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Wikimedia Engineering

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The Wikimedia engineering team builds, improves and maintains the technical infrastructure of Wikimedia sites (software and hardware), by supporting and complementing volunteer efforts. It's composed, among others, by engineering and product development staff employed by the Wikimedia Foundation and by other organizations in the Wikimedia movement.

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Latest report Major news in May include: changes to the mobile site to better show the editors behind the curtain; the announcement of CyrusOne in Dallas as the location of the new Wikimedia data center; the Zürich hackathon and Lila Tretikov's perspective on it; experiments by the Growth team to encourage more contributors to register; the one-year anniversary of the launch of Tech News; the launch of Wikipedia Zero in Nepal in partnership with NCELL; the launch of a second request for proposals for the release management of MediaWiki for third-party users. Read more Featured activity Site performance and architecture Various initiatives geared toward improving site responsiveness, decreasing resource consumption, and/or improving site maintainability Status: (2014-05-monthly) Aaron Schulz has been reviewing the Petition extension for deployment to the cluster, working with Peter Coombe to improve its performance. In addition, the reliability and speed of media uploads was increased by removing many failure cases on Commons. There were many other minor fixes over the course of the month. Team: Ori Livneh, Aaron Schulz, Antoine Musso, Andrew Garrett Latest news Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available. Tech News updates We are looking for contributors to help write a new issue every week. If you would like to help, please contact us. Recent software changes The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf12) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 3. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 8, and to all Wikipedias on July 10 (calendar). CirrusSearch was enabled on July 1 as the primary search method on 36 new wikis, including the Norwegian (no), Portuguese (pt) and Ukrainian (uk) Wikipedias. [1] It is now possible to create Atom or RSS feeds for Word of the Day, Word of the Week and similar entries on Wiktionary wikis. [2] [3] You can now use a graphical interface to edit TemplateData information on the English (en), French (fr) and Italian (it) Wikipedias. [4] [5] VisualEditor news Saving an edit with VisualEditor will now be much faster. [6] [7] You can now add a caption when you add a file to a page with VisualEditor. You can also change the file to a different one and keep the existing caption. [8] [9] [10] When you switch to the Edit source tab, you are now asked to keep your changes. You no longer need to find the option in the menus. [11] [12] [13] The reference tool that adds empty <ref></ref> tags is now at the bottom of the Cite menu, below references that use templates like {{Cite web}}. [14] Context menus will no longer be shown over items that you can edit directly, for example formulæ. [15] [16] [17] Future software changes Starting on July 9, it will be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. The feature was first scheduled for July 1, but was delayed due to bugs. A plan to enable CirrusSearch as the primary search method on the 11 largest Wikimedia wikis has now been prepared. [18] If you use references on a page, you will soon always see them at the bottom of the page, even if you forget to add the <references /> tag (or a template). [19] [20] Black-and-white XCF images will soon display correctly. [21] [22] Description pages of SVG files will soon always show download links for multiple resolutions (example). The links were previously shown only for SVG files in large original resolutions. [23] [24] Problems Between July 2-3, there were problems with loading pages on multiple wikis due to a configuration issue. [25] [26] For a few hours on July 1, there were problems with uploading new files on Wikimedia Commons due to a configuration error. [27] [28] Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

See the status dashboard Stay informed Wikimedia Technology Blog — And its corresponding feed. Calendar — All events. wikitech-announce — Subscribe to announcements of new activities. Get involved How to contribute Tell us if you run into a problem Become a MediaWiki developer Test our mobile site, or build mobile apps Chat with us Figure out ways to encourage new Wikimedia editors Help to update the engineering project documentation Job openings Are you looking to work for Wikimedia? We're hiring! VP of Engineering Software Engineer - Frontend (VisualEditor) Software Engineer - Services Software Engineer - Internationalization Software Engineer - Frontend Software Engineer - Mobile - iOS QA Tester Software Engineer - Full Stack Product Manager - Language Engineering Operations Security Engineer Tools New to project pages? Have a question about how things work? Read the how-to guide. See also Dynamic list of all projects (including those completed) Trello boards Mingle projects, including Wikimedia Language engineering and Analytics

Features engineering VisualEditor — Creating a visual editor for MediaWiki, other platforms and the Web at large Parsoid — A bidirectional runtime wikitext parser. Converts back and forth between wikitext and HTML/XML DOM with RDFa. Flow — Initial ideas for the user "home page" feed system, including modules. Growth — To create sustainable growth in the community of editors on Wikimedia projects. Wikipedia Education Program — A MediaWiki extension to support the Wikipedia Education Program Mobile engineering Wikimedia Apps — Wikimedia Mobile Applications for iOS, Android, and new platforms Commons App — An iOS and Android app that allows you to upload media to Commons. Wikipedia Zero — Free and zero rated access to Wikipedia through our partners Mobile web projects — Features and design work on the Wikimedia MobileFrontend mobile gateway Platform engineering Site performance and architecture — Various initiatives geared toward improving site responsiveness, decreasing resource consumption, and/or improving site maintainability HHVM — Support in MediaWiki for HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) and deployment to the Wikimedia cluster Release & QA — Release Engineering and QA. Working to improve the quality of code and reduce the time it takes users to get it. Admin tools development — Feature development and bugfixes on tools for stewards and local power-users Search — Search infrastructure maintenance and overhaul Auth systems — Improvement of authentication and authorization systems, and adding new auth mechanisms such as OpenID and OAuth Deployment tooling — Improve the deployment process and operational monitoring capabilities in use for the Wikimedia content projects and related infrastructure. Wikidata deployment — Regular deployments to wikidata and clients SUL finalisation — Resolve any remaining clashing user names, so that in the future every user may have a single username to log in with on all wikis. Shell requests — Ongoing processing of Bugzilla requests that require shell access to fix Security auditing and response — Inspection of code and training of developers Quality Assurance — Software testing and quality assurance for Wikimedia engineering activities Beta cluster — Establish a functional, production-like environment in Wikimedia Labs suitable for final-stage testing of new features. Continuous integration — A testing platform to provide continuous quality control for MediaWiki Browser testing — Automated testing of MediaWiki within various browsers to improve quality Multimedia — Handling of images, sound and video files, from infrastructure to contributions, curation, publishing and viewing. Bug management — Management of Wikimedia's bug tracker. Phabricator migration — Preparation and execution of the migration of our development toolchain to Phabricator Mentorship programs — Google Summer of Code, LevelUp, Outreach Program for Women, and other programs that mentor contributors Technical communications — An activity aiming to incrementally improve communications between the communities of developers and users Volunteer coordination and outreach — Coordination of volunteer efforts, technical outreach and recruitment of new volunteers Architecture and Requests for comment process — Deciding on proposals for changes to MediaWiki's architecture and writing guidelines for future changes. Data & Developer Hub — A central place for 3rd-party developers to access our data sets and experiment with our APIs Language engineering Language tools — Internationalization and Localization tools to enable use of Wikimedia projects in various languages. Milkshake — Create generic i18n tools in jQuery Language Engineering Communications and Outreach — News about Language Engineering activities and Outreach programs Content translation — Content translation of Wikipedia pages Analytics Wikimetrics — Cohort analysis of Wikimedia editors Data Processing — Pipe volumes of data into Hadoop for research and reports Editor Engagement Vital Signs — Dashboard to expose Editor Engagement and the impact of product decisions. EventLogging — Sensibly capture Mediawiki usage data to help improve products. Research and Data — Supporting the Wikimedia Foundation in using data to make better decisions Operations The Operations team is responsible for the technical infrastructure of Wikimedia sites: this includes the data centers, servers and network. They document most of their work on the wikitech wiki.