[Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Wikimedia engineering report, October 2013

Guillaume Paumier gpaumier at wikimedia.org
Tue Nov 12 13:58:12 UTC 2013 

Hi,

The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in October 2013 is now
available.

Wiki version:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/October
Blog version:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/11/12/engineering-report-october-2013/

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/2013/October/summary

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.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Major news in October include:

   - A report on the Open Access Media
Importer<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/21/scientific-multimedia-files-get-a-second-life-on-wikipedia/>,
   a tool that transfers multimedia files from scientific publications to
   Wikimedia Commons;
   - A request for proposals for a new datacenter in the continental
US<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/21/rfp-new-datacenter-continental-us/>,
   published by the Operations team;
   - The creation of the Autonym
Font<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/28/the-autonym-font-for-language-names/>,
   which allows language names to be displayed properly without degrading page
   loading time.

*Note: We're also providing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of
this report
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/October/summary>
that does not assume specialized technical knowledge.*
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 -
Fundraising<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oawpXfwM>
   - Software Engineer -
Growth<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o8NJXfwl>
   - Software Engineer - Core
Features<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o6NJXfwj>
   - Software Engineer - Language
Engineering<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oH3gXfwH>
   - Software Engineer <http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o09WXfwM>
   - Senior Software Engineer - Team
Lead<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oC9OXfwg>
   - Software Engineer Data Analytics (Back
End)<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oLdOXfwt>
   - Dev-Ops Engineer -
SRE<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ocLCWfwf>
   - Ops Engineer - Labs
Contractor<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oIcUXfwv>
   - User Experience
Designer<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oO8OXfwr>

Announcements

   - Ori Livneh transitioned to the Platform Engineering group as Senior
   Performance Engineer
(announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-October/072325.html>
   ).
   - Gergő Tisza joined the Platfom Engineering group as Software Engineer
   on the Multimedia team
(announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/multimedia/2013-October/000007.html>
   ).
   - Leslie Carr and Ryan Lane were both promoted to the position of Senior
   Operations Engineer
(announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-October/072475.html>
   ).
   - Rummana Yasmeen joined the Platfom Engineering group as Software Test
   Engineer on the QA team, working primarily on VisualEditor
(announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-October/072758.html>
   ).
   - Vibha Bamba was promoted to the position of Senior User Experience
   Designer (announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/design/2013-October/001066.html>
   )

Technical Operations

*Site infrastructure*
The team continued to heavily refactor the Puppet configuration: manifests
for MySQL, nginx, SSH, puppetmaster, and several others are now properly
organized as modules. Alexandros Kosiaris has made considerable progress
towards supporting multiple puppetmasters on our cluster, which will
greatly improve Puppet performance.

*Wikimedia Labs <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs>*
Andrew Bogott has been working with Yuvaraj Pandian to get the new proxy
system properly deployed; this will greatly reduce our need to hand out
public IPs to labs users. We're close to hiring a contractor to help with
the upcoming migration of Labs from Tampa to Ashburn. Features
Engineering<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Features_engineering>
Editor
retention: Editing tools

*VisualEditor <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor>*
In October, the VisualEditor team continued to improve the stability and
performance of the system, and add new features. The deployed version of
the code was updated five times
(1.22-wmf20<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf20#VisualEditor>,
1.22-wmf21<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf21#VisualEditor>,
1.22-wmf22<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf22#VisualEditor>,
1.23-wmf1 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.23/wmf1#VisualEditor>and
1.23-wmf2 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.23/wmf2#VisualEditor>).
Beyond fixing bugs, the focus of the team's work this month was to make a
number of large structural changes to make the system more dependable and
extensible, and continue to make some usability improvements. For example,
you now need to press the "delete" key twice to delete a template,
reference or image; the first time, they only become selected, to avoid
accidental deletion of infoboxes and similar content. A new feature,
empowering users to switch from editing in VisualEditor to editing wikitext
directly without having to save the page, was also implemented.

