile Partnerships Manager, Asia.
Language Engineering
Platform Engineering
MediaWiki Core
The MediaWiki Core team has committed to having the following work completed by the end of September 2014:
- Completing the necessary engineering work to carry out the finalisation.
- Setting a date on which the finalisation will occur (Note: this date may not be later than September).
- Have a communications strategy in place, and community liaisons to carry that out, for the time period between the announcement of the date of the finalisation and the finalisation proper.
Security auditing and response
Quality assurance
/qa/browsertest repository either to/mediawiki/core or to their relevant extension. This gives us the ability to package browser-based acceptance tests with the release of MediaWiki itself. After more than two years evolving the browser testing framework across WMF, the /qa/browsertests repository is retired, and all if its functions now reside in the repositories of the features being tested.Multimedia
In June, the multimedia team released Media Viewer v0.2 on all Wikimedia wikis, with over 20 million image views per day on sites we track. Global feedback was generally positive and helped surface a range of issues, many of which were addressed quickly. Based on this feedback, Gilles Dubuc, Mark Holmquist, and Gergő Tisza developed a number of new features, with designs by Pau Giner: view images in full resolution, view images in different sizes, show more image information, edit image file pages, as well as easy disable tools for anonymous users and editors.
This month, we started working on the Structured Data project with the Wikidata team, to implement machine-readable data on Wikimedia Commons. We are now in a planning phase and aim to start development in Fall. We ramped up our work on UploadWizard, reviewed user feedback, collected metrics, fixed bugs and started code refactoring, with the help of contract engineer Neil Kandalgaonkar. We also kept working on technical debt and bug fixes for other multimedia tools, such as image scalers, GWToolset and TimedMediaHandler, with the help of Summer contractor Brian Wolff.
As product manager, Fabrice Florin helped plan our next steps, hosting a planning meeting and other discussions of our development goals, and led an extensive review of user feedback for Media Viewer and UploadWizard with new researcher Abbey Ripstra. Community liaison Keegan Peterzell introduced Media Viewer and responded to user comments throughout the product’s worldwide release. To learn more about our work, we invite you to join our discussions on the multimedia mailing list.
Engineering Community Team
Google Summer of Code and FOSS Outreach Program for Women interns and mentors evaluated each other as part of the mid-term evaluations. Reports are available for all projects:
- Tools for mass migration of legacy translated wiki content
- Wikidata annotation tool
- Email bounce handling to MediaWiki with VERP
- Google Books, Internet Archive, Commons upload cycle
- UniversalLanguageSelector fonts for Chinese wikis
- MassMessage page input list improvements
- Book management in Wikibooks/Wikisource
- Parsoid-based online-detection of broken wikitext
- Usability improvements for the Translate extension
- A modern, scalable and attractive skin for MediaWiki
- Automatic cross-language screenshots for user documentation
- Separating skins from core MediaWiki
- Chemical Markup support for Wikimedia Commons
- Improving URL citations on Wikimedia
- Historical OpenStreetMap
- Welcoming new contributors to Wikimedia Labs and Tool Labs
- Evaluating, documenting, and improving MediaWiki web API client libraries
- Feed the Gnomes – Wikidata Outreach
- Template Matching for RDFIO
- Switching Semantic Forms Autocompletion to Select2
- Catalogue for Mediawiki Extensions
- Generic, efficient localisation update service.
Volunteer coordination and outreach
Architecture and Requests for comment process
Developers had several meetings on IRC about architectural issues or Requests for comment:
- 2014-06-02 — Discussion of Requests for comment/Grid system;
- 2014-06-11 — Discussion of several RfCs (lightning round);
- 2014-06-13 — Discussion of security guidelines draft;
- 2014-06-20 — Discussion of revamping MediaWiki’s skin systems: Trevor Parscal’s “Redo skin framework”and Bartosz Dziewoński’s “Separating skins from core MediaWiki” work;
- 2014-06-25 — Discussion of front-end and UX standardization.
Analytics
This month we refined the Editor Model – a proposal to model the main drivers of monthly active editors – and expanded the documentation of the corresponding metric definitions. We applied this model to teams designing editor engagement features (Growth, Mobile) and supported them in setting targets for the next fiscal year.
We analyzed the early impact of the tablet desktop-to-mobile switchover on traffic, edit volume, unique editors, and new editor activation.
We hosted the June 2014 edition of the research showcase with two presentations on the effect of early socialization strategies and on predictive modeling of editor retention.
We released wikiclass, a library for performing automated quality assessment of Wikipedia articles.
We released longitudinal data on the daily edit volume for all wikis with VisualEditor enabled, since the original rollout.
We continued work on an updated definition for PageViews.
Finally, we held our quarterly review (Q4-2014) and presented our goals for the next quarter (Q1-2015).
Wikidata
The Wikidata project is funded and executed by Wikimedia Deutschland.
- The team worked on fixing bugs as well as a number of features. These include data access for Wikiquote, support for redirects, the monolingual text datatype as well as further work on queries. Interface messages where reworked to make them easier to understand. First mockups of the new interface design have been published for comments. The entity suggester a team of students worked on over the last months has been deployed. This makes it easier to add new statements by suggesting what kind of statements are missing on an item. Wikidata the Game has been extended by Magnus by 2 games to add date of birth and date of death to people as well as to add missing images.
Future
- The engineering management team continues to update the Deployments page weekly, providing up-to-date information on the upcoming deployments to Wikimedia sites, as well as the annual goals, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts.
This article was written collaboratively by Wikimedia engineers and managers. See revision history and associated status pages. A wiki version is also available.
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Guillaume Paumier
Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation