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

Guillaume Paumier gpaumier at wikimedia.org
Wed Oct 2 18:54:54 UTC 2013 

Hi,

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

Wiki version:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/September
Blog version:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/02/engineering-report-september-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/September/summary

Below is the full 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 September include:

   - A recap on how our engineers worked with
volunteers<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/03/language-support-at-wikimania-2013-in-hong-kong/>to
improve language tools at Wikimania;
   - A call for wikis willing to experiment with using HTTPS for all
users<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/10/https-by-default-beta-program/>
   ;
   - A recap on how our new image scaling
system<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/12/vipsscaler-implementation-wikimedia-sites/>was
implemented by a volunteer developer;
   - A call for technical
projects<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/16/call-for-wikimedia-tech-projects-needing-contributors/>that
could for instance be completed as part of our mentorship programs;
   - Design experiments to show the community behind Wikipedia
articles<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/25/humanizing-wikipedia-editing-mobile-experiments/>on
mobile devices;
   - Another release of the MediaWiki Language Extension
Bundle<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/26/get-introduced-to-internationalization-engineering-through-the-mediawiki-language-extension-bundle/>,
   with an explanation of how it's put together;
   - The completion of the sixth round of the Outreach Program for
Women<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/30/foss-outreach-program-for-women-success-and-new-round/>
   ;
   - A recap of the launch of
Notifications<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/01/notifications-launch-on-more-wikipedias/>to
more language versions of Wikipedia, and their impact.

*Note: We're also providing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of
this report<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/September/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.

   - Vice President of Engineering: Search Firm Engagement -
Engineering<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oDVOXfw3>
   - 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>
   - Senior Software Engineer -
Multimedia<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oC9OXfwg>
   - QA Engineer - Manual Testing - Visual
Editor<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oNeQXfwy>
   - FE Developer -
Analytics<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=olyGXfwg>
   - Software Engineer Data Analytics (Back
End)<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oLdOXfwt>
   - Product Manager -
Platform<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o3vtXfwI>
   - 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

   - Kartik Mistry joined the Language Engineering team as Software
   Engineer (announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-September/071618.html>
   ).
   - Sucheta Ghoshal joined the Language Engineering team as associate
   software engineer
(announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-September/071620.html>
   ).
   - Kaity Hammerstein joined the User experience team as Associate UX
   Designer (announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/design/2013-September/000871.html>
   ).
   - Aaron Halfaker joined the Analytics team as Research Analyst (
   announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/analytics/2013-September/001021.html>
   ).
   - Oliver Keyes transitioned to the role of Product Analyst
(announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-September/071988.html>
   ).
   - Dan Garry joined the Product development team as Associate Product
   Manager for Platform.
(announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-September/071988.html>
   ).
   - Nick Wilson joined the Product development team as Community Liaison (
   announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-September/071988.html>
   ).

Technical Operations

*Site infrastructure*
Work to refactor and modularize our Puppet repository continues: this
month, lots of dead code was removed, and some tiny miscellaneous classes
aggregated with more relevant components. Work on git-deploy has also
restarted this month. Changes were made to make git-deploy easier to
configure and to make initial setup of new repositories and setup of new
minion targets completely automated.Many of the services within the Tampa
data center have already migrated to EQIAD, however there remain several
smaller, unique, or in some cases orphaned services that we still need to
document or scope prior to the closure of this center. Several of these
services may no longer be required, and we expect there to be some
discussion about how they are migrated or maintained going forward.
Additionally, several of these systems need to be moved to the new
secondary data center (see below), and will be waiting until infrastructure
is in place to do so. Our goal is to try to have these systems moved before
the end of 2013, but we'll continue to have equipment in this location for
as long as necessary to ensure stability of our network.For EQIAD, the
ordering process is underway to complete our fourth row of machines, and
ensure we have capacity to take in systems that will be arriving from the
sunsetting of the Tampa data center, as well as handle our expected growth.For
ULSFO, after a long initial setup, initial bootstrapping and configuration
of the systems is finally underway. Over the next several weeks, we will be
configuring, testing, and redirecting traffic at this location.Lastly, work
has begun on a definition and RFP process for a new, secondary data center,
likely on the west coast of the US. We will send further updates on this
project once our RFPs are complete and we begin the selection process. Our
hope is to have this facility ready to take systems from Tampa by the end
of 2013.

