This morning we upgraded the Wikimedia Bug Tracker to Bugzilla version 3.4.5. The release notes are available here.

For those of you who have been eagerly awaiting the REST APIs, wait no more. You can now find our Bugzilla server’s APIs at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/bzapi. Documentation about the APIs is available at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugzilla:REST_API.

If you find any issues with the bugzilla instance or the APIs, submit a bug. Make sure you set the Component to Bugzilla so that it gets my attention.

This week we watched our projects hit two big milestones.  Russian Wikipedia has just slipped past the 500,000 article mark.  It continues to remain in the top ten largest Wikipedia.  Wikinews has a short write-up on the achievement, and thankfully explains why Russian Wikipedians are celebrating the milestone with… a lemon (or half a lemon).

Also this week we saw the cumulative total for all Wikipedia articles, across all languages, cross the astonishing 15,000,000 mark.  You can see the live-updated data on the volunteer-created Wikistats page (bookmark for frequent statistical wonderment and of course Erik Zachte’s essential-reading, stats.wikimedia.org). For the last few months we were excited to say we had broken 14,000,000.  Just when we got this number in our heads, another million articles flood in.

Both are incredible achievements, demonstrating the continuing and sustained growth of our projects across hundreds of languages.  Congratulations to all of the project contributors.

Jay Walsh, Communications

Earlier today we announced a generous $2 million (USD) grant to the Wikimedia Foundation from the Google Inc. Charity Fund at the Tides Foundation.  This is the first gift to the Wikimedia Foundation from Google, and as an unrestricted gift we’ll be able to support operations for Wikipedia and our other free knowledge projects across multiple priorities.

The news has rung out across outlets in the U.S. and abroad, and microbloggers (prompted by a tweet from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales) have been actively sharing the announcement.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has called Wikipedia “one of the greatest triumphs of the internet,” and considering the impact and mission of Google, we’re in good company.  Many have speculated as to the relationship between our organizations before, but with this news we’re pleased to clarify their great role as a philanthropic supporter for the Foundation.

Thanks to the good folks at Google for making this possible!

Jay Walsh, Communications

We have been upgrading and adding new servers for capacity increases as we always do, unfortunately, thanks to the more updated tech, some of our older systems just are not worth the space in our racks.  These are servers that Wikimedia has used on the projects for 3+ years, so they are out of warranty.  These are good systems though, and while we may overload them and want replacements, they are fine for many, many non-profits to use.

Most systems (but possibly not all) have the following specifications:

• Dual CPU 2.5 GHz AMD (some intel, but most AMD in this batch.)
• 3-4GB RAM Each
• Most have 80 GB or larger HDD (Some have two hard drives, some drives are 160GB or possibly even 250GB)

Disclaimers: The Wikimedia Foundation does not guarantee the operation or use of these servers in any shape or form.  They are old, some may have dying fans, bad hdd sectors, and the like.  Servers have been wiped of information, and they ran through that, but no promises on function!  Also, most servers have rails, but occasionally one may not, and we do not sort through them for these things.  However, they are standard supermicro servers in most cases, and getting replacement rails is fairly simple.  Some servers are well over 3 years old, we do not just turn off servers when they hit the 3 year mark, we turn them off when they are no longer worth using in any role or function on our cluster in a reliable manner.  In most cases, it is simply the hardware technology has updated to the point that a new server is much faster, and since we demand high performance of our servers, it is worth upgrading for our needs.

Now, last time we opened this up, we got a lot of individuals asking for servers for various uses.  Some requests were not very clear, and overall we ended up with a lot of stuff to sort through to find those eligible for these servers.

We try to only donate servers to other non-profits whose core values are similar or in support of our own.  This means we do not donate them for individual use.   Since these servers were purchased with donations to support Wikimedia, we feel we need to further donate them to other like-minded organizations, since that is how the money for the servers was meant to be spent.  This means that we cannot, in good conscience, donate these servers for profit or personal use to individuals or corporations.

If you would like to receive some of these servers for your NON-PROFIT use, please email servers@wikimedia.org.  TO BE ELIGIBLE YOUR EMAIL MUST INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING:

• Subject: Server Decommissioning Donations for <NONPROFIT NAME HERE>
• Your name, contact information, relationship with non-profit requesting the servers
• Registered non-profit name and information.
• Information on the non-profit, who they are, what their mission statement and goals are.
• Shipping address information for a FedEx Ground delivery to where the servers need to go.
• How the servers will be used.  (We like to know and share with folks!)

