Hi,
The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in June 2014 is now available.
Wiki version: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/June Blog version: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/
We're also proposing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this report that does not assume specialized technical knowledge: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/June/summar...
Below is the HTML text of the report.
As always, feedback is appreciated on the usefulness of the report and its summary, and on how to improve them.
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Major news in June include:
- the release of the new Wikipedia for Android app https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/06/25/revamped-wikipedia-app-now-available-on-android/, preceded by its beta version https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/06/05/new-wikipedia-android-app-beta/; - the decision to move away from Bugzilla in favor of Phabricator https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/06/10/on-our-way-to-phabricator/; - A new tablet view for Wikimedia sites https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/06/17/wikimedia-sites-get-a-new-look-on-tablets/ .
*Note: We’re also providing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this report https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/June/summary 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 https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#q,status:open+project:%255Emediawiki.*,n,z went from around 1440 to about 1575. - About 14 shell requests https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Shell_requests were processed.
Contents
- Upcoming events https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#Upcoming_events - Personnel https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#Personnel - Work with us https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#Work_with_us - Announcements https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#Announcements - Technical Operations https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#Technical_Operations - Features Engineering https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#Features_Engineering - Editor retention: Editing tools https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#Editor_retention:_Editing_tools - Core Features https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#Core_Features - Growth https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#Growth - Support https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#Support - Mobile https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#Mobile - Language Engineering https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#Language_Engineering - Platform Engineering https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#Platform_Engineering - MediaWiki Core https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#MediaWiki_Core - Quality assurance https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#Quality_assurance - Multimedia https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#Multimedia - Engineering Community Team https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#Engineering_Community_Team - Analytics https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#Analytics - Wikidata https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#Wikidata - Future https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/15/engineering-report-june-2014/#Future
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.
- VP of Engineering http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qSa9VfwQ&cs=9UL9Vfwt&page=Job%20Description&j=ods8Xfwu - Software Engineer – Front-end (VisualEditor) http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qSa9VfwQ&cs=9UL9Vfwt&page=Job%20Description&j=o8jyYfwH - Software Engineer – Services http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qSa9VfwQ&cs=9UL9Vfwt&page=Job%20Description&j=oAhYYfwx - Software Engineer – Internationalization http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qSa9VfwQ&cs=9UL9Vfwt&page=Job%20Description&j=oH3gXfwH - Software Engineer – Front-end http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qSa9VfwQ&cs=9UL9Vfwt&page=Job%20Description&j=oxgWYfwr - Software Engineer – Mobile – iOS http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qSa9VfwQ&cs=9UL9Vfwt&page=Job%20Description&j=ovD8YfwY - QA Tester http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qSa9VfwQ&cs=9UL9Vfwt&page=Job%20Description&j=oKIUYfw4 - Software Engineer – Full Stack http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qSa9VfwQ&cs=9UL9Vfwt&page=Job%20Description&j=orQ2Yfw1 - Product Manager http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qSa9VfwQ&cs=9UL9Vfwt&page=Job%20Description&j=oQf8YfwV - Product Manager – Language Engineering http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qSa9VfwQ&cs=9UL9Vfwt&page=Job%20Description&j=osiMYfwe - Operations Security Engineer http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qSa9VfwQ&cs=9UL9Vfwt&page=Job%20Description&j=oT6cYfwT - Project Coordinator – Engineering http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qSa9VfwQ&cs=9UL9Vfwt&page=Job%20Description&j=oUleZfwc - Partner Manager – Wikipedia Zero (Latin America) http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qSa9VfwQ&cs=9UL9Vfwt&page=Job%20Description&j=o7G3Yfwy
Announcements
- Elliot Eggleston joined the Wikimedia Foundation as a Features Engineer in the Fundraising-Tech team (announcement http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014-June/077111.html).
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 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Features_engineering Editor retention: Editing tools
*VisualEditor https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor* In June, the VisualEditor team provided a new way to see the context of links and other items when you edit to make this easier, worked on the performance and stability of the editor so that users could more swiftly and reliably make changes to articles, and made some improvements to features focussed on increasing their simplicity and understandability, fixing 94 bugs and tickets https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?list_id=326277&order=priority%2Cbug_severity&product=VisualEditor&query_format=advanced&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=VE-deploy-2014-06-05&target_milestone=VE-deploy-2014-06-12&target_milestone=VE-deploy-2014-06-19&target_milestone=VE-deploy-2014-06-26. The editor now shows with a highlight where dragging-and-dropping content will put it, and works for any content, not just for images. The citation and reference tools had some minor adjustments to guide the user on how they operate, based on feedback and user testing. A lot of fixes to issues with windows opening and closing, and especially the link editing tool, were made, alongside the save dialog, categories, the language editing tool, table styling, template display and highlights on selected items. The mobile version of VisualEditor, currently available for alpha testers, moved towards release, fixing a number of bugs and improving performance. Work to support languages made some significant gains, and work to support Internet Explorer continued. The new visual interface for writing TemplateData was enabled on the Catalan and Hebrew Wikipedias. The deployed version of the code was updated five times in the regular release cycle ( 1.24-wmf8 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.24/wmf8#VisualEditor , 1.24-wmf9 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.24/wmf9#VisualEditor, 1.24-wmf10 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.24/wmf10#VisualEditor and 1.24-wmf11 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.24/wmf11#VisualEditor).
*Parsoid https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid*
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 http://lintbridge.wmflabs.org/_html/issues/ 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
*Flow https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow/Project_information*
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=File:Flow_update_for_WMF_Metrics_presentation.pdf&page=5
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flow_update_for_WMF_Metrics_presentation.pdf?page=5
Presentation slides on Flow from themetrics meeting for June https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF_Metrics_and_activities_meetings/2014-07
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
*Growth https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth* In June, the Growth team completed analysis https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anonymous_editor_acquisition/Signup_CTA_experiment of its first round of A/B testing of signup invitations for anonymous editors https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anonymous_editor_acquisition/Signup_invites on English, French, German, and Italian Wikipedias. Based on these results, the team prepared a second version https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anonymous_editor_acquisition/Signup_invites_v2 to be A/B tested. Additionally, the team released a major refactor of the GuidedTour extension https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GuidedTour‘s API, as well as design enhancements like animations, a new CSS-based way of drawing guider elements, updated button styles, and more. The team also launched GuidedTours on three new Wikipedias: Arabic, Norwegian, and Bengali. Support
*Wikipedia Education Program https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program* This month, the Education Program extension again received incremental improvements and bugfixes. Sage Ross of the Wiki Education Foundation https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Education_Foundation submitted two patches: one that adds information to the API for listing students, and another that lets anonymous users compare course versions. Also, a student from Facebook Open Academy fixed a usability issue in the article assignment feature. Mobile https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_mobile_engineering
*Wikimedia Apps https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps*
The Mobile Apps team released the new Android Wikipedia app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia 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.
*Mobile web projects https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_web_projects* This month, the mobile web team finished work on styling the mobile site to provide a better experience for tablet users. We began redirecting users on tablets, who had previously been sent to the desktop version of all Wikimedia projects, to the new tablet-optimized mobile site on June 17. Our early data suggests that this change had a positive impact on new user signup and new editor activation numbers. We also continued work on VisualEditor features (the linking and citation dialogs) in preparation for releasing the option to edit via VisualEditor to tablet users in the next three months.
*Wikipedia Zero https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero*
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 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_engineering
*Language tools https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Language_tools* The Translate extension received numerous bug fixes, including fixing workflow states transitions for fundraising banners.
*Content translation https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation* The team added support for link adaptation, worked on the infrastructure for machine translation support using Apertium and on hiding templates, images and references that cannot be easily translated. They also prepared for deployment on beta wikis and made multiple bug fixes and design tweaks. Platform Engineering https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineering MediaWiki Core
*HHVM https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/HHVM* The team has been running HHVM on a single test machine (“osmium”) for the purpose of testing the job queue in production. The machine is only put into production on a very limited basis, while enough bugs are found to keep the team busy for a while, and then it’s disabled again as the team fixes those bugs. We’re planning on having HHVM running on a few job runner machines (continually) in July, then turning our focus toward running HHVM on the main application servers, taking a similar strategy.
*Release & QA https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_and_QA_Team* The Release and QA Team had their mid-quarter check-in on June 27. Phabricator work is progressing nicely. The latest MediaWiki tarball release (1.23) was made and the second RFP started and is close to completion. We are moving to only WMF-hosted Jenkins for all jobs, and we are working with the MediaWiki Core and the Operations teams on HHVM-related integration (both for deployment and for the Beta Cluster).
*Admin tools development https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development* Work on this project is currently being completed along with the SUL finalisation https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/SUL_finalisation project, including the global rename tool (bug 14862 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14862) and cleaning up the CentralAuth database (bug 66535 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66535).
*Search https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Search* CirrusSearch is running as the default search engine on all but the highest traffic wikis at this point. Nik Everett and Chad Horohoe plan to migrate most of the remaining wikis in July, leaving only the German and English Wikipedia to migrate in August.
*Auth systems https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Auth_systems* Continued work on the SOA Authentication RFC https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/SOA_Authentication and Phabricator OAuth integration. We made OAuth compatible with HHVM and made other minor bug fixes.
*SUL finalisation https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/SUL_finalisation*
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 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security_auditing_and_response* We released MediaWiki 1.23.1 to prevent multiple issues caused by loading external SVG resources. We also performed security reviews of the Wikidata property suggester, Extension:Mantle https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Mantle for mobile/Flow, and Flow’s templating rewrite. Quality assurance
*Quality Assurance https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance* This month saw significant improvements to the MediaWiki-Vagrant development environments from new WMF staff member Dan Duvall. We have completed support for running the full suite of browser tests on a Vagrant instance under the VisualEditor role. In the near future, we will extend that support to the MobileFrontend and Flow Vagrant roles, as well as making general improvements to Vagrant overall. Another great QA project is from Google Summer of Code intern Vikas Yaligar, who is using the browser test framework to automate taking screen captures of aspects of VisualEditor (or any other feature) in many different languages, for the purpose of documentation and translation.
*Browser testing https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance/Browser_testing* After two years of using a third-party host to run browser test builds in Jenkins, this month we have completed the migration of those builds to Jenkins hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Hosting our browser test builds ourselves gives us more control over every aspect of running the browser tests, as well as the potential to run them faster than previously possible. Particular thanks to Antoine Musso, whose work made it possible. Simultaneously, we have also ported all of the remaining tests from the /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
*Multimedia https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia*
In June, the multimedia team released Media Viewer v0.2 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer on all Wikimedia wikis https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Release_Plan#Large_Wikis, with over 20 million image views per day http://multimedia-metrics.wmflabs.org/graphs/mmv 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 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Multimedia/Media_Viewer#How_can_I_view_the_original_image_in_full-resolution.3F , view images in different sizes https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Multimedia/Media_Viewer#How_can_I_view_images_in_different_sizes.3F , show more image information https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Multimedia/Media_Viewer#How_can_I_view_more_information.3F , edit image file pages https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Multimedia/Media_Viewer#How_can_I_edit_or_discuss_an_image.3F, as well as easy disable tools for anonymous users https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Multimedia/Media_Viewer#How_can_I_turn_off_this_feature.3F and editors.
This month, we started working on the Structured Data https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Structured_Data project with the Wikidata team https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/, 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 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/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 https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards?favorite_id=11321&view=Technical+Debt+Wall 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 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Meetings/Next_Cycle_3_Q4_2013-14 and other discussions of our development goals, and led an extensive review of user feedback for Media Viewer https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheets/d/14LnDVfgHrk4ZbFF1jm8GiI_qSolKxRYYhSZ3enJCgys/edit#gid=0 and UploadWizard https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheets/d/1AUKUODbKVQMtFgTbCm8l3Pee7l7xbpxf9idx_3PsCXE/edit#gid=0 with new researcher Abbey Ripstra. Community liaison Keegan Peterzell introduced Media Viewer and responded to user comments throughout the product’s worldwide release https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Release_Plan. To learn more about our work, we invite you to join our discussions on the multimedia mailing list https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/multimedia. Engineering Community Team https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team
*Bug management https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management* Apart from gruntwork (handling new tickets; prioritizing tickets; pinging on older tickets) and Andre’s main focus on Phabricator https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator, Parent5446, Krinkle and Andre created several requested Bugzilla components https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?bug_id=66704,66803,66875,66924,66977,67299, plus moved ‘MediaWiki skins’ to a Bugzilla product of their own https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66441. In Bugzilla’s codebase, Tony and TTO styled Bugzilla’s Alias field differently https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/124140/, Tony removed the padlock icons for https links in Bugzilla https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59893 and cleaned up the codebase https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/119726, and Odder fixed a small glitch in Bugzilla’s Weekly Summary https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66778 and rendering of custom queries on the Bugzilla frontpage https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/129671/. Numerous older tickets with high priority were triaged on a bugday https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Triage/20140624.
*Phabricator migration https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Migration* Apart from discussions on how to implement certain functionality and settings in Phabricator among team members and stakeholders, Mukunda implemented a MediaWiki OAuth provider in Phabricator (Gerrit changes: 1 https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/139442/,2 https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/139438/; related ticket http://fab.wmflabs.org/T314) and Chase created a Puppet module for Phabricator https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/132505/.
*Mentorship programs https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs*
Google Summer of Code https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2014 and FOSS Outreach Program for Women https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/FOSS_Outreach_Program_for_Women/Round_8 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 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Translate/Mass_migration_tools/Project_updates - Wikidata annotation tool https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_annotation_tool/updates - Email bounce handling to MediaWiki with VERP https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VERP/GSOC_Progress_Rerport - Google Books, Internet Archive, Commons upload cycle https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Books,_Internet_Archive,_Commons_upload_cycle/Progress - UniversalLanguageSelector fonts for Chinese wikis https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector/Fonts_for_Chinese_wikis#Weekly_Report - MassMessage page input list improvements https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MassMessage/Page_input_list_improvements/Progress_reports - Book management in Wikibooks/Wikisource https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Book_management_2014/Progress - Parsoid-based online-detection of broken wikitext https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Hardik95/GSoC_2014_Progress_Report - Usability improvements for the Translate extension https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Kunalgrover05/Progress_Report - A modern, scalable and attractive skin for MediaWiki https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Jack_Phoenix/GSoC_2014 - Automatic cross-language screenshots for user documentation https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Automatic_cross-language_screenshots/progress - Separating skins from core MediaWiki https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Separating_skins_from_core_MediaWiki/Progress - Chemical Markup support for Wikimedia Commons https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Chemical_Markup_support_for_Wikimedia_Commons/Internship_Report - Improving URL citations on Wikimedia https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Mvolz/Weekly_Reports - Historical OpenStreetMap https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:JaimeLyn/Weekly_Reports - Welcoming new contributors to Wikimedia Labs and Tool Labs https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Welcome_to_labs/Progress_Reports - Evaluating, documenting, and improving MediaWiki web API client libraries https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Evaluating_and_Improving_MediaWiki_web_API_client_libraries/Progress_Reports - Feed the Gnomes – Wikidata Outreach https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Thepwnco/OPW_Reporting - Template Matching for RDFIO https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:RDFIO/Template_matching_for_RDFIO/Reports - Switching Semantic Forms Autocompletion to Select2 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Semantic_Forms/Select2_for_autocompletion/Progress_Report - Catalogue for Mediawiki Extensions https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Adi.iiita/Gsoc2014/Report#Weekly_Report - Generic, efficient localisation update service https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LocalisationUpdate/LUv2/Updates .
*Technical communications https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_communications* In addition to ongoing communications support https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_communications/Tech_blog_activity for the engineering staff, Guillaume Paumier https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Guillom focused on information architecture of Wikimedia engineering activities. This notably involved reorganizing the Wikimedia Engineering https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering portal (now linked from mediawiki.org’s sidebar) and creating a status dashboard https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Dashboard that lists the status of all current activities hosted on mediawiki.org. The portal is now also cross-linked with the other main tech spaces (like Tech https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech and Tech News https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News) and team hubs.
*Volunteer coordination and outreach https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Volunteer_coordination_and_outreach* Volunteers and staff are beginning to add or express interest in topics for the 2014 Wikimania Hackathon in London. The WMUK team is working hard to finalize venue logistics so that we can schedule talks and sessions in specific rooms. Everything is on track for a successful (and very large!) Hackathon. Tech Talks held in June:*How, What, Why of WikiFont* https://plus.google.com/events/chpgv8usjd6dn38on07njjk28hg on June 12 and *A Few Python Tips* https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Meetings/2014-06-19 on June 19. A new process has been set up forvolunteers needing to sign an NDA https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_NDA in order to be granted special permissions in Wikimedia servers. On a similar note, we have started a project to implement a Trusted User Tool http://fab.wmflabs.org/project/view/40/ in Phabricator, in order to register editors of Wikimedia projects that have been granted special permissions after signing a community agreement.