*Data Dumps <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Projects/Data_Dumps>*
The GSoC incremental
dumps<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Svick/Incremental_dumps>project
has drawn to a close, but
User:Svick <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Svick> will still be
around. There's work to be
done<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54633>before this
can go into production, as well as extensive testing and code
review from folks with C++ expertise. If you want to help, check the
repository<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/projects/operations/dumps/incremental,dashboards/default:recent>
.

*Wikimedia Labs <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs>*
The DNS infrastructure of the Labs has been overhauled and much improved.
The hardware switch to replace Labs' NFS server unreliable hardware is
ready, and should be enabled this week. Yuvaraj Pandian has created and
deployed a new instance proxy with an OpenStack-style API. The new proxy is
in use for a small number of instances right now, but will be expanded to
most instances in the future. The new proxy uses nginx with Lua code to
read its configuration of virtual hosts from redis and can handle arbitrary
URLs to arbitrary back-ends. Features
Engineering<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Features_engineering>
Editor
retention: Editing tools

*VisualEditor <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor>*
In September, the VisualEditor team continued their work to improve the
editor and roll it out to additional wikis. The deployed version of the
code was updated four times
(1.22-wmf16<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf16#VisualEditor>,
1.22-wmf17,<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf17#VisualEditor>
1.22-wmf18<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf18#VisualEditor>and
1.22-wmf19<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf19#VisualEditor>).
The focus in the team's work this month was to continue to improve the
stability and performance of the system, fix a number of bugs uncovered by
the community, and make some usability improvements.

*Parsoid <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid>*
We fixed a few bugs reported in production, added performance stats to our
RT-testing framework (and discovered a couple bugs and fixed them as a
result) and did some long-standing cleanup work in our codebase. September
also saw the all-staff meeting at the WMF offices in San Francisco which
gave us the opportunity to work in person and discuss some proposals. We
planned out an implementation strategy for language variant support, and
started researching and experimenting with HTML storage options which is
required for a number of projects in our roadmap.
Core Features

*Notifications <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_%28Notifications%29>*
In September, we released Notifications on more
Wikipedias<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/01/notifications-launch-on-more-wikipedias/>,
such as the Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Ukrainian and
Vietnamese. Fabrice Florin and Keegan Peterzell managed community relations
for these new releases, and are reaching out to more projects. Our next
deployments will take place every other
Tuesday<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Release_Plan_2013>.
Developer Benny Situ was responsible for these deployments and fixed a
number of bugs, with the help of Erik Benhardson and Matthias Mullie.
Community response has been very positive so far, across languages and
regions. For each release, we reached out to community members weeks in
advance, inviting them to translate and discuss the tool with their peers.
As a result, we have now formed productive relationships with volunteer
groups in each project, and are very grateful for their generous support.
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>*
This month, we continued back-end work on the Flow first release –
integrating with the recent changes table (to ensure that users will be
able to monitor Flow boards via the watchlist and Special:Recentchanges, in
the same way they monitor wiki pages), mentions and notifications, and an
early experiment with VisualEditor-enabled posting. We also kicked off a
sprint to create a new visual design
treatment<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal/Design#Visual_design_iterations>for
the board and discussions that will work across desktop and mobile
platforms. We are aiming to implement this design next month, in
preparation for several rounds of new user and experienced user feedback
before the first onwiki release.
Growth

*Growth <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth>*
In September, the Growth <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth> team
(formerly known as Editor Engagement Experiments, or E3), primarily worked
on the onboarding new
Wikipedians<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Onboarding_new_Wikipedians>project.
In particular, this included the creation and deployment of two
new guided tours <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Guided_tours> to teach any
new user how to make their first edit, using
wikitext<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikitext>or
VisualEditor <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor>. The guided
tours extension was also deployed to the following language editions of
Wikipedia: Catalan, Hebrew, Hungarian, Malay, Spanish, Swedish, and
Ukrainian.

Along with the renaming, the team held its third Quarterly Review
(minutes<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_reviews/Editor_engagement_experiments/September_2013>are
available), published its 2013–2014
product goals<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2013-14_Goals#Editor_Engagement_-_Growth_Team>,
and shared a new job
opening<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o8NJXfwl&c=qSa9VfwQ>for
two additional software engineers.
In accordance with our 2013-14 goals, the Growth team began research
into modeling
newcomer retention<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newcomer_survival_models>on
Wikipedia, anonymous
editor acquisition<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anonymous_editor_acquisition>,
and article creation
improvement<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Article_creation>
.
Support

*2013 Wikimedia
fundraiser<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/2013_Wikimedia_fundraiser>
*
This month, the team mostly focused on preparing for the upcoming English
fundraiser. Planning began for periodic tests throughout October, which
will help determine the launch date and other aspects of our fundraising
efforts in November and December.
Mobile <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering>

*Wikipedia Zero <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero>*
This month, the team released enhanced URL rewriting and debug flag-only
Edge Side Includes (ESI) banner inclusion to production, supported the Ops
implementation of dynamic MCC/MNC carrier tagging, identified web access
log and user agent anomalies, further analyzed and recommended load
balancer IP address-related changes in support of HTTPS requirements, and
tested JavaScript-based Wikipedia Zero user interface enhancements.

*Mobile web projects <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_web_projects>*
In September, we mostly focused on Tutorial A/B testing, Notifications
overlay in Beta, and adding campaign tracking to MobileFrontend.
Platform Engineering<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineering>
MediaWiki
Core

*MediaWiki 1.22 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/Roadmap>*
In September, MediaWiki 1.22wmf16 through 1.22wmf19 were deployed to the
production Wikimedia Foundation cluster.

*Multimedia <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia>*
In September, we continued to expand our multimedia
team<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia>and updated our
multimedia
plan for the coming
year<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/2013-14_Goals>(see
slides <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Multimedia_Project_Slides.pdf>).
Mark Holmquist continued development on the Media
Viewer<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer>to
improve the image viewing experience, based on designs by May
Tee-Galloway and Jared Zimmerman. We also made good progress on the Beta
Features <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Beta_Features> project, which will
invite users to test, give feedback, and use a range of new features in
real-world settings. We aim to have first beta versions of both products
ready by the end of the October. New employee Bryan Davis started work on
several multimedia platform bugs, and Summer contractor Jan Gerber
completed his work on the TimedMediaHandler extension. 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>.
Last but not least, we are also recruiting for a senior software
engineer<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ouLnWfwi&c=qSa9VfwQ>position
on our team.

*Admin tools development<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development>
*
Although this activity is still officially on hold, several bug fixes were
committed this month by community members. The GSoC project to implement a
simple Bayesian Filter
extension<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Anubhav_iitr/Bayesan_spam_filter>was
successfully completed.

*Search <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Search>*
In September, we expanded the new CirrusSearch back-end to a number of
wikis. Italian Wiktionary, Catalan Wikipedia and English Wikisource are all
running CirrusSearch now. Additionally, we deployed to all "closed" wikis.
Further feature refinement and bugfixing are ongoing, with roughly 2 to 3
deployments a week.

*Auth systems <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Auth_systems>*
The team improved the user interface of OAuth and deployed these changes to
mediawiki.org and test.wikipedia.org. We hope to test and refine the
extension with third party developers, and subsequently deploy to all
wikis. An initial review of
Extension:OpenID<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OpenID>was
performed, and several issues were brought to the attention of the
extension maintainer. Several bugs with CentralAuth/SUL were also fixed.

*Security auditing and
response<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security_auditing_and_response>
*
The team responded to reported issues, and released MediaWiki 1.21.2,
1.20.7 and 1.19.8 security releases to fix several issues in core and
extensions.
Quality assurance

*Quality Assurance <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance>*
This month, we wrapped up Rachel Thomas' Outreach Program for Women
internship successfully. Rachel helped us extend our browser test coverage
of VisualEditor. Besides our ongoing collaboration with Wikimedia
Foundation development projects, we are also engaging the greater community
on the QA mailing list <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/qa>,
where we discuss both code contributions and general QA topics.

*Browser testing<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance/Browser_testing>
*
This month saw significant improvements to both coverage and speed in our
tests for VisualEditor. We are collaborating with the Language team on
browser tests for the UniversalLanguageSelector extension and
Translatewiki.net. We created our first tests for the new Flow feature and
are in the process of supporting Flow fully in a reference test
environment. We presented yet another of our ongoing series of training
sessions, this one live in San Francisco.
Engineering community team

*Bug management <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management>*
This month, beside our usual ongoing work and numerous small
fixes<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?bug_id=37257,53500,53333,52943,52768,49456,53628,53603,53393,52603,50191,54041>to
Bugzilla's code and changes to taxonomy, Legoktm provided a patch to
support
Sourceforge URLs <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54416> in
Bugzilla's "See Also" field, as part of moving pywikipedia bug
reports<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52692>from
SourceForge to Bugzilla. Andre Klapper added
an option <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47256#c11> to
display metadata changes to a bug report (which are available via the
"History" link in a Bugzilla ticket) inline, between the comments. It is
now possible to distinguish the products 'MediaWiki' and 'MediaWiki
extensions' <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40244> in
Bugzilla's search results. Furthermore, work on creating a guided bug entry
form <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36762> for newcomers
continued.

*Mentorship programs <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs>*
18 out of the 20 Google Summer of
Code<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2013>projects have
passed the program evaluation, as well as the one Outreach
Program for Women<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_Program_for_Women/Round_6>project
(read our
announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-September/072081.html>and
blog
post<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/30/foss-outreach-program-for-women-success-and-new-round/>).
These numbers are unprecedented and we have to ensure that they are not
just occasional results but a trend.

Wrap-up reports from the projects:

   - Browser test automation for Visual
Editor<http://bleededge.blogspot.com/2013/09/wrap-up-of-my-outreach-program-for.html>
   - Internationalization and Right-To-Left Support in
VisualEditor<http://moriel.smarterthanthat.com/tips/google-summer-of-code-2013-summary/>
   - Improve support for book structures<http://www.mollywhite.net/blog/?p=104>
   - Section handling in Semantic
Forms<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-October/072133.html>
   - Prototyping inline comments <http://richajain-annotator.blogspot.in/>
   - jQuery.IME extensions for Firefox and
Chrome<http://blog.praveensingh.in/articles/gsoc-wrap-up/>

 *Technical communications<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_communications>
*
Guillaume Paumier <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Guillom> wrapped up
work on supporting the deployment of VisualEditor, and resumed regular
activities like preparing the Tech
newsletter<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News>and ongoing
communications support for the engineering staff.

*Volunteer coordination and
outreach<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Volunteer_coordination_and_outreach>
*
Together with XWiki <http://www.xwiki.org/> and Tiki <https://tiki.org/>,
we submitted a Wiki
devroom<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Events/FOSDEM#Devroom_proposal>proposal
for
FOSDEM <http://fosdem.org>, the biggest open source source conference in
Europe. We are also preparing a proposal for a stand, lead by volunteers at
the nascent Wikimedia Belgium chapter. The overall goal is to achieve a
good MediaWiki & Wikimedia tech gathering in Brussels next February. We are
also supporting the organization of the MediaWiki Architecture
Summit<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_guidelines/Meetings/Architecture_Summit_2014>in
San Francisco on 23-24 January, 2014.
Analytics <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics> The team has been
focused on smaller but more important work items this month, including
enhancement to Wikimetrics, Grantmaking and Program Developments graphing
infrastructure and fixing some long-standing Limn bugs. On the
infrastructure side, our collaboration with Ops has the Kafka middleware
project moving along nicely. The all-staff meeting and travel schedules
definitely impacted our throughput this month.Two notable accomplishments
should be called out: our Hadoop environment is now 100% free software, as
we swapped out a proprietary JDK for OpenJDK 7. We also spent a lot of time
on our engagement processes and planning for our first combined quarterly
review in October, and made significant process on our hiring goals.

*Research and data<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Research_and_Data>
*
This month, Aaron
Halfaker<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Halfak_%28WMF%29>joined
the research team as a full-time employee. We started to reorganize
the team structure and engagement model in coordination with the Analytics
developers. We performed a survival analysis of new
editors<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newcomer_survival_models>in
preparation for new experiments led by the
Growth <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Growth> team, and worked with the
team to iron out the data collection and experimental design for the fortcoming
iteration<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Onboarding_new_Wikipedians/OB6>of
*GettingStarted*.

We worked with product owners to determine the initial research strategy
for features with key releases scheduled for the next two quarters (Mobile
Web <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_web/Team>, Beta
Features<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Beta_Features>,
Multimedia <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia>,
Flow<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow>,
Universal Language
Selector<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector>,
Content translation <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation>).
We started a cohort analysis of conversion rates for mobile vs desktop
account registrations; the results will be
published<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/R:Mobile_editor_engagement>on
Meta shortly.

We drafted a proposal to host tabular
datasets<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/DataNamespace>in a dedicated
namespace and solicited feedback from interested parties
(particularly the Wikidata community). We also started fleshing out the Labs
2 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Labs2>proposal, an outreach
program for academic researchers and community members, launched at
Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong. We co-hosted the second IRC research office
hours and prepared for the first Wikimedia research
hackathon<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Labs2/Hackathons/November_9th,_2013>,
an offline/online event to be held in various locations worldwide on
November 9, 2013.
Last, we contributed to the September 2013
issue<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2013/September>of
the Wikimedia research newsletter.
Kiwix <http://www.kiwix.org>

*The Kiwix project is funded and executed by Wikimedia
CH<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CH>
.*
Mediawiki offliner<http://sourceforge.net/p/kiwix/other/ci/master/tree/mwhtmldumper/>is
now pretty stable, and its first release will happen in October. The
ZIM
incremental update GSoC
project<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Kiran_mathew_1993/ZIM_incremental_updates_for_Kiwix>was
successfully completed; we still need to do a little bit work to
finish
the integration in the openZIM and Kiwix code bases. libzim, the openZIM
reference implementation, has been packaged for
Debian<http://packages.debian.org/sid/main/libzim-dev>
. 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>
.*
In September, the Wikidata team mainly concentrated on the sister projects
Wikimedia Commons and Wiktionary. For Wikimedia Commons, we added the
ability to store interwiki links in one central location (Wikidata)
together with the ones for Wikipedia and Wikivoyage. For Wiktionary, we
published an analysis<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Comparison_of_Projects_and_Proposals_for_Wiktionary>of
all existing proposals for the integration of Wikidata and Wiktionary.
On
Wikidata itself, we rolled out the URL datatype. This for example allows
you to provide a URL as a source of a statement. Denny Vrandečić published
2 blog posts about the ideas behind Wikidata: "Wikidata Quality and
Quantity<http://blog.wikimedia.de/2013/09/04/wikidata-quality-and-quantity/>"
and "A categorical
imperative?<http://blog.wikimedia.de/2013/09/12/a-categorical-imperative/>".
In addition, he shared a few thoughts on the future of
Wikidata<http://blog.wikimedia.de/2013/09/27/data-for-the-people/>before
leaving the project at the end of the month. The
development team is looking to hire another front-end
developer<http://wikimedia.de/wiki/Software_Entwickler_%28w/m%29_mit_Schwerpunkt_Frontend_Development>experienced
in JavaScript.
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 *engineering
roadmap<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Roadmap>
*, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts.

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