Please keep in mind that deciding where these go is pretty tough, so the more detailed you can be in your email is best.  (IE: ‘Wikimedia uses these for our sites.’ is pretty vague where ‘Wikimedia is the non-profit foundation that runs Wikipedia.  Server donations to us would be used to run our websites that allow access to Wikipedia and its sister projects.’ is a lot nicer. ;)  Also, by submitting and possibly accepting servers from us, you are giving us permission to post about it here on our technical blog.

The submission period will remain open no less than two weeks from this posting.

The last time we did this was in September 2009, which took a long while to get sorted out!  We try to do these in multiple, smaller batches, it just easier on operations that way.

Rob Halsell, Operations Engineer

If there are any questions or concerns, anyone can feel free to email me @ the servers@wikimedia.org address, or you can also feel free just to post the questions in the comments.  (Which is even better, avoids duplicate questions!)
Rob Halsell
Systems Administrator

An update from the Wikipedia Usability Initiative – the team working to streamline and simplify the editing experience on Wikipedia.

You asked and we listened.  In an effort to be comprehensible in many languages, the Usability Initiative’s beta toolbar used the letter “A” for character formatting icons.  In our recent release, we updated the toolbar to use language-specific icons (for example, “B” for Bold and “I” for Italic in English and “F” for Fettdruck and “K” for Kursiv in German).  These have been created by Hannes Tank using the free Droid Serif font by Ascender, which has an extensive character set, contains over 43,000 glyphs, and continues to grow.

We, unfortunately, cannot create all of the icons that are needed for all the languages and wikis out there.  We need your help!  Let’s collaborate!  To help you help us, we have created this “How To” guide to walk you through the steps to create these icons and get them on Wikimedia Commons.  If you use a language wiki that does not have language-specific icons already on Commons, and have basic knowledge of Inkscape + Gimp (open-source illustration and photo editing tools) or Adobe Illustrator + Photoshop, we welcome your contributions.  To incorporate these into your language wiki, you need to have administrator privileges.  If you have sufficient privileges, please see our description of the technical implementation here.  If you don’t, please get in touch with a local administrator for the wiki in questions.  We encourage you to discuss within your language community to determine which letter or icon is right for you.  Thank you in advance for your participation and contributions – we couldn’t do it without you.

Do you have thoughts and opinions on going language specific?  Please share!  Do you have questions or suggestions for improvements on our How To?  Please leave them on the discussion page.

Parul Vora, Wikipedia Usability Initiative

The usability initiative recently deployed some changes to the beta features, most notably the replacement of the textarea on the edit page with a content-editable iframe (mistakenly referred to as a “rich text editor” by some users). Users at various wikis have reported some issues resulting from this change. We’re fixing these bugs as fast as we can and deploying fixes as soon as possible (once properly tested of course). Below is a list of bugs associated with the rich text editor and their status; we’ll keep this page up to date as we push out fixes. If you’re bothered by these bugs and don’t want to wait for fixes, you can turn off the content-editable iframe by leaving beta (click the “Leave Beta” link at the top of any wiki page).

UPDATE Feb 12 21:01 UTC: It’s been reported that the loading cover doesn’t go away in Firefox when certain gadgets are enabled. For this reason we’ve removed the loading cover for now.

UPDATE Feb 12 22:31 UTC: Because there’s still some issues with the iframe and most users are just using the toolbar, we’ve disabled the iframe for users that only use the toolbar. This means that if you disable the navigable table of contents in your preferences, you shouldn’t experience any of the iframe-related issues (such as those with pasting text).

UPDATE: Around midnight UTC in the night between Feb 12 and Feb 13, we’ve disabled the navigable table of contents and the enhanced dialogs until we work out the remaining bugs.

Roan Kattouw (Catrope)

• bug 22311 (Pressing tab in edit box should go to summary box): fix deployed
• bug 22393 (Charinsert tools at the bottom of the edit page and old toolbar don’t work): fix deployed. Charinsert may have to be fixed in site JS on some wikis, depending on the local Charinsert implementation; this has been done on the English and Portuguese Wikipedias as well as Commons; I checked the other top 10 Wikipedias but they didn’t need a local fix. You may heve to Shift-Refresh for this to work on Commons.
• bug 22394 (Pasting formatted text preserves formatting): fix deployed.
• bug 22398 (Extra line breaks inserted when pasting text): fix ready, will be deployed soon
• bug 22402 (Leaving beta doesn’t turn off experimental features like TOC and dialogs): fix deployed.
• bug 22413 (Old toolbar disappears when TOC enabled): inadvertently fixed when bug 22393 was fixed (love it when that happens)
• bug 22428 (Line breaks in pasted text not saved in Safari, Chrome): fix ready, will be deployed soon
• bug 22435 (Literal &nbsp; and <p> in article text gets removed on save): fix deployed.
• bug 22440 (Random cursor jumps in Firefox 3.5 and above): fix ready, will be deployed soon

Developer Meet-Up (by Raymond, CC-BY-SA)

Wikimedia Germany invites all MediaWiki developers, Toolserver users, Gadget hackers, and other people interested in the technical side of Wikimedia projects to come to Berlin for a Developer Meet-Up on April 14.-16. Last year’s meet-up in Berlin was a great success, and we hope to make it even better this time! This year we want to focus on structured (meta) data, search, and community building. The future of the Toolserver will also be a subject.

The dates are set, but it’s not clear yet if we start full throttle on Wednesday the 14th or if we have just an arrival event on that date and a full day on Friday the 16th instead – this depends on venue arrangements that are not sorted out yet. Note that registration in advance will be required – a website will be set up for this soon, we will announce it on blogs and mailing lists.

On that Friday, April 16., the Wikimedia Chapters and Board start their convention in Berlin. This will be a great opportunity to meet, to discuss interesting topics, to network and to exchange ideas and thoughts! Wikimedia Germany will host the event, so we will organize the venue, the hotel(s), some fun things to do in Berlin, food & drinks and lots of other things – and there might even be a party at the c-base again…

See you in Berlin!

Daniel Kinzler, Wikidata Software Achitect

Update: Registration is now open!

Every year, Wikipedia usage goes upward, and every year the technical folks working and volunteering with Wikimedia have to plan, purchase, and implement new servers to keep up to the growing popularity of Wikipedia and its sister projects.  With the advances in computing, running 9 new application servers this year took the load of 36 application servers from 3 years ago.

So when we upgrade, what happens to the old equipment that is too slow for Wikipedia, but not too slow for MANY other non-profits?  We donate them!  These systems were 1U rackmount servers, dual cpu 2.5-3, single core, 2-4GB of RAM, and 2-4 HDD Bays with 1-2 80-250GB HDDs. This year, we have  three non-profits who received our older systems (in alphabetical order): Drupal.org, OpenStreetMap Foundation, and Sugar Labs.

Drupal.org

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is an international non-profit organisation supporting but not controlling the project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and to providing geospatial data for anybody to use and share.

OpenStreetMap is an open initiative to create and provide free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them.

Sugar Labs

The mission of Sugar Labs^® is to produce, distribute, and support the use of the Sugar learning platform; it is a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and developers to create, extend, teach, and learn with the Sugar learning platform.

We hope the recipients of our servers will be able to put them to good use!

Below are some common questions involving Wikimedia and the server donation process:

Q. How can I get some of the decommissioned donation servers?

A. The best place to follow the goings on of our technical team is here, on the Wikimedia Technical Blog.  When we have a batch of servers up for decommissioning and donation, we will announce it on the tech blog, and instructions on how to apply to receive some servers.

Q. Who is eligible to apply for servers?

A. We try to only donate servers to other non-profits whose core values are similar or in support of our own.  This means we do not donate them for individual use.   Since these servers were purchased with donations to support Wikimedia, we feel we need to further donate them to other like-minded organizations, since that is how the money for the servers was meant to be spent.

Q. How often does this happen?

A. Most servers are kept in use by Wikimedia beyond three years.  Many of our servers that we have turned off in this batch are anywhere from 3 to 5 years old.  We only replace them when it makes sense from the technical standpoint to do so.  This means we cannot just say ‘we will do this every X months.’  We try to get the most use out of every server, as they were donated or purchased with donations.  So there is no set date, just keep checking the Wikimedia Technical Blog, when we have more to donate, we will say so there!

Q. I am a student/person/so and so, and I want to learn to develop and do such and such.  Can you send me a server?

A. Sorry, unfortunately it is just not realistic or fair of us to try to sort out which personal use requests for servers are legitimate and which are folks wanting computers for any other reason.  We choose to limit our donations to other like minded non-profit organizations.

Rob Halsell
Systems Administrator

Today we’re excited to announce a new partnership with Telefónica, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world.  Telefónica will be working with the Wikimedia Foundation to increase the reach and accessibility of free knowledge for millions of their customers.  Through their mobile, IPtv, broadband, and other platforms they will soon begin to provide fast and innovative access to educational information from Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

Telefónica has a particularly strong presence in Latin America, a part of the world experiencing an incredible rise in access to the internet, and a place where we hope to see considerable increases to our free knowledge materials.

Over the course of this three-year partnership we plan to jointly develop new approaches to sharing Wikimedia project information, particularly through Telefónica’s very large base of mobile subscribers. Telefónica has also expressed a strong interest in working with local chapters to support local outreach and education activities.  Last year they supported Wikimania in Buenos Aires.