We just posted our monthly report about engineering activity: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/09/04/engineering-august-2012-report/ You might specifically be interested in these recent pieces of news:

* The localisation team's plan on language teams -- they are requesting comments: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_localization_tools/L... * WMF aims to activate the Article Feedback tool to 100% of English Wikipedia by the end of October 2012, with other wiki projects starting later this year. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback * We're working towards a full release of Page Curation on the English Wikipedia at the end of September 2012. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Curation This should help new page patrollers. * There's a roadmap for improvements to tools for admins: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development/Roadmap

And a few more items of interest:

* Changes in our analytics system to improve the accuracy of the active editors metric https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/31/improving-the-accuracy-of-the-active-e... * What our new analytics team is doing (the new monthly report card and a data services platform to help us answer questions about our community): https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/07/25/meet-the-analytics-team/ * Progress by the i18n team on the Universal Language Selector & Milkshake, and WebFonts https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/24/webfonts-in-uls-translation-rally/

I also ran into a little bit of confusion yesterday regarding Scribunto, the MediaWiki extension that will allow people to create templates in Lua instead of wikitext. People thought it was about to be deployed on lots of wikis. It's still way early in development, and will not be enabled on most Wikimedia wikis anytime soon. Right now I'm clarifying the information on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua_scripting -- please feel free to reply and tell me what sort of information you'll be wanting.

Thanks!