Major news in February include:
Note: We’re also providing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this report that does not assume specialized technical knowledge.
Engineering metrics in February:
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.
Wikimedia Labs
Labs metrics in February:
ulsfo redeployment
eqiad data center capacity expansion
In February, the Parsoid team continued with bug fixes and improved image support. See the deployment page for a summary of deployments and fixed bugs in February.
Part of the team has continued to mentor two Outreach Program for Women (OPW) interns. This program ends mid-March. Others are mentoring a group of students in a Facebook Open Academy project to build a Cassandra storage back-end for the Parsoid round-trip test server.
We have a first version of a Debian package for Parsoid ready. This
package is yet to find a home base (repository) from which it can be
installed. This will soon make the installation of Parsoid as easy as apt-get install parsoid
.
In February, the Growth team first focused on releasing the new Wikipedia onboarding experience on additional projects. The GettingStarted extension was deployed to 30 Wikipedias, including all of the top 10 projects by number of page views. This marks the first time its task suggestions and guided tours were available outside English projects. The GuidedTour extension was also deployed to those projects (as a dependency of GettingStarted), as well as the Czech Wikipedia and se.wikimedia.org. Late in the month, the team also presented its work at its first Quarterly Review of the 2014 calendar year (see slides and minutes).
Wikipedia Zero (partnerships)
UniversalLanguageSelector was re-enabled with webfonts disabled by default. Research is ongoing to see whether they can and should be re-enabled by default at least for some languages.
More convenient shortcuts were added by Niklas Laxström to the Translate extension.
Kartik Mistry and Amir Aharoni are working on stabilizing the browser tests for all the language extensions and on setting up more robust online staging sites.
Language Engineering Communications and Outreach
ext_zend_compat
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under HipHop, with the goal of using it for our Lua module. Ori Livneh
is working on packaging and deployment issues, as well as generally
wrangling the overall development effort. Aaron Schulz is starting to
investigate what is needed for wmferrors
support.The Release and QA team had their latest quarterly review on February 13. Highlights from the meeting include:
Notable progress on things with visuals includes an updated Development and deployment flowchart (opposite), as well as an auto-generated version.
The month of February saw a lot of work on WMF deployment tooling.
To see a real life example of what it looks like to deploy code on the WMF server cluster, watch this screencast created by Bryan Davis. That shows you what the person deploying the code sees when doing a localization (translations) update. A deployment that includes new changes to the code (e.g. MediaWiki and extensions) on the servers would be different.
The suite of tools that make up the current MediaWiki deployment tooling is continuing to be updated and rewritten in Python. You can see the work of this in the repository’s history.
The updated Development and Deployment Process flowchart is now created using Blockdiag, a Python library for converting text into flow charts. You can see the current draft in the newly-minted Release Engineering repository.
There is now a matrix showing the requirements for deployment tooling for 3 projects (MediaWiki, Parsoid (and related), and ElasticSearch (and related)). This is not a fixed document and will grow/change as more is learned.
Security auditing and response
Two instances in labs have been added as Jenkins slaves. They are equipped with tox and pip to let us tests python software while fetching dependencies from pypi (bug 44443).
Nik Everett made the CirrusSearch browsertests runnable on a labs instance which has elastic search. The job is now triggered from Gerrit and being improved.
The experimental Meetbot instance setup by Antoine back in November has been overhauled and is now maintained by the community in the tools-labs project (thank you Tim Landscheidt).
Several Debian packages are now build automatically via Jenkins thanks to an effort by Carl Fürstenberg https://integration.wikimedia.org/ci/view/Ops-DebGlue/ . It helped packaging Parsoid among others.
In February, the multimedia team continued to focus on Media Viewer v0.2, getting it ready for a wider release next quarter. Gilles Dubuc, Mark Holmquist, Gergő Tisza and Aaron Arcos released a variety of new features, such as: permissions, file usage, pre-loading of images, previews during load and an improved full-screen experience. We also started development on a better ‘Use this file’ panel, including share, embed and download features. Pau Giner designed this panel, as well as a new Zoom feature for next quarter’s v0.3 version of Media Viewer. We invite you to test the latest version (see the testing tips) and share your feedback.
Fabrice Florin managed product development for Media Viewer and prepared the release plan for a gradual deployment of Media Viewer out of beta in coming months, based on the team’s latest development goals. We also hosted an IRC chat to discuss Media Viewer with the rest of the community and plan our next steps together. Lastly, the video RfC we started last month was closed with a community recommendation to not support the proprietary MP4 video format on our sites; as a result, we will only support open video formats like WebM and Ogg in the next version (v0.3) of Media Viewer. For more updates, we invite you to join the multimedia mailing list.
Project management tools review
The six ongoing FOSS Outreach Program for Women projects all made good progress, and are headed to completion by the end of the program on March 10. For more details, check their dedicated reports:
Getting Facebook Open Academy projects up to speed is becoming even more complex than expected, but we are getting there slowly. All students and mentors met at the kick-off hackathon at Facebook headquarters on February 7−9 (see Marc-André Pelletier’s report).
Wikimedia applied to Google Summer of Code 2014 and we were accepted. We also confirmed our participation in FOSS Outreach Program for Women round 8. We are organizing both programs simultaneously under a common umbrella, as we did last year with great success.
Volunteer coordination and outreach
Architecture and Requests for comment process
We’ve fixed the following production issues:
This month, we welcomed Leila Zia as the newest addition to the team. Leila joins the Foundation as a research scientist after completing a PhD in management science and engineering at Stanford University. Her work will initially focus on modeling editor lifecycles to better understand what affects their survival and retention.
We hosted the first public Research and Data showcase, a monthly showcase of research conducted by the team and other researchers in the organization. This month, we presented two studies on Wikipedia article creation trends and on the measurement of mobile browsing sessions. The showcase is hosted at the Wikimedia Foundation and live streamed on YouTube every 3rd Wednesday of the month at 11.30am Pacific Time.
We attended the 17th ACM Conference on Computer-supported cooperative work and Social Computing (CSCW ’14) in Baltimore. Research on Wikipedia and wiki-based collaboration has been a major focus of CSCW in the past, and this year three Wikipedia research papers were presented. We hosted a session to discuss collaboration opportunities for researchers interested in tackling problems of strategic importance for Wikimedia (a detailed CSCW ’14 report will follow on wiki-research-l).
We started creating public documentation for data sources and tools used by the team for research and data analysis and porting docs previously hosted on internal wikis (for example: analytics/geolocation).
We continued to provide ad-hoc support to various teams at the Foundation and worked closely with the Growth and Mobile teams to prepare and review results for their respective quarterly reviews.
The Kiwix project is funded and executed by Wikimedia CH.
The Wikidata project is funded and executed by Wikimedia Deutschland.
This article was written collaboratively by Wikimedia engineers and managers. See revision history and associated status pages. A wiki version is also available.