Hi,

The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities (including upcoming events, new hires, and open positions) in February 2013 is now available. Thanks to Guillaume Paumier, Priyanka Nag, Tilman Bayer and the engineers who helped put this together.

Wiki version: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/February Blog version: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/12/engineering-february-2013-report/

We're also providing 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/February/su...

Below is the full HTML text of the report, as previously requested.

As always, feedback is appreciated about the usefulness of the report and its summary, and on how to improve them.

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Major news in February include:

- The Wikipedia Zero projecthttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/22/getting-wikipedia-to-the-people-who-need-it-most//got a Knight News Challenge grant. - Additional input methodshttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/20/report-from-the-spring-2013-open-source-language-summit/were made available for jQuery.IME. - The Translate extension introduced a new iteration of the Translation

Editorhttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/15/inching-towards-enabling-our-improvements-to-the-translation-user-experience/ . - The Wikimedia mobile web team launched the ability to view or add pages tohttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/13/follow-your-favorite-wikipedia-pages-on-the-mobile-web/watchlist — all from mobile devices. - Echo is A new notification system for Wikipediahttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/07/echo-a-new-notification-system-for-wikipedia/ . - The Technical Operations team found ways to stop problemshttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/05/how-the-technical-operations-team-stops-problems-in-their-tracks/in their tracks. - Wikipedia Mobile hit 3 billion monthly page viewshttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/01/wikipedia-mobile-hits-3-billion-monthly-page-views/ .

*Note: We’re also providing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this reporthttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/February/summarythat does not assume specialized technical knowledge. * Upcoming events

There are many opportunities for you to get involved and contribute to MediaWiki and technical activities to improve Wikimedia sites, both for coders and contributors with other talents.

For a more complete and up-to-date list, check out the Project:Calendar. Date Event Contact Mar 7 QA: General MediaWiki reports Bug Triagehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Triage/20130307 AKlapper https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:AKlapper_%28WMF%29, Valeriejhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Valeriej Mar 13 Increase the backloghttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/QA/Browser_testing/Increase_the_backlog: Given/When/Then explained, with examples from Search tests and suggestions for more Zeljko.filipinhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Zeljko.filipin%28WMF%29, Qgil https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil, Cmcmahonhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Cmcmahon%28WMF%29 Mar 18 QA: LiquidThreads (LQT) Bug Triagehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Triage/20130318 AKlapper https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:AKlapper_%28WMF%29, Valeriejhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Valeriej Mar 19 Office hour about Wikimedia’s issue trackerhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bugzillaand Bug management https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management in #wikimedia-officeconnecthttp://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#wikimedia-office AKlapper https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:AKlapper_%28WMF%29 Mar 20 SMWCon Spring 2013 http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Spring_2013 (New York City, USA) Mar 22 LibrePlanet https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Events/LibrePlanet2013(Cambridge, MA, USA) Mar 25 QA: Collaborate with Weekend Testers Americas: test new tools for new users (E3) Cmcmahonhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Cmcmahon%28WMF%29, Qgil https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil 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 – Editor Engagementhttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ovvXWfwD - Software Engineer – Parserhttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oIsbXfw2 - Software Engineer – Appshttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oqU0Wfw0 - Software Engineer – Mobilehttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o4cKWfwG - Software Engineer – Multimedia Systemshttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oj40Wfw3 - Software Engineer – Multimedia User Interfaceshttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ohqbXfwz - Software Engineer – Searchhttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ogk1Wfwh - Product Manager – Mobilehttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oGWJWfw1 - Director of User Experiencehttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=otv0WfwE - Visual Designer http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oomJWfw9 - Partner Solutions Engineerhttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o0FbXfwx - Dev-Ops Engineer (SRE)http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ocLCWfwf - Operations Engineer – Database Administratorhttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=obMOWfwr - Senior Program Manager – Mobilehttp://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o1GbXfwz

Announcements

- Ed Sanders joined the Features engineeringhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Features_engineeringgroup as Software Engineer working on Visual Editor (

announcementhttp://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-February/066421.html ). - Christian Aistleitner joined as a contractor specializing in work on Gerrit (announcementhttp://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-February/066465.html ). - Marc-Andre Pelletier joined the Technical Operations team as Operations Engineer (contractor), focusing on the Wikimedia Labs infrastructure and migration of tools (announcementhttp://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-February/066588.html ). - Kirsten Menger-Anderson joined the Features group as a part-time contractor Technical Writer focusing on Editor Engagement Experiments. - Greg Grossmeier joined the Platform engineeringhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineeringgroup as Release Manager (

announcementhttp://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-February/066672.html ). - Site Performance Engineer and Senior Technical Advisor Patrick Reilly’s last day with WMF was February 19th (announcementhttps://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork/status/304324931141914624 ).

Technical Operations

*Site infrastructure* Both Asher Feldman and Peter Youngmeister are proceeding cautiously in broadening MariaDB deployment in our clusters. We have one MariaDB instance for each of the database clusters (s1 to s7). The MariaDB support team has been quick in resolving bugs we encountered along the way. In another database administration task, Asher reviewed and deployed the Wikidata schema changes and migrated it from s3 cluster to s5, adding more growth capacity.We put sixty new application servers into production in each of the two datacenters. This is in anticipation of expected traffic growth coming from both our regular and mobile sites in the coming year.Lately we have been experiencing short time-out failures in the nightly search indices built with search-pool4. Asher is experimenting with a fix. He redistributed the search-pool4 indices in the Tampa data center based on sizes and what seems to be a more acceptable index size-to-ram ratio. We essentially have a virtual search-pool5 shard, but with the spelling and highlight indices for pool4 and pool5 sharing the same servers. The pool4 wikis are using the new setup in Tampa, with everything else continuing to use our Ashburn cluster. We should know soon if it works.The TechOps team had a in-person team meeting the week of 25th February in WMF’s San Francisco office.

- The highlights of the meeting were: - Discuss the upkeep of the “failover” datacenter and capture the lessons learned from the recent datacenter switchover. For example, we think we could reduce the switchover “readonly” time from 32 minutes to 10 minutes by automating more of the database and caching failover procedures. - Improve and streamline our hiring process and our security access model. - Organize a coordinated sprints process to fill the gap between smaller tasks (for which we use the RT ticketing system) and larger tasks (which require department coordination) by collecting some thoughts. We started brainstorming and forming teams via the Projects wikitech pagehttps://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Projects . - Face-to-face meetings with the Engineering teams from Platform, Mobile, Analytics and Wikidata. - Short TechOps sprints to reduce cronspams and our RT queue. - Review budget needs for the 2013-2014 fiscal year.

*Data Dumps https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Projects/Data_Dumps* Numerous bug fixes were made to the mwxml2sql tool, and a set of SQL files bsed on an English language Wikipedia XML dump was published for use by testers [1] http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/experimental/enwiki/sqlfiles/. A tool to convert SQL dumps to escaped tab-delimited format is now available for use with MySQL’s LOAD DATA INFILE command, much faster than INSERTs. All SQL fles from the same dump were converted to this format and also publishedhttp://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/experimental/enwiki/tabfiles/ .A new mirror has come on line, initially mirroring historical archives of XML files as well as MediaWiki releases, page view statistics and other files [2]http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/xmldatadumps-l/2013-February/000706.html. Thanks to Robert Smith and Wansecurity.com for providing the resources to make this happen.

*Wikimedia Labs https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs* This month was mostly spent stabilizing Labs components. Labs Gangliahttp://ganglia.wmflabs.org/was fixed to report instance statistics properly. Adminbot was updated to fix utf8 issues, and to fix package issues when upgrading. A number of changes were made to the glusterfs support to bring more stability. Gluster was upgraded to 3.3.1 to fix a memory leak on both the client and server. Gluster isn’t matching our use case of multitenancy, as the glusterd daemon isn’t handling the large number of volumes well. To help with this, until we either fix the issue in gluster, or replace it, we’ve made a change to not create/manage Gluster volumes for projects unless they opt in. We’ve also disabled and deleted Gluster volumes for projects that are currently unused. Work was done to turn Puppet classes for installing MediaWiki in Labs into modules, so that they can be reused more easily.We merged wikitech.wikimedia.org (our operations and infrastructure documentation) and labsconsole.wikimedia.org together into wikitech.wikimedia.org. wikitech-static.wikimedia.org is available as a backup, in case all access to our cluster is unavailable. Work was started on supporting saltstack reactors, to replace the bootstrapping for instance creation. This month we have new member of the Labs team, Marc-Andre Pelletierhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:MPelletier_%28WMF%29, also known in the community as Coren. Coren will be working on the new Tool Labs infrastructure and we’re very excited to have him on-board. Asher and Peter started work on replicated databases for Tool Labs during the last week of the month. Features Engineeringhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Features_engineering Editor retention: Editing tools

*VisualEditor https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor* In February, the team worked on improving the design, user interface components and API infrastructure of VisualEditor, preparing for the new features that will be added in the coming months. The objective is for VisualEditor to be the default editor for all users, capable of letting them edit the majority of content without needing to use the wikitext editor, in July 2013. This will mean adding support for references, (at least) basic templates, categories and images, each of which is a very large piece of work. During this time, the team has expanded with the recruitment of Ed Sandershttps://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-February/066421.html, who will focus on the data infrastructure of VisualEditor’s platform. The alpha version of VisualEditor on mediawiki.org and the English Wikipedia was updated twice (1.21-wmf9https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21/wmf9#VisualEditorand -wmf10 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21/wmf10#VisualEditor), adding support for Microsoft Internet Explorer (version 9 and above), fixing a number of bugs reported by the community, improving internationalisation, and restructuring the data model layer so that the code interfaces are ready for the new features.

*Parsoid https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid* The Parsoid team continued to improve support for non-English wikis. This involved exposing more configuration information through the MediaWiki API and using it throughout Parsoid. The support is now reasonably complete, but needs testing. The round-trip testing framework needs to be adapted to support running tests on pages from multiple wikis.

A new contributor, C. Scott Ananian, improved Parsoid’s performance by switching the DOM library from JSDom https://github.com/tmpvar/jsdom to Domino https://github.com/fgnass/domino. He also improved image handling and contributed numerous other patcheshttps://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/owner:Cscott+status:merged,n,z .

The tokenizer was modified to parse one top-level block at a time, which helps to spread out API requests and minimize the number of tokens in flight. The serializer is in the process of being rewritten to work on DOM input to benefit from the context provided by the DOM. This rewrite is expected to simplify the logic significantly, and help fix some more selective serialization issues that are blocking a deployment to production.

We also used the ops and core hackathon to discuss and refine our storage planshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/Roadmap#Performance:_Generate_and_store_HTML_DOM_on_edit. Finally, we wrote a blog post about Parsoid on the WMF tech bloghttp://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/04/parsoid-how-wikipedia-catches-up-with-the-web/ . Editor engagement features

*Notifications https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_%28Notifications%29* This month, we continued development on the Notifications project (code-named *Echo*), which is now being tested on mediawiki.org. Ryan Kaldari and Benny Situ developed new features such as bundlinghttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Bundling, dismiss https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Dismissand web preferenceshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Preferences, as well as refactored the code for the fly-out, archive page and email notifications. Luke Welling continued to develop a more robust job queuehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#JobQueue. Fabrice Florin spearheaded discussions about notifications for both new and experienced users, and updated requirements for this first set notificationshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#First_Notificationsfor our upcoming release. We will develop these notifications and final features in coming weeks, and are aiming for a first release on the English Wikipedia next month; in the meantime, you can help us test the current version https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Testing on mediawiki.org. To learn more, read this project updatehttp://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/07/echo-a-new-notification-system-for-wikipedia/on the Wikimedia blog. If you are a software engineer, check out this job opening http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ovvXWfwD&c=qSa9VfwQ to join our team and develop more editor engagement projects like Echo.

*Flow https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow* In February, we analyzed and collated user research concerning talk pages. Early designs were shown to members of the Board of Trustees to ask for their input. Jeff Atwood (from StackOverflow and Discourse) came in to give us a brain dump of his work. Design work was done on secondary “modules” as examples for how existing workflows can be rebuilt within the Flow system. Community engagement strategies saw the beginnings of implementation with the creation of a “Portal” that will engage discussion about Flow at three locations (mediawiki.org https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/FlowPortal, meta, and the English Wikipedia).

*Article feedback https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback* This month, our team completed feature development for Article Feedback v5https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5(AFT5) and prepared to release an updated version on English, French and German Wikipedias. Developer Matthias Mullie developed a final set of new features, including simpler moderation toolshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Feature_Requirements#Simpler_moderation_tools, better filtershttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Feature_Requirements#Feedback_page_filters, a new feedback linkhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Feature_Requirements#Feedback_link_on_article_pages, auto-archivehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Feature_Requirements#Auto-archive_commentsand discussion on a talk pagehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Feature_Requirements#Discuss_on_talk_page. Designer Pau Giner posted a usability study reporthttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Article_feedback/Moderation_Tools_Usability_Studyabout the effectiveness of the new moderation tools. Community liaison Oliver Keyes contributed to this request for commentshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Article_feedback, which concluded with a request to remove AFT4 and provide an opt-in version of AFT5 on the English Wikipedia (going forward, editors who wish to enable AFT5 for articles they watch can simply add the special Category:Article Feedback 5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Article_Feedback_5 on those pages). Product manager Fabrice Florin collaborated with members of the German Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/de:Wikipedia:Artikel-Feedback(which is now testing the tool in its ongoing pilothttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/de:Spezial:Artikelr%C3%BCckmeldungen_v5, with a vote expected in May) and the French Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fr:Wikip%C3%A9dia:Prise_de_d%C3%A9cision/Mise_en_place_de_l%27outil_d%27%C3%A9valuation_des_articles_sur_la_Wikip%C3%A9dia_en_fran%C3%A7ais(which just voted to start its own six-month pilot). We plan to deploy AFT5′s final version on these projects by the end of the month, as described in this 2013 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 February, the Editor Engagement Experiments team (“E3″) continued working toward completing its goals for the quarter ending in March, which includes updates on the following projects.

After the intial launch of guided tourshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Guided_tours, Matt Flaschen and other team members worked on A/B testing the effectiveness of guided tours as part of the onboarding new Wikipedianshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Onboarding_new_Wikipediansexperiences currently enabled on English Wikipedia. Results from these controlled tests are vital to understanding the impact of tours on editor engagement. In the meantime, the GuidedTour extensionhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GuidedTourwas enabled on Wikimedia Commons and six Wikipedias (including French, German, and Dutch), so that local administrators and volunteer developers could take advantage of the feature.

In addition to working on polishing and quantifying the effect of guided tours, significant progress was made on a new landing page for the onboarding project, with plans to launch early in March. The new Getting Started page will be expanded to include a wider variety task types offered to new editors. It will also be generated from a basic recommender system coupled with the GettingStarted extensionhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GettingStarted, rather than relying on a bot.

Kirsten Menger-Anderson https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Kmengerjoined the team as Technical Writer mid-month. She began work with Ori Livneh, Dario Taraborelli, and others on documenting the EventLogginghttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/EventLoggingextension, with the goal of producing a comprehensive guide for end users of EventLogging, especially other Wikimedia Engineering teams in need of data. Future work by Kirsten will include similar documentation of the User Metrics https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UserMetrics data analysis API, which will be opened up for internal use in March. Support

*2012 Wikimedia fundraiserhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/2012_Wikimedia_fundraiser * The majority of February was spent paying down the more glaring examples of technical debt we acquired during the 2012 English fundraiser, before jumping straight into a whole new round of International fundraising that kicked off on February 27th at approximately 15:00 UTC (7am PST). Due to unforeseen problems with one of our payment gateways, we were forced to scrap our plans for a continuous international fundraising effort spanning March through June, and will instead attempt to raise as much of the remaining budget in March as we are able. All other plans have been precluded by the March fundraising efforts. Mobile https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering

*Commons App https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Apps/Commons* February saw numerous beta releases of the Commons iOS and Android app. The Android app was publishedhttps://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikimedia.commonsto Google’s Play store with a Beta label. Brion Vibber announced for testers to get envolved in http://tflig.ht/Zl9Ef7. A significant amount of time was spent on the visual polish, bug fixing, and internationalization in prep for a very active series of betas. Extensive work was also done to log specific user actions using E3′s EventLogging setup to help us make data driven decisions in the future.

*Wikipedia Zero https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero* During February, we launched with a new partner, Orange Botswana. We’ve also begun testing with Vimpelcom for an upcoming launch in March. In addition, we’ve made improvements to the partner dashboard which tracks Wikipedia Zero usage.

*Open Street Map https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap* Tomasz Finc, Max Semenik and Arthur Richards worked on organising the OSM hackathonhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Events/Wikimedia_Mapping_Event_2013which took place on March 9-10 in Copenhagen. Max Semenik continued working on OSM in Labs and uploaded initial versions of several OSM-related packages to Gerrit for Operations to review.

*Mobile Web Photo Uploadhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_design/Uploads * In February we released the ability to upload and add images to articles lacking them to the full mobile web. We continued work on improving the upload and mobile file page views, for full productization in early March. We also explored two new upload workflows in alpha/beta: adding a call to action to articles that appear in the Nearby and Watchlist view, allowing users to quickly see articles near them that may need an image, take a photo and upload. Lastly, we began collaborating with the Fundraising team to enable CentralNotice on the mobile web, giving us the ability to deliver targeted banners to users who might be interested in trying out our new upload features or Commons apps. Platform Engineeringhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineering MediaWiki Core

*MediaWiki 1.21 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21/Roadmap* Deployments of 1.21wmf9 and 1.21wmf10 went to production as scheduled with mininal issue.

*Git conversion https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Git/Conversion* Gerrit was upgraded this month to a pre-2.6 snapshot. This enabled the use of plugins, as well as brought numerous bugfixes and UI improvements. Work is underway on a plugin to provide Bugzilla integration and to replace Gitweb with a better repository viewer called Gitblit. All of our git repositories are now automatically replicated to GitHubhttps://github.com/wikimedia. We’ve begun some initial planning into how we can improve the “new repository request” process, making it much easier for users with a quicker turnaround time.

*TimedMediaHandler https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/TimedMediaHandler* Jan Gerber continues to work part-time for the WMF to fix multimedia bugs. Fixes include better support for FLAC files (bug 43249https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43249) and better support for metadata display in small embedded players (bug 44272https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44272 ).

*Wikidata deployment https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_deployment* Wikidata has been deployed to Hungarian, Italian, Hebrew, and English Wikipedias!

*Media storage https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Media_storage* Nearly all files have been copied from Swift (in Tampa) to Ceph (in Ashburn). Further scripts will be run to synchronize the Ceph files to account for deletions and updates to files. The Varnish configuration to handle URL rewriting (to take the place of rewrite.py in swift) is already coded, though not yet in use.

*Lua scripting https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua_scripting* We deployed Lua/Scribunto to several wikis, including English Wikipedia, on February 18th. The current plan is to deploy to the remaining wikis on March 13thhttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/11/lua-templates-faster-more-flexible-pages/ .

*Site performance https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Site_performance* A patch to allow moving the job queue to another DB cluster has been merged, and another patch to support an alternative Redis-based queue is in review in gerrit. Currently, job-related operations consume a significant portion of production database master wall time.

*Admin tools developmenthttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development * The team worked on a number of areas this month. The interface for Stewards to mass-lock user accountshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development/CentralAuth_Lockingwas completed and will be deployed very soon next month. The support for global AbuseFilters nears completion, with a test deployment to test.wikipedia.org and mediawiki.org; once internationalisation is more complete, it will be deployed for all wikis. The team worked to agree a specificationhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development/Roadmap/Global_CheckUserfor a global CheckUser tool. Progress was made on a global account renaming toolhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development/Global_Renameand XFF-based global and local blocks. The team also worked on finalising the migration to Single User Login, building some metricshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development/SUL_Audit#Metricsto ascertain a sense of the problem.

*REST proposal https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API/REST_proposal* Yuri https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Yurik started gathering requirements for the RESTful (content-orientedhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/API_roadmap#Content_API) API as part of the overall planning for the API v2.0 roadmaphttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/API_roadmap. Also, Wikia’s focused R&D sprint has led to remove all the remaining obstacles identified previously and Wikia has identified a new, larger dedicated Product team to get to a final implementation of the REST API following the directions set by the existing prototype and internal RFC; the team (API/Data) is the same one in charge of Search and all the related API’s, this will ensure a better integration of this product into the new API strategy. At the moment of writing the knowledge transfer required for the team to start this new phase has just begun and the team has to first to complete the current work on another project already in progress. In the meantime, Wikia will make an RFC public for review and feedback.

*Security auditing and responsehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security_auditing_and_response * Continued responses to reported vulnerabilities. Preparation for security releases for 1.19 and 1.20 branches of MediaWiki. Continued review of Fundraising. Quality assurance

*Quality Assurance https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/QA* Concluded mobile app file upload test exercise. Preparing for new test exercise, possibly for Search. Exploring another collaboration with Weekend Testers.

*Beta cluster https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Beta_cluster* We are adding search to the beta cluster following Mobile Frontend tweaks. We are discussing new ways to use the beta cluster as a result of our San Francisco gathering in February.

*Continuous integrationhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Continuous_integration * Antoine Musso worked with several MediaWiki extension authors to ensure that the unit tests for those extensions are run by Jenkins and that they work. He hopes to have all extensions that run on the Wikimedia production cluster fully operational by the end of February. Antoine also integrated PHP CodeSniffer into our automated test runs.

*Browser testing https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/QA/Browser_testing* Added E3 tests. Preparing for test event to increase the backlog. Sophisticated tests for Language need tweaking/research. Analytics

*Kraken (Analytics Cluster)https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Kraken * We did two reviews of Kraken: one for security and one for overall architecture. We’re incorporating the feedback, which includes merging our puppet modules into the operations puppet repository and the test puppet in Labs. Work has started to create dashboards for mobile pageviews, Wikipedia Zero and the mobile alpha and beta sites.

*Limn https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Limn* Highlights in the past month include

- Stacked charts - Debianization & Puppetization - New E3 and Grantmaking dashboards - Ad-hoc visualization of datasource

*Wikistats https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikistats* New mobile pageview report is in testing phase but not ready to ship.

*Page view logginghttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Pageview_logging * It was a quiet month for the logging infrastructure; things were running fine. We have been working on a patch to fix bug 45178https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45178, which we will try to deploy in March. Engineering community team

*Bug management https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management* As part of the Weekly QA Goalshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/QA/Weekly_goals, a Git/Gerrit Bug Triage dayhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Triage/20130219took place. About 25 open reports were retested and/or synchronized with their status in the upstream bugtrackerhttps://code.google.com/p/gerrit/issues/. The Bug day format will be developed further to make it more attractive to new contributors.

Valerie published an initial version of a Bug Life Cycle flowcharthttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bug_Life_Cycle_Diagram.svgdescribing the life of a bug report by its status changes over time, continued investigating feedback channels and workflows of other bigger free software projects, and also helped testing the Commons Upload app for Android and the mobile browser as part of Mobile QA testinghttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_QA/Commons_uploads. A table on Bugzilla use by development teamshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Development_teams_usagewas made available.

Furthermore, reachout to several development teams continued to better understand the different bug management needs, and discussions took place about a workflow how to mark fixed tickets as backport candidates in the issue tracker, potentially resulting in the addition of a dropdown menu (“ flag http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/4.2/en/html/flags-overview.html“) in Bugzilla.

*Mentorship programs https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs* The Outreach Program for Womenhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_Program_for_Womenis more than half-way. Our six participants are fairly on track; read February reports from Valerie http://valmj.wordpress.com/, Mariyahttp://mitevam.tumblr.com/post/44134682053/february-in-short, Priyankahttp://priyankaivy.blogspot.in/2013/02/learning-to-build-gadgets-in-wikipedia.htmland Sucheta http://mikipedian.blogspot.in/. Teresa is working on unit tests for the Git repository extension and is looking at a request to use this extension to help to maintain CentralNotice-related content. Isarra completed her work on Flow/User testshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow/User_testsand now is working with the Editor Engagement team on improvements to the Watchlist design. Google published the timelinehttps://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/events/google/gsoc2013for the Summer of Code 2013 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2013 and we have confirmed our intention to apply as organization. Without big announcements and more than a month before any deadline, we have already 15 students, 5 mentors and 2 org admins potentially interested.

*Technical communicationshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_communications * Guillaume Paumier https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Guillom finished setting up the Project:Calendarhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Calendar, used it to replace content on pages like QA/Weekly goalshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/QA/Weekly_goalsand Meetings https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Meetings using selective transclusion, created an edit noticehttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Editnotice-4-Calendarto make it easier to add and edit events, added a bullet list display optionhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template_talk:New_opportunities/Content, and added links to icons creditshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Visual_identityas part of an effort to harmonize visual identity for MediaWiki. He updated the monthly report how-tohttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/How_toto reflect the current process, and met with LCA staff https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal_and_Community_Advocacy to discuss possible collaboration between the tech ambassadorshttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/Ambassadorsand community advocates programs. While in San Francisco, he met with many colleagues to discuss engineering project documentation, and ways to announce to and engage with the rest of the community. Last, he started to create a Product developmenthttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Product_developmenthub to facilitate the involvement of contributors, and supported the engineering team in communicating about their accomplishments on the Wikimedia Tech blog.

*Volunteer coordination and outreachhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Volunteer_coordination_and_outreach *

- We have consolidated the QA Weekly goalshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/QA/Weekly_goalsas a way to orchestrate testing and bug management activities with the wider community. We run two Features testinghttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/QA/Features_testingactivities (Article Feedback’s new featureshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Feature_Requirements#Features_under_considerationand Wikipedia + Commons uploadshttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_QA/Commons_uploads) and two Bug Days (Article feedback and Git/Gerrithttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Triage/20130219). So far it has been useful to coordinate better testing activities across Wikimedia Foundation teams, but we still need better results engaging volunteers. - The (newly elected) Affiliations Committee is working on finding an agreement with MediaWiki Group Ahmedabadhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Groups/Proposals/Ahmedabadand Wikimedia India regarding whether it should be a chapter Special Interest Groups, a user group, or some other structure. - Quim Gil went to FOSDEM; as a result, we have now a generic “How to contribute” presentation and videohttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_contribute/Presentation . - We are helping the organization of the Amsterdam Hackathon 2013https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Hackathon_2013and also helped the Wikimedia Foundation decide what employees would get travel sponsorship to Amsterdam.

Language engineeringhttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_engineering

*Language tools https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Language_tools*

- Translate (TUX) enhancements: Development continues full steam ahead on the new translation editor with proof reading feature by Santhosh and Amir. Niklas continues to enhance and test backend translate infrastructure, including Solr integration and other translation aids. - Plurals support: by Santhosh and Amir to be more consistent with CLDR standards. - Technical Font Specification for Indic scripts: We kicked off this collaborative project between Red Hat and Wikimedia at the Language

Summithttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Pune_LanguageSummit_February_2013/Event_Reportin February. Santhosh and Runa are contributors to this project. - Language Coverage Matrixhttps://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Asnprhp63DAtdEQyTnMwV29yVFZFMmlwOXoxQU9SMFE#gid=0: This matrix aims to provide an up-to-date status of language support for all tools that the team is developing and maintaining. - Mediawiki i18n code review: Team continues to support Mediawiki release with i18n code reviews across other features and extensions. - Mediawiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB): Monthly release of MLEB

completedhttps://translatewiki.net/mleb/MediaWikiLanguageExtensionBundle-2013.02.tar.bz2with release notes by Amir.

*Milkshake https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Milkshake*

- jQuery.IME: Continue to merge input methods contributed into jQuery.IME. We now have 155+ input methods for 75+ languages. - jQuery.ULS: Continue to maintain jQuery.ULS. Awaiting resolution of deployment issues.

Kiwix http://www.kiwix.org

*The Kiwix project is funded and executed by Wikimedia CHhttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CH .* We have migrated our source code repository from Subversion to Githttp://code.kiwix.org. We have have also focused in February on the revamping of the Kiwix Web sitehttp://www.kiwix.org. The new Web site is really more user friendly. Audience continues to grow with 120,000 downloads of the software in February. Wikidata https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata

*The Wikidata project is funded and executed by Wikimedia Deutschlandhttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Deutschland/en .*

In February the first phase of Wikidata (language links) was deployed on the English-language Wikipedia. Additionally the first parts of phase 2 (infoboxes) went life on wikidata.org. It is now possible to add statements. For an example see d:159 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/159. The first tools have already been written on top of this, for example Geneawiki http://toolserver.org/%7Emagnus/ts2/geneawiki/?q=Q1339 and Reasonator http://toolserver.org/%7Emagnus/ts2/reasonator/?q=Q1339. In the meantime more work has been put into additional data-types, like strings and geocoordinates, as well as the foundations of phase 3 (lists based on queries).

In other good news: Wikimedia Germany has decided to fund Wikidata development http://blog.wikimedia.de/2013/02/20/the-future-of-wikidata/after the end of the first year of development at the end of March.

Future The engineering management team continues to update the *Deploymentshttps://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.

-- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation