Engineering Community Team
From MediaWiki.org
Contents
Purpose[edit | edit source]
- Attract and support volunteer technologists so that they can become an even more powerful force in driving improvement on the website
- Help nurture volunteer-developed extensions and widgets
- Provide communications support for all groups in the engineering department
- Develop clear documentation for MediaWiki so that new staff, volunteer developers and external users have a smooth ramp-up process to becoming MediaWiki developers
Team[edit | edit source]
Current activities[edit | edit source]
See also Engineering Community team meetings.
| Activity | Information | |
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| Bug management | Management of Wikimedia's bug tracker. [edit] | Team [edit]: Andre Klapper |
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Apart from gruntwork (handling new tickets; prioritizing tickets; pinging on older tickets) and Andre's main focus on Phabricator, Parent5446, Krinkle and Andre created several requested Bugzilla components, plus moved 'MediaWiki skins' to a Bugzilla product of their own. In Bugzilla's codebase, Tony and TTO styled Bugzilla's Alias field differently, Tony removed the padlock icons for https links in Bugzilla and cleaned up the codebase, and Odder fixed a small glitch in Bugzilla's Weekly Summary and rendering of custom queries on the Bugzilla frontpage. Numerous older tickets with high priority were triaged on a bugday.
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| Phabricator migration | Preparation and execution of the migration of our development toolchain to Phabricator [edit] | Team [edit]: Andre Klapper, Andre Klapper (Phabmaster), Mukunda Modell (development), Chase Pettet (ops) & stakeholders. |
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Apart from discussions on how to implement certain functionality and settings in Phabricator among team members and stakeholders, Mukunda implemented a MediaWiki OAuth provider in Phabricator (Gerrit changes: 1, 2; related ticket) and Chase created a Puppet module for Phabricator.
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| Mentorship programs | Google Summer of Code, LevelUp, Outreach Program for Women, and other programs that mentor contributors [edit] | Team [edit]: Quim Gil, Sumana Harihareswara |
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Google Summer of Code and FOSS Outreach Program for Women interns and mentors evaluated each other as part of the mid-term evaluations. Below you can find all project reports:
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| Technical communications | An activity aiming to incrementally improve communications between the communities of developers and users [edit] | Team [edit]: Guillaume Paumier |
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In addition to ongoing communications support for the engineering staff, Guillaume Paumier organized and archived many team documentation pages of the Engineering Community Team, like planning pages, reports and meeting notes. He also set up subscription templates on mediawiki.org and the English Wikipedia that display the latest version of the technical newsletter for users who prefer not to get it delivered on their talk page.
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| Volunteer coordination and outreach | Coordination of volunteer efforts, technical outreach and recruitment of new volunteers [edit] | Team [edit]: Sumana Harihareswara, Quim Gil, Guillaume Paumier |
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Volunteers and staff are beginning to add or express interest in topics for the 2014 Wikimania Hackathon in London. The WMUK team is working hard to finalize venue logistics so that we can schedule talks and sessions in specific rooms. Everything is on track for a successful (and very large!) Hacakthon. . Tech Talks held in June: How, What, Why of WikiFont on June 12 and A Few Python Tips on June 19. A new process has been set up for volunteers needing to sign an NDA in order to be granted special permissions in Wikimedia servers. On a similar note, we have started a project to implement a Trusted User Tool in Phabricator, in order to register editors of Wikimedia projects that have been granted special permissions after signing a community agreement.
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| Architecture and Requests for comment process | Deciding on proposals for changes to MediaWiki's architecture and writing guidelines for future changes. [edit] | Team [edit]: Sumana Harihareswara |
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Developers had several meetings in IRC about architectural issues or Requests for comment:
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| Data & Developer Hub | A central place for 3rd-party developers to access our data sets and experiment with our APIs [edit] | Team [edit]: Sumana Harihareswara, Moiz Syed, Dario Taraborelli, Juliusz Gonera, Jared Zimmerman, Brad Jorsch |
Planning[edit | edit source]
We connect our short term plans with the 2013-14 Engineering Community goals at the ECT Showcase. We might fine tune plans in our weekly meetings.
 June 2014 |
Engineering Community Team — Monthly planning, July 2014 | August 2014 |
July 2014[edit | edit source]
Sumana[edit | edit source]
Guillaume[edit | edit source]
- Assemble and publish the engineering report for June. Status: In progress
- Follow up on support requests (e.g. blog post reviews). Status: In progress
- Get the weekly tech newsletter assembled, published, translated and delivered (with help). Status: In progress
- Prepare Wikimania sessions and presentation. Status: not started
- Coordinate collaboration between newsletters (Tech News, VisualEditor, Wikidata, Education) and help to set up multilingual delivery. Status: not started
- (if confirmed) Write series of blog posts for the one-year anniversary of VisualEditor, highlighting the work done over the past years. Status: In progress
- (if time allows) Rewrite Template:Wikimedia engineering project information and associated templates with Lua. Status: not started
Quim[edit | edit source]
- Zürich Hackathon 2014 evaluation published.-- Status: Not done
- push mediawiki.org homepage redesign to get community approval-- Status: Not done
- Evaluation of Facebook Open Academy published.-- Status: Not done
- agree the strategy behind Upstream projects -- Status: Not done
Andre[edit | edit source]
- Phabricator (driving tasks): Get Alpha instance up and running; work on consensus on configuration settings Status: In progress
- (With Quim) Set up workflow for having a regular, easy "bug of the week" for new code contributors, with rotating support of Wikimedia development teams (based on Annoying little bugs) Status: In progress: planning page created on 2014-07-02 targetting end of July
- Have a Pywikibot bugday with the Pywikibot hackers around the end of July Status: In progress - page created
July−September 2014[edit | edit source]
Guillaume[edit | edit source]
- Provide ongoing communications support (blog post reviews, activity pages, etc.). Status: In progress
- Assemble and publish monthly reports. Status: In progress
- Ensure the weekly publication of Tech/News. Status: In progress
- Collaborate and integrate with other newsletters. Status: In progress
- Further improve the information architecture of Wikimedia Engineering activities on mediawiki.org. Status: In progress
Andre[edit | edit source]
To be further defined
- Progress on migrating to Phabricator: Set up Phab alpha instance, set up Legalpad, have test import of RT/Bugzilla data Status: In progress
- (With Quim) Expose a regular, easy "bug of the week" for new code contributors with rotating support of Wikimedia development teams (based on Annoying little bugs) Status: In progress, targetting end of July
- Have a public bug day approximately once per month. Status: In progress (2014/07 likely on Pywikibot)
Quim[edit | edit source]
- …
Sumana[edit | edit source]
- Developer Hub prototype
- Landing page, 3 projects showcased, 3 APIs documented
- API sandbox functional prototype
- Contribution process defined
Past activities[edit | edit source]
| Activity | Information | |
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| MediaWiki architecture document | An overview of MediaWiki's architecture and decisions that led to it [edit] | Team [edit]: Guillaume Paumier, Sumana Harihareswara |
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The community awaits the publication of Volume 2 of Architecture of Open Source Applications, probably in a matter of days. It will include our now-finished chapter on MediaWiki's architecture.
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| Wikimedia blog maintenance | Maintenance and new features for the Wikimedia blog [edit] | Team [edit]: Guillaume Paumier, |
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Guillaume Paumier made minor changes to the theme, like not displaying trackbacks and pings in the comments list. He investigated plugins to support multiple authors, photo galleries and multilingual posts, and is testing Piwik as a possible solution to record metrics. Chad Horohoe created git repositories for the WP-Victor theme and the WMBlog plugin in Gerrit, and imported their history from GitHub.
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| Summer of Code 2011 | A sponsored community program allowing students to join the community as developers. [edit] | Team [edit]: Sumana Harihareswara |
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Neil Harris is now working on getting Kevin Brown's ArchiveLinks project completed and deployed. This activity page ("Summer of Code 2011") is now being retired; in the future, status updates will be on the Mentorship programs page.
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| Summer of Code 2012 | A sponsored community program allowing students to join the community as developers. [edit] | Team [edit]: Sumana Harihareswara, Gregory Varnum as backup organizational administrator |
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The Wikimedia community is following up its Summer of Code participation with participation in the GNOME Outreach Program for Women, which offers paid internships for work in open source software projects. This follows the community's decision not to participate in Google Code-In due to a lack of mentors. Also, Sumana Harihareswara posted a retrospective on our participation in Summer of Code 2012, concluding that we're improving at student retention but need to get better at producing something useful at the end of a mentorship period, and offering suggestions on how to improve our processes in the future. This activity page ("Summer of Code 2012") is now being retired; in the future, status updates will be on the Mentorship programs page.
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| Wikimedia Foundation engineering 20% policy | A policy and practice whereby WMF engineering staff spent at least 20% of their work time on tasks that directly serve the Wikimedia developer and user community [edit] | Team [edit]: Sumana Harihareswara, Rob Lanphier, All engineering staff |
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Sumana Harihareswara has developed Mentorship programs/LevelUp, a new program in which WMF engineers and systems administrators will grow their and the community's capacity for the long term. This replaces 20% time, which is now defunct.
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| Project management tools review | A review of tools for bug tracking, project and product management used by the Wikimedia technical community [edit] | Team [edit]: Andre Klapper, Guillaume Paumier |
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As the review has finished and as Phabricator was favored, future status updates can be found at mw:Phabricator/Migration#Status.
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Team documentation[edit | edit source]
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