Hi,
The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in September 2014 is now available:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September
Below is the HTML text of the report.
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Major news in September include:
- a call for candidates https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/09/18/new-foss-outreach-internships-female-technical-contributors/ for the Free and Open Source Software Outreach Program for Women; - a roundtable discussion https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/09/29/round-table-with-editors-from-the-catalan-wikipedia/ between the Language engineering team and editors from the Catalan language Wikipedia, focusing on the Content Translation tool.
Engineering metrics in September:
- 151 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki. - About 27 shell requests https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Shell_requests were processed.
Contents [hide https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September# ]
- 1 Upcoming events https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September#Upcoming_events - 2 Personnel https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September#Personnel - 2.1 Work with us https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September#Work_with_us - 2.2 Announcements https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September#Announcements - 3 Technical Operations https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September#Technical_Operations - 4 Features Engineering https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September#Features_Engineering - 4.1 Editor retention: Editing tools https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September#Editor_retention:_Editing_tools - 4.2 Services https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September#Services - 4.3 Core Features https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September#Core_Features - 5 Mobile https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September#Mobile - 6 Language Engineering https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September#Language_Engineering - 7 Platform Engineering https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September#Platform_Engineering - 7.1 MediaWiki Core https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September#MediaWiki_Core - 7.2 Multimedia https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September#Multimedia - 7.3 Engineering Community Team https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September#Engineering_Community_Team - 8 Analytics https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September#Analytics - 9 Kiwix https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September#Kiwix - 10 Wikidata https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September#Wikidata - 11 Future https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September#Future
Upcoming events[edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&veaction=edit&vesection=1 | edit source https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=edit§ion=1 ]
There are many opportunities for you to *get involved and contribute https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_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 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Calendar. [edit or add events https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Project:Calendar] [refresh table https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=purge#] [view credits https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Project:Visual_identity] DateTypeEventContactOct 1–Oct 3[image: IRL (physical) meet-ups and conferences] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/EventsSMWCon Fall 2014 https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Fall_2014 (Vienna, Austria)Conference talk https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:SMWCon_Fall_2014Oct 6[image: Online meetings] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MeetingsTech Talk: The Dashboarding Problem https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/103470172168784626509/events/ch8uuivq05nqejqlivrqni6v1n0 1900-2000 UTC http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Tech+Talk%3A+The+Dashboarding+Problem&iso=20141006T19&p1=1440&ah=1 in #wikimedia-office irc://irc.freenode.net/wikimedia-officeconnect http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#wikimedia-office.Nuria Ruiz https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_talk:NRuiz_(WMF)Oct 8–Oct 8[image: Old bugs] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_managementCollection/Book/PDF Bug Day https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Triage/201410 (exact date pending)Talk https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Thread:Talk:PDF_rendering/Test_instance_and_bug_triageOct 22[image: Online meetings] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MeetingsTech Talk: Design Research in Product Development https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/103470172168784626509/events/caiiagf75bvddr09nf4jbgccn30 1900-2000 UTC http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Tech+Talk%3A+Design+Research+in+Product+Development&iso=20141022T19&p1=1440&ah=1 in #wikimedia-office irc://irc.freenode.net/wikimedia-officeconnect http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#wikimedia-office.Abbey Ripstra https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_talk:ARipstra_(WMF)Oct 22[image: Online meetings] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MeetingsMeetup: Exploratory Testing for Complex Software; Lessons from Cloud Foundry https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/103470172168784626509/events/c9r9lqtbpn52vhivkc12usps55c 0130-0300 UTC http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Cloudfoundry+Meetup&iso=20141022T0130&ah=1&am=30 in #wikimedia-office irc://irc.freenode.net/wikimedia-officeconnect http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#wikimedia-office. Personnel[edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&veaction=edit&vesection=2 | edit source https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=edit§ion=2 ]Work with us https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Work_with_us[edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&veaction=edit&vesection=3 | edit source https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=edit§ion=3 ]
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.
- Senior Software Engineer - Services http://grnh.se/748mr2 - Software Engineer - Maps & Geo - Mobile http://grnh.se/4w5iyb - Software Engineer - Mobile - iOS http://grnh.se/j4gmk5 - Release Engineer http://grnh.se/5fw24x - Technical Writer http://grnh.se/d86hti - Full Stack Developer - Analytics http://grnh.se/vfgr0t - Research Analyst http://grnh.se/r8ukg1 - Agile Coach/ScrumMaster - Team Practices Group http://grnh.se/5h4jdv - Senior Technical Product Manager http://grnh.se/bm5neu - Community Liaison http://grnh.se/i2jvpo - Community Liaison (PT Contract) http://grnh.se/kyra75 - Operations Security Engineer http://grnh.se/m65tn8 - UX Senior Designer http://grnh.se/47xrkn - UX Senior Design Researcher http://grnh.se/x2nsqv - UX Visual Design Fellowship http://grnh.se/783knf - Mobile Partnerships Regional Manager http://grnh.se/v75upy
Announcements[edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&veaction=edit&vesection=4 | edit source https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=edit§ion=4 ]
- Damon Sicore joined the Wikimedia Foundation as Vice President of Engineering (announcement https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaannounce-l/2014-September/000987.html ). - Rachel Farrand joined the Engineering Community Team as Events Coordinator (announcement https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014-September/078488.html ). - Jeff Hobson joined the Wikipedia Zero engineering team (announcement https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014-September/078638.html ). - Daisy Chen joined the UX Research team as Associate Design Researcher ( announcement https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/design/2014-September/002095.html ).
Technical Operations[edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&veaction=edit&vesection=5 | edit source https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=edit§ion=5 ]
*Dallas data center* In September we have setup (backup) replication of most project data, including core databases and external storage. Work on Swift images and system backups was still ongoing into October. Essential system infrastructure such as an installation server, DNS, LVS, NTP etc. has been deployed as well.
*Tampa data center* We started the last push to get the remaining services & systems out of our Tampa data center, with a deadline for shutdown of all systems on October 1st. The remaining services included PDF generation, mail servers, noc.wikimedia.org and LDAP.
Labs metrics in September:
- Number of projects: 146 - Number of instances: 415 - Amount of RAM in use (in MBs): 1,996,288 - Amount of allocated storage (in GBs): 20,435 - Number of virtual CPUs in use: 977 - Number of users: 4,083
*Wikimedia Labs* Wikitech (the Labs web interface) is now managed https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/labs-l/2014-September/002870.html via the standard WMF deployment system. This should allow for more frequent MediaWiki updates and overall greater stability.The last historic remaining dependencies on our old Tampa datacenter (e.g. LDAP and Labs DNS backup servers) were finally stamped out and replaced with dependencies on Dallas hardware.One of the labs virtualization hosts (virt1006) was suffering intermittent problems, so all affected instances were migrated to other hosts in order to stave off possible future disaster. Consequently, Labs is a bit short on virtualization space, but new hardware procurement is under way.Several long-unused instances and projects were cleaned up in order to free up more space.The last of the ToolLabs replica DB servers was upgraded to MariaDB 10.Features Engineering https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Features_engineering[edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&veaction=edit&vesection=6 | edit source https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=edit§ion=6 ]Editor retention: Editing tools[edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&veaction=edit&vesection=7 | edit source https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=edit§ion=7 ]
*VisualEditor https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=VisualEditor/status&veaction=edit ] In September, the team working on VisualEditor expanded browser support, improved some features, and fixed nearly 60 bugs and tickets https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?list_id=348697&order=priority%2Cbug_severity&product=VisualEditor&query_format=advanced&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=VE-deploy-2014-09-04&target_milestone=VE-deploy-2014-09-11&target_milestone=VE-deploy-2014-09-181&target_milestone=VE-deploy-2014-09-25&target_milestone=VE-deploy-2014-10-02 .
Users of Internet Explorer 10, who we were previously preventing from using VisualEditor due to some major bugs, will now be able to use VisualEditor; this follows on from Internet Explorer 11 support last month. When editing a template with a required field, VisualEditor now warns you to avoid leaving it blank, and you can now create auto-numbered links using VisualEditor.
Improvements and updates were made to a number of interface messages as part of our work with translators to improve the software for all users, based on feedback from users and user testing https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Design/User_testing. We made progress on table structure editing and auto-filled citations, both of which will be coming soon. The deployed version of the code was updated five times in the regular release cycle (1.24-wmf20 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.24/wmf20#VisualEditor, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.24/wmf17#VisualEditor 1.24-wmf21 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.24/wmf20#VisualEditor, 1.24-wmf22 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.24/wmf22#VisualEditor, 1.25-wmf1 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.25/wmf1#VisualEditor and 1.25-wmf2 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.25/wmf2#VisualEditor).
*Editing https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editing* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Editing/status&veaction=edit] In September, the Editing Team made substantial progress on front-end standardisation, as well as the work on VisualEditor which is reported separately. The team welcomed Bartosz "MatmaRex" Dziewoński https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Bartosz_Dziewo%C5%84ski_(WMF) as a new team member, and existing student member Moriel Schottlender https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:MSchottlender-WMF converted to full-time status.
The team's work on front-end standardisation is focussed on improving libraries and infrastructure, and in particular, the OOjs UI https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/OOjs_UI library. This included the creation of a MediaWiki theme in collaboration with the Design team, which can be explored in the online demo https://tools.wmflabs.org/oojs-ui/oojs-ui/demos/index.html#widgets-mediawiki-vector-ltr; this will be deployed into MediaWiki's use of OOUI in the next few weeks. A number of bugs were fixed, including working around window and popup sizing, over-flow item placement, and working around some browser bugs in Firefox and Safari. The code documentation has a number of minor issues corrected, and the build process was extended to create a minified distribution. The OOjs https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/OOjs library was updated to fix a minor bug in oo.Compare, with a new version (v1.1.1) released and pushed downstream into MediaWiki, VisualEditor and OOjs UI. The TemplateData extension now supports the "autovalue" parameter property, a wikitext value that a parameter can be set to have inserted by default if desired. Also, the specification for TemplateData http://git.wikimedia.org/blob/mediawiki%2Fextensions%2FTemplateData.git/HEAD/Specification.md was re-written to be clearer and more consistent. Next month the TemplateData GUI editor will be made available on all Wikimedia wikis.
*Parsoid https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Parsoid/status&veaction=edit] In September, we continued to fix bugs, upgraded libraries, and made additional progress towards improving compatibility with PHP parser + Tidy rendering. Specifically, Parsoid's paragraph wrapping now targets the PHP parser + Tidy output rather than PHP parser output. We also continued to update Parsoid's CSS / rendering to more closely match the current rendering. We also improved Parsoid's robustness handling edge case scenarios (pathological backtracking, parsing of very large wikitext tables). Part of the Parsoid team was also busy with launching the PDF rendering service which was successfully launched end of September. Services[edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&veaction=edit&vesection=8 | edit source https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=edit§ion=8 ]
*Services and REST API https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Services* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Services/status&veaction=edit] September saw a lot of activity on the RESTBase https://github.com/gwicke/restbase storage and API service. A new 'pagecontent' composite bucket type using revisioned blob buckets was introduced. This uses the by-now fairly rich table storage backend to provide functionality similar to MediaWiki's revision table, and supports any number of revisioned types of content (like HTML, wikitext, JSON metadata) associated with each revision.
Work on secondary index updates https://github.com/gwicke/restbase-cassandra/blob/master/doc/SecondaryIndexes.md continued at full steam, and is now close to being merged. Core Features[edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&veaction=edit&vesection=9 | edit source https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=edit§ion=9 ]
*Flow https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow/Project_information* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Flow/Project_information/status&veaction=edit ] In September, the Flow team enabled new test pages on French WP and Hebrew WP. The French test is for the Forum des Nouveaux, a Help space for new contributors (similar to the Teahouse on English WP). The Forum des Nouveaux hosts reached out to the Flow team after Wikimania, excited to try out the new discussions system. The Hebrew WP test is helping the team diagnose problems for Right-to-Left languages, and general i18n issues. The team also refined the new Echo notifications functionality, with lots of feedback from contributors on Mediawiki.org and En.wp. New topic notifications are now bundled in Echo, and we fixed several bugs related to the behavior of the Alerts and Messages tabs, and getting excess mention notifications.
*Growth https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Growth/status&veaction=edit]
In September, the Growth team shut down, with workflows shifting into the mainstream of other teams. Mobile https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_mobile_engineering[edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&veaction=edit&vesection=10 | edit source https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=edit§ion=10 ]
*Wikimedia Apps https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Apps/status&veaction=edit ] In September, the Mobile Apps Team released a new version of the iOS app containing the Nearby feature which shows you articles about things that are near your location, and a references panel that pops up whenever you tap a reference. The team also released an iOS 8 compatibility build to market. The team also spent time performing code quality improvements and refactoring on both the iOS and Android apps.
*Mobile web projects https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_web_projects* [ edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Mobile_web_projects/status&veaction=edit ] This month the mobile web team focused on the first prototype of WikiGrok, a new contribution feature that asks users who are reading Wikipedia articles to help add Wikidata that is missing about the article subject. Over the course of the month, we built and user-tested the first experimental interface for allowing users to input Wikidata: a simple binary question mode that provides the user with a suggested occupation on biographies that are missing this information in Wikidata but contain a possible occupation in the Wikipedia article. In this early test phase we are storing the replies in a separate database, not pushing to Wikidata. We plan to add suggestions for more Wikidata fields and test this version against a slightly more complex tagging interface in beta in October.
*Wikipedia Zero https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_Zero/status&veaction=edit ] During September 2014, the team built more Partners Portal architecture, including Graph extension integration components for eventual display of aggregate statistics to zero-rating partners (it already works and is being reviewed in house). The team also grew support for dynamic zero-rating banners while enhancing JSON configuration extension code and issuing bugfixes. Additionally, the team shrunk the size of the Wikipedia favicon to reduce bandwidth usage by users across the web. And on the partner side, we launched Telenor Myanmar in September. Finally, the team welcomed its newest software engineer, Jeff Hobson, to the Wikimedia Foundation! Language Engineering https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_engineering[edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&veaction=edit&vesection=11 | edit source https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=edit§ion=11 ]
*Language tools https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Language_tools* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Language_tools/status&veaction=edit ] The CLDR extension was updated to version 26 and entries identical to CLDR were removed from LocalNamesEn.php. The team made RTL fixes in core, Echo and Wikibase, and tested Flow for RTL support. Maintenance of the Translate extension continued, and the performance of translation memory was improved on ElasticSearch with the help of Nik Everett
*Language Engineering Communications and Outreach https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Language_engineering_communications_and_outreach* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Language_engineering_communications_and_outreach/status&veaction=edit ] The Language Engineering team hosted a round-table with Catalan Wikipedia editors http://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/09/29/round-table-with-editors-from-the-catalan-wikipedia/ who use ContentTranslation to gather feedback about their experience with the tool. OPW mentors started coordinating with candidates interested in internationalization projects https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/FOSS_Outreach_Program_for_Women/Round_9#Internationalization_and_localization
*Content translation https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation* [ edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Content_translation/status&veaction=edit ] The second version of the tool was released https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation/Announcement-October2014. This version has not yet been deployed due to technical issues in the Labs setup. This is currently being resolved with the Ops team.
Notable improvements include:
- a basic formatting toolbar (for Chrome); - more accurate warnings for unchanged machine translated content; - design improvements for the top bar and progress bar; - bi-directional support for Spanish-Portuguese machine translation; - link adaptation improvements.
The team is performing ongoing tests with users for Spanish-Portuguese, Portuguese-Spanish translations, and we started planning for the third release https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation/Roadmap/CX02Release. Platform Engineering https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineering[edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&veaction=edit&vesection=12 | edit source https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=edit§ion=12 ]MediaWiki Core[edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&veaction=edit&vesection=13 | edit source https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=edit§ion=13 ]
*Admin tools development https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Admin_tools_development/status&veaction=edit ] The majority of admin tools resources are currently diverted towards the SUL finalisation https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/SUL_finalisation project. In September, minor UX enhancements were applied to the Special:CentralAuth https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth page.
*Search https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Search* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Search/status&veaction=edit] In September we worked to mitigate the performance bottleneck that we found in August. We found there to be no silver bullet but used the information we learned to pick and order appropriate hardware to handle the remaining wikis. We also implemented out significantly improved wikitext Regular Expression search. In October we've begun rolling out the wikitext Regular Expression search and received some of the hardware we need to finish cutting over the remaining wikis. We believe we'll get it all installed in October and cut the remaining wikis over in November.
*SUL finalisation https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/SUL_finalisation* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=SUL_finalisation/status&veaction=edit ] In September, the team wrapped up the feature development for SUL finalisation. One part of the work (the steward end of the rename request form) is outstanding and will be finished in October. In October, the team is planning to proceed into deployment and testing of the features.
*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/status&veaction=edit ] We published the 1.23.4 security release, and completed review for the Graph and Imagemetrics extensions. Multimedia[edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&veaction=edit&vesection=14 | edit source https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=edit§ion=14 ]
*Multimedia https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Multimedia/status&veaction=edit ] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Media_Viewer_-_New_Design_-_Default_Lightbox.png Media Viewer's new user interface, with a 'More details' button. In September, the multimedia team developed and released a first round of new improvements https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Improvements to Media Viewer, based on feedback from our recent community consultation https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Engagement_(Product)/Media_Viewer_consultation and ongoing user research https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Media_Viewer_Research_Round_2_(August_2014) .
These improvements aim to make Media Viewer easier to use by readers and casual editors, with these features: a more prominent "More Details" button https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/830, linking to the File: page; separate icons for "Download" https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/841 and "Share or Embed" https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/834 features; and an easier way to enlarge images by clicking on them https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/831. Next, we plan to work on an easier way to disable Media Viewer for personal use https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/836 and a caption or description right below the image https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/589. We would like to thank all the community members who suggested these improvements. Our research suggests that they offer a better user experience, that is both clearer and simpler.
This month, we also ramped up the Structured Data https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data project, in collaboration with community members and the Wikidata team https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/: in October, we will start developing a first prototype for a high-end API that can read and write machine-readable data on Wikimedia Commons, to be followed by a wider deployment in coming months. In parallel, the foundation is also launching a file metadata cleanup drive https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_metadata_cleanup_drive to add machine-readable attributions and licenses on files that lack them, spearheaded by Guillaume Paumier https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Guillaume_(WMF). To learn more, join our Structured Data Q&A https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data#Discussions on Thursday, October 16 at 18:00 UTC http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Structured+Data+IRC+discussion&iso=20141016T18&ah=1, for an office hours https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours#Upcoming_office_hours chat on #wikimedia-office irc://irc.freenode.net/wikimedia-officeconnect http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#wikimedia-office(Freenode IRC). We also continued our code refactoring for the UploadWizard https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UploadWizard, and started to collect metrics for an upload funnel analysis https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UploadWizard/Funnel_analysis, to find out how many users drop out at each step of the upload and where failure is occurring, so we can prioritize bug fixes. For more information about our work, join the multimedia mailing list https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/multimedia. Engineering Community Team https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team[edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&veaction=edit&vesection=15 | edit source https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=edit§ion=15 ]
*Bug management https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Bug_management/status&veaction=edit ] The "Commons App" product was closed as no further development is planned currently. A new product was created for the new PDF renderer infrastructure https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69603 and numerous components were created https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?bug_id=70535,70500,70432,70622,71103,71049,70951,70846 .
*Phabricator migration https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Migration* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Phabricator/Migration/status&veaction=edit ] phabricator.wikimedia.org got set up with tickets imported from the previous Labs instance (public registration will be enabled once all remaining tasks https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T463 have been sorted out). Restricting access to Phabricator tasks based on project membership https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T50 was implemented. Inbound email was https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T244 configured so Phabricator lets you interact with external (non-Phabricator) users via email https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T52. A certificate for phab.wmfusercontent.org https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T373 for file uploads was set up and Operations set up SNI on misc-web-lb https://rt.wikimedia.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=8345, made it work with nginx, added IPv6 access https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71270, and fixed an error when trying to log in via HTTP https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T457. The legal footer required was set up with its license https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T171, terms of use https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T198 and correct links https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T505. Reedy added phabricator to the interwiki map https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T454, and Helder started to the 'tracked' gadget on MediaWiki to query the Phabricator API https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T177. Many further smaller fixes took place. Furthermore, Quim improved the Phabricator documentation and help https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Help. Andre showed the very basics of Phabricator http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fpkHyCGX1Y in a video. Daniel and Yuvi set up a new Phabricator test instance on https://phab-01.wmflabs.org/ that anybody is welcome to test. Analytics https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics[edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&veaction=edit&vesection=16 | edit source https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=edit§ion=16 ]
*Wikimetrics https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Wikimetrics* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Analytics/Wikimetrics/status&veaction=edit ]
Work was done on the following metrics:
- Rolling New Active Editor - Implemented - Rolling Surviving New Active Editor - Implemented - Pages Created and Edits - Updated to include reporting configuration to include changes to deleted pages (this is a default). - Metrics with ‘Namespaces’ as a parameter let you specify “All Namespaces.” Leave the input field blank to do so. - Rolling recurring old active editor is implemented, but does not perform sufficiently rapidly for us to enable it on the production servers. - The status of the implementation of Standardized Metrics defined by the Research Team is here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Metrics_standardization/Implementat...
*Data Processing https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Data_Processing* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Analytics/Data_Processing/status&veaction=edit ]
A terrific weekly summary is posted to the Analytics mailing list with a summary at the top of each email. Here are the links to related posts in the archives.
- 2014-09-01--2014-09-07 https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/analytics/2014-September/002493.html - 2014-09-08--2014-09-14 https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/analytics/2014-September/002496.html - 2014-09-15--2014-09-21 https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/analytics/2014-September/002522.html - 2014-09-22--2014-09-28 https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/analytics/2014-October/002539.html
*Editor Engagement Vital Signs https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Editor_Engagement_Vital_Signs* [ edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Analytics/Editor_Engagement_Vital_Signs/status&veaction=edit ] The Vital Signs https://metrics.wmflabs.org/static/public/dash/ dashboard is now live. We are calling it “Vital Signs” because it will eventually display content and readership metrics, not just Editor Engagement metrics. Vital Signs was presented at the Analytics Quarterly Review as well as the October WMF Metrics meeting https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF_Metrics_and_activities_meetings/2014-10 .
*EventLogging https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/EventLogging* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Analytics/EventLogging/status&veaction=edit ] Work https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68931 was performed to clean up some EventLogging tables per the privacy policy.
*Research and Data https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Research_and_Data* [edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Analytics/Research_and_Data/status&veaction=edit ] This month we onboarded Ellery Wulczyn https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ewulczyn_(WMF) as the newest addition to the Research & Data team. Ellery recently finished a Computer Science Masters program at Stanford and joins us as a full-time research analyst after completing a summer fellowship with University of Chicago's Data Science for Social Good http://dssg.io/ program. His focus at WMF is going to be fundraising research and analytics. Welcome, Ellery!
We completed the definitions, documentation and requirements for a new set of metrics https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Metrics_standardization#q1-2015 to be implemented in Vital Signs https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Editor_Engagement_Vital_Signs.
We completed a first draft of a page view definition https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Page_view, which is currently being discussed. We supported the mobile team with baseline traffic reports https://trello.com/c/8OyGYWEM/379-mobile-apps-traffic-analytics for Apps and Mobile Web.
We participated in the preparatory sessions for the design of an open consultation led by the Community Liaison team as well as in regular meetings to support the strategy consultation process. We held our Q1-2015 quarterly review https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Analytics_Quarterly_Review_Q1_2014-15_(Research_and_Data).pdf, reviewed the team's progress against Q1 goals and posted our proposed Q2 goals https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Research_and_Data/2014-15_Goals#Q2:_Oct_-_Dec_2014 . Kiwix http://www.kiwix.org/[edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&veaction=edit&vesection=17 | edit source https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=edit§ion=17 ]
*The Kiwix project is funded and executed by Wikimedia CH https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CH.* https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Kiwix_bookeen_1.png Kiwix and Wikipedia offline will soon be available on an e-ink device. We made progress in our work with our partner Bookeen http://www.bookeen.com/ to get an e-ink reader able to read Wikipedia offline. We managed to get a first version of the device firmware working, and it will be tested in the field as part of the Malebooks http://malebooks.ml/ pilot deployment.As a consequence of a bug fixing sprint with Parsoid and Wikisource developers at Wikimania, we were finally able to generate *usable* ZIM files from Wikisource (dxample with fr.wikisource.org http://library.kiwix.org/wikisource_fr_all_09_2014/).Work on the offline https://github.com/kiwix/gutenberg project Gutenberg http://gutenberg.org/ continued and we are now almost ready to release. A few ZIM files are in testing, for example in German http://library.kiwix.org/gutenberg_de_all_10_2014/ and in Spanish http://library.kiwix.org/gutenberg_es_all_10_2014/.Kiwix was represented at the Selenium conference http://seleniumconf.org/ where we held a 2-day bug hunting session: 120 bugs were reported, of which 50% were fixed https://github.com/Bug-Bash/selenium-kiwix/issues.mwoffliner https://sourceforge.net/p/kiwix/other/ci/master/tree/mwoffliner/ was improved to make it easier to use for everyone, in particular to make ZIM files for only a selection of articles. As a demonstration, we prepared a ZIM files containing all Wikipedia articles about medicine http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en_medicine_09_2014.zim.torrent .After many years, a new version of a tool to generate a live CD http://kiwix.org/wiki/Live_CD including Kiwix and Wikipedia content was released.Wikidata https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata[edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&veaction=edit&vesection=18 | edit source https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=edit§ion=18 ]
*The Wikidata project is funded and executed by Wikimedia Deutschland https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Deutschland/en.* In September, the Wikidata team focused on improving performance, doing groundwork for the new user interface design, and making it possible to track where data from Wikidata is used. Next to that, they worked on tests and prepared for a week-long meeting with the WMF multimedia team and volunteers to discuss and plan structured data support for Wikimedia Commons.Future[edit https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&veaction=edit&vesection=19 | edit source https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September&action=edit§ion=19 ]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 *annual goals https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals*, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts.
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