*Parsoid <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid>*
In October, the Parsoid team continued to refine the parser behavior in
edge cases. Performance was improved by increasing the parallelism of API
requests and separating page updates from dependency-triggered updates in
the job queue. The round-trip testing
server<http://parsoid.wmflabs.org:8001/>performance was improved so
that we can now run round-trip tests on 160,000
pages over night. Support for private wikis was also added this month. We
also made additional progress on
Rashomon<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:GWicke/Notes/Storage>,
the revision storage service based on Apache Cassandra. Rashomon is
initially going to be used for implementing HTML and metadata storage for
Parsoid output. Rashomon was deployed on a test cluster and import/write
tests were performed<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:GWicke/Notes/Storage/Cassandra_testing>
.
Core Features

*Notifications <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_%28Notifications%29>*
In October, we released Notifications
worldwide<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Release_Plan_2013#Completed>on
about 800 different sites, including most of the remaining Wikipedia
wikis and 'sister projects'. Fabrice Florin and Keegan Peterzell managed
the community outreach for these final releases, while Benny Situ proceeded
with the technical deployments. Community members we've spoken to generally
find this tool helpful, across languages and world regions. Notifications
are also available on mobile devices, and seem to be adding value on these
platforms as well. We now plan a final release of Notifications on the
German and Italian editions of Wikipedia at the end of November. To learn
more, visit our project hub <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo>,
read the help
page <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Notifications> and join the
discussion on the talk
page<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notifications>
.

*Flow <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal/Project_information>*
In October, the Flow team implemented a new visual design
treatment<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal/Design/FAQ>on the
Flow
prototype <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal/Interactive_Prototype>(currently
hosted on WMF Labs), and we continued to work through the set of
features needed for a minimum viable product (MVP) on Wikipedia. We held an
in-office User Experience
workshop<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal/Team/Meetings/2013-10-15_Flow_workshop>,
primarily with users new to Wikipedia, to get feedback on the usability of
the new design. We're planning to demo the Flow MVP to interested
WikiProjects in November to get more feedback on what's needed for a first
on-Wikipedia trial.
Growth

*Growth <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth>*
In October, the Growth team completed its sixth and final major A/B test of
the GettingStarted <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GettingStarted>and
GuidedTour <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GuidedTour> extensions
for the onboarding new
Wikipedians<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Onboarding_new_Wikipedians>project.
Data
analysis results <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/R:OB6> for this test were
also completed and published, making way for rolling out the winning
version on non-English Wikipedias in November. This month, the team also
completed background research and early designs for its upcoming work
on anonymous
editor acquisition<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anonymous_editor_acquisition>and
Wikipedia
article creation <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_article_creation>
.
Support

*2013 Wikimedia fundraiser
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/2013_Wikimedia_fundraiser>*
The fundraising team has been steadily ramping up to the big English
fundraiser, and so the fundraising tech team has been transitioning into
their usual year-end fundraising monitoring and support role. At the end of
October, we went in to a feature freeze for CentralNotice, and have been
concentrating on bugfixes with the intent of increasing stability on the
payments cluster and in the rest of the donation pipeline. We have also
started planning for the international fundraising campaigns targeted for
early 2014.

*Wikipedia Education Program
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program>*
This month, we fixed several bugs in the Education Program extension and
added one much-needed UI feature. More improvements are in the pipeline.
For now, we're focusing on issues that are not linked to the extension's
lack of integration with ContentHandler, and on features that might carry
over to a new version of the extension. We've also begun the groundwork for
redesigning the UX and broadening the extension's scope.
Mobile <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering>

*Commons App <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Commons>*
Many changes were made to the iOS Commons app in October. Users can now
select the license among the most common ones, and swipe to delete
categories on yet-to-be-uploaded images. A number of visual and interface
improvements have been made, including on the settings page and the image
details slider, notably for iOS 7 compatibility. Icon consistency has been
improved throughout the app. The app now also has better
internationalization support (via Autolayout), as well as better landscape
and iPad support.

*Wikipedia Zero <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero>*
This month, the team released a wide array of features and enhancements.
Part of the work focused on reducing accidental data charges, for example
by adding interstitials and suppressing UI chrome icons. The latter change
caused a 30-minute outage of JavaScript and CSS assets on Wikidata.

We started redirecting ineligible access attempts against subdomains
zero.wikipedia.org to a unified warning page; this will reduce residual
content in search engine caches, and reduce charges for users accidentally
visiting zero.wikipedia.org subdomains while off participating networks.

We added support for partner self-management of configuration for
JSON-oriented users; this will be enhanced with stage gating before any
actual push to production.
Last, we nearly finalized IP address zero-rating lists (with the support of
the Operations team), and we've also started working on Wikipedia Zero
support for all Wikimedia projects.

*Mobile web projects <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_web_projects>*
The mobile web team has been focusing on a variety of new features, as well
as running tests and gathering metrics on new and new-ish mobile editors.
The team has also been working on general design enhancements to improve
the user experience and make the look and feel consistent across all
aspects of the mobile experience.

Feature highlights from the past month include: a better AbuseFilter
support for mobile editing, early experimentation around integrating
VisualEditor with MobileFrontend for tablets, client-side performance
enhancements, the ability to 'thank' from the watchlist, and Captcha
support for mobile editing.
In beta, 'Near this page' is now available, as well as user profiles and
'Keep Going' (a series of calls to action for new editors).
Language Engineering<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_engineering>
The
Language Engineering team worked on building a new Main Page for
translatewiki.net, the primary translation platform for MediaWiki projects.
This includes a new sign-in screen and project displays. A special feature
is also being introduced for new translators through which they can provide
a limited set of translations for evaluation. As part of the enhancements
towards Universal Language Selector (ULS), a new font has been
developed<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/28/the-autonym-font-for-language-names/>for
displaying Language Names in their own scripts. This is known as the
Autonym font and contains only the characters needed for the language
names. Significantly small in size, this font will soon be deployed on
Wikimedia projects. The team also worked on fixing a font inheritance issue
for the edit area (bug
53734<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53734>
). The monthly release<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-i18n/2013-October/000762.html>of
the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB) was also completed. The
team prepared for the open-source language
summit<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Language_portal/Pune_LanguageSummit_November_2013/Details>to
be held in Pune, India on November 18−19 in collaboration with Red Hat
and other open-source internationalization developers. Platform
Engineering<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineering>
MediaWiki
Core

*MediaWiki 1.22 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/Roadmap>*
The last deployment from the 1.22 MediaWiki release was on October 24. To
see all the changes that occurred during the 1.22 development cycle, see
the main 1.22 release <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22> page
or the RELEASE NOTES<https://git.wikimedia.org/blob/mediawiki%2Fcore.git/REL1_22/RELEASE-NOTES-1.22>file.
Final release of MediaWiki 1.22 is expected to be November
29<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Release_management/Release_timeline>
.

*MediaWiki 1.23 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.23/Roadmap>*
The first deployment using the newly-branched 1.23 version of
MediaWiki<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.23/wmf1>was
deployed to Wikimedia servers on October 24.

*Site performance and architecture
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Site_performance_and_architecture>*
We implemented logging, aggregation & graphing of the VisualEditor DOM load
& save timing. We also rolled out mw.inspect, a library for inspecting
static asset metrics. We configured stable URLs and improved cache headers
for font resources, and rolled out a localStorage module caching to test
wikis and the beta cluster.

*Admin tools development
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development>*
This activity is still officially on hold. However, some development of the
global rename user tool is under way at
gerrit:92468<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/92468>
.

*Search <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Search>*
In October, CirrusSearch was deployed as a secondary search engine to
Wikidata, all Wikivoyage wikis, and Wikipedia in Bengali. It became the
primary search engine on Wiktionary in Italian, Wikipedia in Catalan and
Wikisource in English. In November, we plan to deploy many more wikis
including some larger than the Catalan Wikipedia. To expand to those larger
wikis, we've negotiated some new hardware that should be deployed mid month.

*Auth systems <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Auth_systems>*
We continued to refine the OAuth UX with the design team, and completed all
major development tasks for the initial OAuth product. The first
third-party application approved to use OAuth, "Gerrit Patch Uploader", was
successfully used by several end users. We plan to finish the OAuth
deployment in November.

*Wikimania Scholarship app
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimania_Scholarship_app>*
A two-week cleanup sprint began on October 23, with the goal of having a
functioning version of the existing application running in Labs with major
code cleanliness and security concerns addressed. At the close of October,
approximately half the listed tasks were completed, but these tasks
encompass only about one third of the total work. The project should be in
good shape for a progress review around November 8.

*Security auditing and response
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security_auditing_and_response>*
We responded to several issues reported in core and extensions. An
emergency password reset was put into place to address a private data
security issue<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/October_2013_private_data_security_issue>
.
Quality assurance

*Quality Assurance <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance>*
In October the Quality Assurance project brought on a new software tester
for VisualEditor, Rummana Yasmeen, who became productive quickly, reporting
a number of issues and validating a VE deployment. QA spent a significant
amount of time with the WMF Language team, using automated browser tests to
find issues with the UniversalLanguageSelector and other Language software.
QA continues to expand the utility of the beta labs test environment,
supporting the new Flow extension there, and increasing the role of beta
for deployments. Membership in the QA mailing list continues to grow, and
October saw more contributions to the automated tests from volunteers. QA
will participate in the Google Code In project as well.

*Beta cluster <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Beta_cluster>*

*Continuous integration
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Continuous_integration>*
October has been dedicated to consolidating the Jenkins configuration to
make it easier to edit. Most actions are now handled by shell scripts under
integration/jenkins.git:/bin; editing the scripts doesn't require updating
Jenkins jobs. The second slave server has been added to production and is
successfully running PHPUnit tests. The packaging of dependencies required
to upgrade Zuul has been completed, and Antoine Musso now has a version
working in Labs. Finally, we investigated the possibility of running the
browser tests whenever a change is submitted in Gerrit; that work is still
in progress. Thanks to Carl
Fürstenberg<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AzaToth>'s
work during the Summer, we are now able to build some Debian packages
straight into Jenkins using a dedicated instance and the Jenkins Debian
glue scripts <http://jenkins-debian-glue.org/>. The jobs are listed in
Jenkins <https://integration.wikimedia.org/ci/view/Ops-DebGlue/> under the
Ops-DebGlue view.

*Browser testing
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance/Browser_testing>*
October saw a major change to the architecture of the browser tests. Since
they are now in many different repositories (VisualEditor,
UniversalLanguageSelector, MobileFrontend, Flow, etc.), we consolidated the
code shared among the various tests in all the repositories into a single
library. This allows all the tests, present and future, to use the best and
most up-to-date infrastructure. As for the tests themselves, we expanded
coverage and identified issues for VisualEditor, Flow, gadgets, Language
features, MobileFrontend, and more.
Engineering community team

*Bug management <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management>*
Bugzilla now offers a new guided bug entry
form<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Wikimedia&component=Bugzilla&format=guided>which
will make creating good bug reports easier for newcomers. Bugzilla
now also displays metadata
changes<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47256#c11>of a
bug report inline for all logged-in users, so they can see in the
comments who changed a value of a field (without clicking on "History").
Daniel Zahn upgraded Wikimedia Bugzilla to latest version
4.2.7<http://www.bugzilla.org/releases/4.2.7/release-notes.html>.
Legoktm mass-imported about 400 Pywikibot
tickets<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52692>from
Sourceforge to Bugzilla. On a related note, Amir ran a PyWikibot
Bug Triage <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Triage/20131024>resulting
in nearly 100 tickets receiving updates. Furthermore, Andre
Klapper investigated Wikimedia Bugzilla's customizations in CSS and code in
order to clean up and sync with the upstream code base, to simplify current
maintenance and also make a potential future upgrade of Wikimedia Bugzilla
from version 4.2 to 4.4 easier.

*Mentorship programs <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs>*
We presented the summary of GSoC 2013 and FOSS OPW round
6<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GSoC_2013_%26_FOSS_OPW_Round_6.pdf>at
the Wikimedia Metrics Meeting. The document about lessons
learned in mentorship
programs<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Lessons_learned>was
updated. Wikimedia applied to Google
Code-In <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-In> and was
successfully accepted on November 1. We opened the call for candidates for FOSS
Outreach Program for Women - Round
7<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/FOSS_Outreach_Program_for_Women>
.

*Technical communications
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_communications>*
Besides ongoing communications support for the engineering staff, Guillaume
Paumier <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Guillom> published three
issues of the Tech newsletter
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News>in October, and started a
list
of open tasks<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_communications/What_you_can_do>related
to technical communications, available for anyone to work on,
primarily in preparation for Google
Code-In<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-In>
.

*Volunteer coordination and outreach
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Volunteer_coordination_and_outreach>*
Our proposal for a Wiki devroom at
FOSDEM<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Events/FOSDEM>was accepted and
we launched the Call
for participation<https://lists.fosdem.org/pipermail/wikis-devroom/2013-October/000000.html>.
On tech community metrics <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_metrics>,
we obtained first results of the *Community metrics: Who contributes
code*<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_metrics#Who_contributes_code>key
progress indicator. We facilitated the MediaWiki
1.22 Release Plan tech
talk<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Meetings/2013-10-09>and the Flow
UX Workshop <http://www.meetup.com/wikimedia-tech/events/141845782/>meet-up.
The list of participants of the Architecture
Summit 2014 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_Summit_2014> was
published. We also experimented with a monthly cycle of Engineering
Community Team meetings<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team/Meetings>
.
Multimedia

*Multimedia <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia>*
In October, we continued to expand our multimedia
team<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia>and hired Gergő
Tisza <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tgr> as software engineer. Mark
Holmquist worked with Gergő to develop a first beta version of the Media
Viewer <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer>,
which displays images in larger size or full screen; this work was based on
designs by Pau Giner, May Tee-Galloway and Jared Zimmerman.

We also completed development on the Beta
Features<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/About_Beta_Features>program,
which invites users to try out new features before they are
released for everyone. A first version of both products is now ready for
testing by logged in users on
MediaWiki.org<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures>(to
try new features, click on the small 'Beta' link next to your
'Preferences').

We plan to release the Beta Features program in coming days to Wikimedia
Commons and Meta-Wiki, then to all wikis
worldwide<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Beta_Features/Release_Plan>at
the end of November. Fabrice Florin managed the development of both
projects, and updated our multimedia plans to prepare for roundtable
discussions <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Roundtables> with community
members next month.
Bryan Davis started work on improving the thumbnail pipeline and guided the
development of an upcoming GLAM Toolset for batch uploads by museum
curators. To discuss these features and keep up with our work, we invite
you to join the new multimedia mailing
list<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/multimedia>.
We are also recruiting for a senior software
engineer<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ouLnWfwi&c=qSa9VfwQ>position
on our team.
Analytics <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics>

*Kraken <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Kraken>*
The team designed and implemented multiple data center configuration
support for Kafka (message bus). A bug involving buffer space allocation
was exposed and fixed in the Varnish module, and infrastructure work done
on automated data ingestion and partitioning. Product Analyst Oliver Keyes
did some exploratory work with Hive and provided feedback to the
Development team on ease of use and use cases.

*Wikimetrics <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Wikimetrics>*
The Threshold metric was implemented, and numerous bugs were fixed.

*Data Quality <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Data_Quality>*
We created dashboards for several Wikipedia Zero partners (Orange
Madagascar, Bangalink, Umniah Jordan), and identified and fixed Wikipedia
Zero data issues in collaboration with the Zero team.

*Research and Data
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Research_and_Data>*
This month, we continued to support *Growth* and *Mobile* as the team's
focus areas for this quarter. We published the
results<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:OB6>of the latest
*GettingStarted* test run by the Growth team, we completed the cohort
analysis<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Mobile_editor_engagement/Calls_to_action>for
Mobile user acquisition and we worked with the Mobile team to prepare
the launch a new test for new user
activation<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Mobile_editor_engagement/Tutorial_test>,
currently underway.

We analyzed active editor trends to determine whether the September 2013
total active editor
data<http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm>represented
an anomalous change from seasonality and the long-term trend,
and concluded that this was not the case. The results of this analysis call
for the need to apply time series analysis and forecasting methods to other
key performance indicators that the Foundation publishes on a daily or
monthly basis.

We continued to work with the analytics engineers to provide requirements
for Wikimetrics (with a particular focus on UserMetrics feature
parity<https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/analytics/wiki/Wikimetrics_Feature_Parity>),
and to perform data QA and validate the output of the application for
metrics that were recently implemented.

We completed a round of consultations with internal stakeholders to
identify research needs of each team in the organization and determine
their priority. We
presented<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Analytics_Quarterly_Review_Q2_2013_%28Research_and_Data%29.pdf>a
review of our activities for Q1 and plans for Q2 at the Analytics
Quarterly meeting. We identified "metric standardization" as one of the
goals the team will focus on in this quarter.
We organized<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Labs2/Hackathons/November_9th,_2013>and
announced<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/17/join-inaugural-wiki-research-hackathon-november-9/>the
inaugural Wiki Research Hackathon, a global event hosted in 8
locations
in 5 countries, bringing together Wikimedia researchers, academics and
community members to work on wiki research projects. The hackathon — the
first event organized in the context of the
Labs2<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Labs2>initiative — will
take place on November 9, 2013.
Kiwix <http://www.kiwix.org>

*The Kiwix project is funded and executed by Wikimedia CH
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CH>.*
We have released a new version (1.4) of Kiwix for
Android<https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwixmobile>;
besides other improvements, we have introduced a localized user interface.
We continue our efforts to speed-up the ZIM throughput; Wikipedia is now
available offline in more than 60
languages<http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Wikipedia_in_all_languages>.
The last flash drives from our Deaddrops &
Geocaching<http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Deaddrops_%26_Geocaching>pilot
were sent; we hope to get them walled up before the end of the year.
We have also submitted a few proposals about Kiwix for Android for the Google
Code-In program<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-In#Kiwix_for_Android>
.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>.*
At the beginning of the month, Lydia
Pintscher<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Lydia_Pintscher_%28WMDE%29>took
over the product management for Wikidata. In a blog
entry<http://blog.wikimedia.de/2013/10/01/pushing-wikidata-to-the-next-level/>,
she elaborated her goals for the future. The developers continued their
work on the numbers datatype, sorting of statements and simple queries. In
addition, a prototype for a multilingual picture
dictionary<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Multilingual_Picture_dictionary>was
published, as well as a tool to visualize
time and location
data<http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/tempo_spatial_display.html>from
Wikidata and another one to build
lists <http://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/?p=97> based on data in
Wikidata. October
was also the month to celebrate Wikidata's first birthday. Enjoy some essays,
interviews and more
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:First_Birthday>from the
community.
Future 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/2013-14_Goals>*,
listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts.


-- 
Guillaume Paumier
Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation
https://donate.wikimedia.org
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