Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2014/December

November 2014

Wikimedia engineering report, December 2014

January 2015

Tech Forum

Tech News

Tech Ambassadors

Product and Technology

MediaWiki

Major news in December include:

• the third version of the Content translation tool;
• a look at collaboration practices within the mobile web engineering team;
• lead images prominently featured in the Beta version of the Wikipedia for Android app;
• the migration of the Technical Operations team from RT to Phabricator;
• a retrospective on how the deployment of HHVM improved editing performance on Wikimedia sites.

Upcoming events

There are many opportunities for you to get involved and contribute to MediaWiki and technical activities to improve Wikimedia sites, both for coders and contributors with other talents.

For a more complete and up-to-date list, check out the Project:Calendar.

Personnel

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.

• Director of Engineering
• Senior Software Engineer - Services
• Software Engineer - Flow (Front-end)
• Software Engineer - Mobile - Android
• Application Security Engineer
• Full Stack Developer - Analytics
• Agile Coach
• Scrum Master
• Senior Technical Product Manager
• Community Liaison
• Community Liaison (PT Contract)
• UX Senior Designer
• UX Senior Design Researcher
• UX Visual Design Fellowship

Announcements

• Nirzar Pangarkar joined the User Experience team as User Experience Designer (announcement).

Technical Operations

Dallas data center

FIX: missing

Tampa data center

FIX: missing

Labs metrics in December:

• Number of projects: 155
• Number of instances: 437
• Amount of RAM in use (in MBs): 2,147,840
• Amount of allocated storage (in GBs): 21,745
• Number of virtual CPUs in use: 1,059
• Number of users: 4,599

Tool metrics:

• Number of tools: 1002
• Number of tool maintainers: 559

Wikimedia Labs

• We've added two new large servers to the Labs virtualization cluster in eqiad. This will increases our capacity by about 40%; Andrew is now in the process of rebalancing load among servers and allocating new resources to projects that need them.
• Yuvi has made some progress with an intermittent DNS issue. With luck this will be more stable now.
• The toolserver is now officially decommissioned.

Features Engineering

Editor retention: Editing tools

Collaboration

Services

Support

Front-end

Front-end libraries standardization

FIX: missing

Mobile

Language Engineering

Platform Engineering

MediaWiki Core

Release Engineering

Multimedia

Engineering Community Team

Analytics

Kiwix

The Kiwix project is funded and executed by Wikimedia CH.

FIX: missing

Wikidata

The Wikidata project is funded and executed by Wikimedia Deutschland.

In December the Wikidata team released a number of new features. These are:

• language fallbacks (so you see information in a different language if it is not available in your primary language)
• statements on properties (this is important for mapping our properties to other databases for example)
• a new datatype for linking to properties (this is necessary to say that one property is the inverse of another property for example - like "father" and "child")
• performance improvements.

In addition we provided support for the work on query functionality for Wikidata. Your input is requested for a new feature: article placeholders powered by Wikidata.

It was announced that Freebase will be shut down in favor of Wikidata. Lydia wrote a blog post about scaling Wikidata over the next year.

Future

The engineering management team continues to update the Deployments page weekly, providing up-to-date information on the upcoming deployments to Wikimedia sites, as well as the annual goals, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts.