Dear all,
We are excited to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation now has a Vice
President of Engineering. Damon Sicore will be filling this vital role.
Please join us in welcoming him to the team.
The VPE role will be crucial to further developing and maintaining the
technology that supports the very core of the Wikimedia movement, and
ensuring the development, scale, and stability of the MediaWiki
architecture.
Damon joins us as part of planned growth of our product and engineering
teams, first announced in November 2012. As we have grown, we need
dedicated focus on product and engineering as separate departments, to
ensure development of best practices like performance engineering,
continuous delivery, A/B testing, software re-architecture, UI/UX work, and
user research. Erik Moeller, who filled the role of VP for both product and
engineering since 2011, led in the creation of this new role and was
essential to the search process. From today onward, Erik will focus on his
role as VP of Product and Strategy and Deputy Director of the WMF, while
Damon will take over leadership of the Engineering team; both will report
to me as part of the c-level team.
Damon has a unique track record of managing large platform rollouts using
distributed teams like ours, while understanding the essential role of
community contributions and working in a transparent, open source
environment. These skills and experiences will be invaluable in his work
here at the Foundation. It’s unusual to find someone who understands us so
well, and so I want to thank the many people from across the organization,
especially in the engineering, product, and human resources teams, who have
been involved in making this search successful.
We are very happy to have Damon on board. His proven track record of
managing large platform rollouts using distributed teams like ours, while
understanding the essential role of community contributions and working in
a transparent, open source environment, is unique and invaluable as part of
our movement.
We’ll be sending around a copy of the press release shortly. You’ll also be
be able to meet Damon, and ask him questions, this Thursday at our monthly
Metrics Meeting
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF_Metrics_and_activities_meetings>.
Please join us there!
Please join me in welcoming Damon.
Lila
Hello,
Please join us on the next Wikimedia bug day:
**2014-10-08, 14:00–22:00 UTC** [1] in #wikimedia-tech on Freenode IRC.[2]
We will be triaging bug reports for the Collection extension (Book tool)
in general and PDF export in particular, which were just switched to a
new backend (OCG).[3] We have two immediate goals:
1) recover 100 % of the relevant reports from the defunct PediaPress
tracker;[4]
2) get a clean list of known PDF issues that the new backend didn't fix.
Everyone is welcome to join any time these weeks, and no technical
knowledge is needed! It's an easy way to get involved or to give
something back.
We encourage you to record your activity on the etherpad [4].
This information and more can be found here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Triage/201410
For more information on triaging in general, check out
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Triage
I look forward to seeing you there. Please distribute further by email,
talk pages etc. (Collection is used on almost 2 thousands wikis!)
Sorry for the crossposting,
Nemo
[1] Timezone converter: http://everytimezone.com/#2014-10-08,120,5x1
[2] See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC for more info on IRC chat
[3] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014-July/077867.html
[4] https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/BugTriage-Collection
Hello all,
I would like to announce the release of MediaWiki Language Extension
Bundle 2014.09. This bundle is compatible with MediaWiki 1.23.x and
MediaWiki 1.22.x releases.
* Download: https://translatewiki.net/mleb/MediaWikiLanguageExtensionBundle-2014.09.tar…
* sha256sum: 9cfdc7d4fc87b4cd6f8d1d2e1593b8cd064b7a9a2773c1a6a554304949a609ec
Quick links:
* Installation instructions are at: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MLEB
* Announcements of new releases will be posted to a mailing list:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n
* Report bugs to: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org
* Talk with us at: #mediawiki-i18n @ Freenode
Release notes for each extension are below.
-- Kartik Mistry
== Babel and CleanChanges ==
* Only localisation updates.
== CLDR ==
=== Noteworthy changes ===
* Update to CLDR 26 (Upstream: http://cldr.unicode.org/index/downloads/cldr-26)
==== Changes ====
* Removed entries from LocalNamesEn.php when identical to CLDR. Right
now, 13 local names are differing from CLDR's, as well as the other
languages, are left to follow-ups.
== LocalisationUpdate ==
=== Noteworthy changes ===
* Bug 68781: New hook LocalisationCacheRecacheFallback in MediaWiki
1.24 and above allows to not use the wrong message when a language
itself doesn't have a change but one of its fallbacks does.
== Translate ==
=== Noteworthy changes ===
* Regression fixed: Translate's compatibility with MediaWiki 1.22 has
been restored.
* Regression fixed: Fix translation ratios in translatable page
language selector.
* Special:MyLanguage is now in core. For backwards compatibility,
translations of Special:MyLanguage aliases were moved to a separate
file (Bug 69461).
* Bug 67778: Added UserMerge support.
* $wgTranslatePageTranslationULS now works as intended on all
translation pages by removing the language code from the page name.
== UniversalLanguageSelector ==
=== Noteworthy changes ===
* Update ULS data with latest supplementalData.xml from CLDR.
--
Kartik Mistry/કાર્તિક મિસ્ત્રી | IRC: kart_
{kartikm, 0x1f1f}.wordpress.com
Hi,
Is currently someone working on this thing? I might be able to help
with this task at some point. So in case you are working on it or
would like to get any help with this, let me know, either here or on
irc (petan), thanks
The next RFC meeting will discuss the following RFC:
* API roadmap (Brad Jorsch, Yuri Astrakhan)
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/API_roadmap>
The API roadmap was last discussed at the Architecture Summit in January.
The meeting will be on the IRC channel #wikimedia-office on
irc.freenode.org at the following time:
* UTC: Wednesday 21:00
* US PDT: Wednesday 14:00
* Europe CEST: Wednesday 23:00
* Australia AEST: Thursday 07:00
-- Tim Starling
Forwarding from Siko Bouterse:
Greetings! The Wikimedia Foundation Individual Engagement Grants program is
accepting proposals for funding new experiments from September 1st to 30th.
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG>
Your idea can improve Wikimedia projects by building a new tool or gadget,
organizing a better process on your wiki, conducting research on an
important issue, or providing other support for community-building. Whether
you need $200 or $30,000 USD, Individual Engagement Grants can cover your
own project development time in addition to funding for a team to help you.
The program has a flexible schedule and reporting structure, and
Grantmaking staff are there to support you through all stages of the
process.
Do you have have a good idea, but you are worried that it isn’t developed
enough for a grant? Put it into the IdeaLab, where volunteers and staff
can give you advice and guidance on how to bring it to life. <
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab> Also, IEG will be hosting
three Hangout Sessions for real-time discussions to help you make your
proposal better - the first will happen on September 16th. <
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Events#Upcoming_events>
For inspiration, you can read more about past projects <
https://blog.wikimedia.org/tag/individual-engagement-grants/> that received
funding or review open proposals <
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG#ieg-reviewing>. We are excited
to see some of the new ways your grant ideas can support our community and
make an impact on the future of Wikimedia projects.
Submit your proposal in September! <
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG#ieg-apply>
Dear Wikitech-l
REL1_24 was branched and announced ahead of schedule[0].
Our schedule[1] clearly states that we will announce a branch one week
before we make one in order to allow developers to put any necessary work
into the branch and keep backports to a minimum.
The current release is planned for 2014-11-26[2]. According to our
schedule, the actual REL1_24 branch should be made on 2014-10-22.
Please excuse the error and do not deprecate anything while we make the
necessary corrections. Unless there is a good reason to keep the branch,
we will revert the current REL1_24 branch on Monday evening.
Finally, while we are very happy to have help with the release work, we
do ask that you coordinate with us to ensure a controlled process free
of disruption.
Signed,
Mark and Markus
[0] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/project:mediawiki/core+branch:REL1_24,n,z)
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WikiReleaseTeam/Release_process#Release_proc…
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WikiReleaseTeam/Release_timeline
(apologies for cross-posting)
I'm happy to announce that HHVM is available on all Wikimedia wikis for
intrepid beta testers. HHVM, you'll recall, is an alternative runtime for
PHP that provides substantial performance improvements over the standard
PHP interpreter. Simply put: HHVM is software that runs on Wikimedia's
servers to make your reading and editing experience faster.
You can read more about HHVM here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/HHVM
* How do I enable HHVM?
You can enable HHVM by opting in to the beta feature. This short animated
gif will show you how: <http://people.wikimedia.org/~ori/hhvm_beta.gif>.
Enabling the beta feature will set a special cookie in your browser. Our
servers are configured to route requests bearing this cookie to a pool of
servers that are running HHVM.
* How do I know that it's working?
Opting-in to the beta feature does not change the user interface in any
way. If you like, you can copy the following code snippet to the global.js
subpage of your user page on MetaWiki:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ori.livneh/global.js
If you copy this script to your global.js, the personal bar will be
annotated with the name of the PHP runtime used to generate the page and
the backend response time. It looks like this:
http://people.wikimedia.org/~ori/hhvm_script.png
Edits made by users with HHVM enabled will be tagged with 'HHVM'. The tag
is there as a precaution, to help us clean up if we discover that HHVM is
mangling edits somehow. We don't expect this to happen.
* What sort of performance changes should I expect?
We expect HHVM to have a substantial impact on the time it takes to load,
preview, and save pages.
At the moment, API requests are not being handled by HHVM. Because
VisualEditor uses the API to save articles, opting in to the HHVM beta
feature will not impact the performance of VisualEditor. We hope to have
HHVM handling API requests next week.
* What sort of issues might I encounter?
Most of the bugs that we have encountered so far resulted from minute
differences in how PHP5 and HHVM handle various edge-cases. These bugs
typically cause a MediaWiki error page to be shown.
If you encounter an error, please report it on Bugzilla and tag with it the
'HHVM' keyword.
We're not done yet, but this is an important milestone. The roll-out of
HHVM as a beta feature caps many months of hard work from many developers,
both salaried and volunteer, from the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia
Deutschland, and the broader Wikimedia movement. I want to take this
opportunity to express my appreciation to the following individuals, listed
in alphabetical order:
Aaron Schulz, Alexandros Kosiaris, Brad Jorsch, Brandon Black, Brett
Simmers, Bryan Davis, Chad Horohoe, Chris Steipp, Erik Bernhardson, Erik
Möller, Faidon Liambotis, Filippo Giunchedi, Giuseppe Lavagetto, Greg
Grossmeier, Jack McBarn, Katie Filbert, Kunal Mehta, Mark Bergsma, Max
Semenik, Niklas Laxström, Rob Lanphier, and Tim Starling.
More good things to come! :)
