Here are results from Hack-A-Ton DC:

-Number of WMF Staff attending: 16

-Number of non-staff attending: 11

-Last-minute cancellations: 2

-Number of local developers attending: 8

-Number of “Fix-me’s” that were closed as resolved: 44 (roughly 30% of the queue)

-Number of Ops RT issues that were closed as resolved: 5

-Most Fixes (prize winners): 1st: Roan Kattouw, 2nd: Siebrand Mazeland, 3rd: Chad Horohoe. Honorable mention to Bryan Tong Minh who came in 4th.

-Furthest Traveled: 1st: Naren Datha, 2nd Tim Starling, 3rd Niklas Laxström

-Special Thank You (for setting up the MeetUp): Katie Filbert:aude

-Community and Engineering Discussions included:
a) Demo of WikiBhasha by Naren Datha of Microsoft,
b) Presentation of Test Suite methods by Rob Lanphier and Trevor Parscal, Priyanka Dhanda and Markus Glaser
c) Discussion of how to resolve Code Review / Deployment backlog by pretty much everybody
d) Demo and discussion of Sentence Level Editing by Jan Pavle Posma
e) Discussion of Pending Changes roadmap by Rob Lanphier, Alolita Sharma and team
f) Discussion of Resource Loader by Trevor Parscal and Roan Kattouw
g) Discussion of the future of WMF Release Engineering by Tim Starling, Rob Lanphier and team
All discussions were followed by prototyping or sprints on that topic

-Number of people attending the WikiMeetUp Saturday night: 52

Danese Cooper, Chief Technology Officer

Picture of most of the hackers sporting their new tee-shirts:

Nearly everybody...outside for a change.

So far we have 30 people gathered for a weekend of MediaWiki hacking (and we have room for more, so…come on down! http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hack-A-Ton_DC ). The good folks at the Embassy Suites Tyson’s Corner have been very helpful (and we’ve not taken down the wifi yet).

See below for some snaps of the action. We’ll take a Group Picture outside in our Hack-a-Thon shirts for later posting.

Danese Cooper, Chief Technology Officer

Concentration

Naren Datha presents on WikiBhasha

The Hacking Room (partial view)

Folks over at Microsoft Research have been thinking about ways to improve content translation between instances of Wikipedia.  For example, today the largest collection of articles is at English Wikipedia (more than 3,000,000).  Compare that number with the collection at Hindi Wikipedia (which as of July 31 of this year had 55716).  One proven way to increase the articles in Hindi is machine translation, but such translations still need human review and often subtle editing to make them elegantly readable.

Enter WikiBhasha, formerly known as WikiBABEL, which launches today as both a MediaWiki extension project and a bookmarklet.  WikiBhasha takes content from a targeted Wikipedia page and displays a machine translation to a second language side-by-side.  Users can edit, add to or delete the translated content, preview their work and then submit it to the second language Wikipedia.

What’s especially interesting to me about this project is the fact that its author, researcher A. Kumaran, has tirelessly persuaded Microsoft to allow him to open source the client.  The code has been checked into the MediaWiki code tree under the Apache License 2.0, which means that the powerful side-by-side editing tools developed by Mr. Kumaran can potentially be used in other MediaWiki projects.  I’m very pleased to see Microsoft take this step, and I hope you will join me in welcoming WikiBhasha.

Danese Cooper, Chief Technical Officer

The Cisco ASA 5510 Series Adaptive Security Appliances

With the growth of the Foundation has come numerous necessary upgrades from Office IT, in order to support more users. One of the most noticeable (and more appreciated by the staff) is upgrading the internet connection. Some groups can get away with bare minimum internet connectivity, but we simply cannot since most everyone needs a decent Internet connection for their work (imagine how hard it would be for the Ops engineers to work, if they couldn’t SSH). When I started this summer, the San Francisco office had three bonded T1′s, for a total of 4.5 megabits/second of bandwidth. Recently, we completed an upgrade to a 100 megabit fiber connection along with a replacement firewall, the Cisco ASA 5510.
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Universal Subtitles synchronisation interface gives subtitle authors fine grained control over subtitle timing.

For the past 6 months the Participatory Culture Foundation has been hard at work on their latest open web video mission to make captioning, subtitling, and translating video publicly accessible in a way that’s free and open. Part of the Mozilla Drum Beat campaign for a better web, Universal Subtitles is a tool and platform to help bring an open solution to subtitling web video. Commons has supported timed text via the mwEmbed gadget for some time, but up until today it has been very difficult to create the initial subtitle track. I have been watching the development of the universal subtitles efforts, and while at the subtitle summit and open video conference we were finally able to hack on bringing the Universal Subtitles widget to Wikimedia Commons.

Today, I am happy to share our first pass at integrating our open subtitle efforts. Please keep in mind this integration is still very early on in development, but the basic milestone of being able to use the tool on commons to create and sync up subtitle tracks is an important first step. Even without helpful tools in place, the Wikimedia community has been creating subtitles and translations. We hope this new subtitle edit tools will broaden the number of participants and enable the Wikimedia community to set a new standard for high quality multilingual accessibility in online video content.

If you have a moment, feel free to check out the widget and provide some feedback. If you are looking for a video to subtitle, check out the recently created needs subtitling category.

Michael Dale, Open Source Video Collaboration Technology

Last Thursday October 7th, more than one hundred Wikipedia editors, donors, and readers gathered in New York City for Inside the Globe, a celebration of the dynamic community that has helped build the world’s largest free-knowledge resource.

Wikipedia editor and Wikimedia Foundation fellowship recipient Steven Walling presented a talk regarding the identity and culture of the most involved editors, highlighting the motivations and methods behind their amazing accomplishments within the project. Founder Jimmy Wales also spoke about the enormous impact of Wikipedia and the importance of continued support.

Wikipedia is a truly collaborative project, with individuals each doing their part to provide everyone with free access to the sum of all knowledge. It was wonderful to be able to bring some of them together, and inspiring to know that there are many more out there all around the world. Thank you all for being a part of this community.

Many thanks to Ruth Ann and Bill Harnisch of The Harnisch Foundation for generously sponsoring this event.

Steven Ma, Community Department

This is a reminder to anyone who might have been considering coming to the Hack-A-Ton in DC. If you haven’t been following page on MediaWiki.org, we’ve recently updated it with additional information, including the venue.

This year, we will be meeting at the Embassy Suites in Tyson’s Corner, just outside of the city itself. By the end of this week we will have a breakdown of what to expect and when.

We’ve already got a fair number of people coming so far, and I’d love to see more there. So if you’ve been thinking about coming but haven’t said anything or know of someone who would want to come, please get in touch with either myself or Danese for more information.

Around 18:00 UTC today, all Wikimedia projects experienced an unplanned outage caused by a cascade of events originating with the Image Scalers and eventually spreading through our web servers and load balancers due to an apparent bug in PyBal code. Situation was remedied by restarting key servers and rebalancing the load between subsystems. Full services availability was restored at 19:30 UTC.

Below is another overview update from Wikimedia Foundation Engineering, pulled together by Alolita, Danese, Erik, Guillaume, Mark, Tomasz, Zak, and myself. This edition of the update was drafted on mediawiki.org, where you can find the complete history of everyone who contributed. We believe we’ve gotten better at characterizing our work, but there are almost certainly gaps (especially when it comes to ongoing activities versus projects that have clear begin and end dates).

As before, each area has a program manager, who is responsible for coordinating the activity in that area. More detailed updates will come from those people as they are available.

A quick summary of the major development and operations initiatives underway this month:

• Testing and deployment of the grant-funded improvements to media uploading
• Further testing of the new ResourceLoader, which landed in trunk
• Testing and deployment of the article feedback tool, which is timed to coincide with the Public Policy Initiative’s first semester
• Build-out of a new primary data center location in Virginia. The new data center eliminate our Tampa data center as a single point of failure for all Wikimedia Foundation projects;
• Ongoing development of Pending Changes
• Engineering and testing for the 2010 Fundraiser, including testing of a new analytics framework
• The Hack-A-Ton happening in Washington, DC, a combination hackathon/bugsmash

More detail below the fold…

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