*Architecture and Requests for comment process https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_process*
Developers had several meetings https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_meetings on IRC about architectural issues or Requests for comment https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment:
- 2014-06-02 — Discussion https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_meetings/RFC_review_2014-06-02 of Requests for comment/Grid system https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Grid_system; - 2014-06-11 — Discussion https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_meetings/RFC_review_2014-06-11 of several RfCs (lightning round); - 2014-06-13 — Discussion https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_meetings/Security_guidelines_discussion_2014-06-13 of security guidelines draft https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security_for_developers/Architecture; - 2014-06-20 — Discussion https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_meetings/RFC_review_2014-06-20 of revamping MediaWiki’s skin systems: Trevor Parscal’s “Redo skin framework” https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Redo_skin_framework and Bartosz Dziewoński’s “Separating skins from core MediaWiki” work https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65748; - 2014-06-25 — Discussion http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014-June/077227.html of front-end and UX standardization https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UX_standardization.
Analytics https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics
*Wikimetrics https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Wikimetrics* To support Editor Engagement Vital Signs, the team has implemented a new metric: Newly Registered User. There is also a new backup system to preserve user’s reports on cohorts as well as the ability to tag cohorts. A number of bugs have been fixed, including fixing the first run of a recurrent report and preventing the creation of reports with invalid cohorts.
*Data Processing https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Data_Processing* The team has now integrated Data Processing as part of its Development Process. New Stories/Features have been identified and tasked. Also, experimentation with Cloudera Hadoop 5 is complete and we are ready to upgrade the cluster in July.
*Editor Engagement Vital Signs https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Editor_Engagement_Vital_Signs* The ability to run a metric over an entire project (wiki) in Wikimetrics drives us closer to producing data daily for our first Vital Sign. The team has also iterated on the design of the dashboard and navigation. We added a requirement from executives to have a default view when EEVS is loaded. This view would display metrics for the 7 largest Wikipedias.
*EventLogging https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/EventLogging* We fixed a serious bug where cookie data was getting captured in the country column. Saved data was scrubbed of the unwanted information and some old and unused tables were dropped. The team also implemented Throughput Monitoring to help catch potential issues in EventLogging.
*Research and Data https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Research_and_Data*
This month we refined the Editor Model – a proposal to model the main drivers of monthly active editors https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Editor_Model_review.pdf – and expanded the documentation https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Rolling_monthly_active_editor 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 https://trello.com/c/sWoW3yqC/341-tablet-switchover-data-for-the-mobile-team , edit volume, unique editors https://trello.com/c/NsBSDPVo/356-tablet-switchover-edit-volume%7Ctotal, and new editor activation https://trello.com/c/LKVK7RfL/351-tablet-switchover-editor-activation.
We hosted the June 2014 edition https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Research_and_Data/Showcase#June_2014 of the research showcase with two presentations on the effect of early socialization strategies https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moodbar_--_lightweight_socialization_improves_long-term_editor_retention.pdf and on predictive modeling of editor retention https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Active_editor_survival.pdf.
We released wikiclass http://pythonhosted.org/wikiclass/, a library for performing automated quality assessment of Wikipedia articles.
We released longitudinal data on the daily edit volume https://trello.com/c/NIcjLKjd/328-longitudinal-ve-vs-wt-data-all-wikis 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 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Analytics_Quarterly_Review_Q4_2013-14_(Research_and_Data).pdf (Q4-2014) and presented our goals https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Research_and_Data/2014-15_Goals#Q1:_Jul_-_Sep_2014 for the next quarter (Q1-2015). Wikidata https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata
*The Wikidata project is funded and executed by Wikimedia Deutschland https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Deutschland/en.* 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 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:UI_redesign_input 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 http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-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. FutureThe 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. ------------------------------
*This article was written collaboratively by Wikimedia engineers and managers. See revision history https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/June&action=history and associated status pages. A wiki version https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/June is also available.*
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