Wikimedia engineering January 2012 report

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Major news in January include:

Hover your mouse over the green question marks ([?]) to see the description of a particular project.

Events

Recent events

A major event in January was the English Wikipedia blackout protesting SOPA & PIPA.

Wikimedia developers met and built tools at the San Francisco hackathon.
  • English Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout — The engineering team supported this online protest by developing and deploying the blackout code and design, including the CongressLookup extension for helping people find and contact their representative, pulling from Sunlight Foundation APIs and other sources. The Operations team disabled editing during the 24 hour time period as agreed upon by the community, and helped keep other systems up and running, including the temporarily overloaded Wikimedia blog.

Upcoming events

  • Pune hackathon (10–12 February 2012, Pune, India) — Preparation began and registration continued for an outreach-focused developers week-end to take place in Pune, India, and led by Alolita Sharma. Approximately 70 participants are expected to learn and contribute at this event, focusing on the gadgets framework, mobile Wikimedia access, and language support (i18n/L10n).

Personnel

Job openings

Are you looking to work for Wikimedia? We have a lot of hiring coming up, and we really love talking to active community members about these roles.

  • Requests for proposals:
    • Mobile UX — Help us redesign our mobile platform and apps as more and more visitors access Wikipedia and its sister sites via mobile devices.
    • Mobile QA — Help us set up testing and automation processes for all Wikimedia Mobile projects.

Short news

Engineering metrics in January:

Operations

Site infrastructure

  • Data Centers [?] — Work continued on building up the EQIAD datacenter in Virginia. We added a new bastion host, a ganglia server, new dataset servers and upgraded the database servers, with a new chained replication topology and heartbeat-based replication monitoring. We upgraded mailman and migrated it to a new server in EQIAD from ESAMS. We have also successfully tested the new thumbnail system and the text squid implementation that we’ll start rolling out fully in February. As for our Tampa datacenter, we have been upgrading the database servers as well as adding new ones for redundancy and capacity needs. We have at least 4 databases per cluster now (except s5, where the fourth one is being added). At the same time, we have retired 40 old servers, freeing up 2 racks of space and the much-needed IP addresses. The retired servers will be available for donation soon.
  • Media Storage [?] — Performance testing of Swift continued in January. We confirmed that performance degrades above roughly 10 million objects in a bucket, so we adjusted both the Swift middleware and MediaWiki support to allow sharded containers. Our current plan is to shard the Commons and English Wikipedia containers. The test hardware for object storage arrived, and we validated that it works as expected. We have thus ordered what will be the production hardware, and expect it to arrive and go into service towards the end of February. We have started populating the current cluster in Tampa with thumbnails in preparation for putting it into production service.
  • HTTPS — HTTPS work is still on hold in favor of other projects. We did have some activity thanks to volunteer Abe Music who fixed a portion of our UDP logging module for Nginx. There is one more fix still needed before HTTPS page views are properly tracked in our statistics. The following outstanding issues have been fixed: nagios (replaced self-signed cert), upload (served wrong cert via IPv6), integration (wrong cert / certificate chain). There are remaining issues related to: jobs, status and mail. The wiki table of HTTPS-less domains has been updated, and details can be found in the page’s edit history.

Testing environment

  • Wikimedia Labs [?] — To keep up with project growth, the virtualization controller (virt1) has been converted into a compute node. Doing so let virt1 and virt4 join the instance storage, doubling the filesystem storage available. The additional compute node also allows Labs to grow by up to another 30 instances. An old ruby gateway server (mobile2) was converted into the virtualization controller (virt0). A number of projects were added or moved to Labs, including incubator, ganglia, deployment-prep, globaleducation, a number of mobile projects, and a bunch more. Labs was very useful during the SF hackathon. A number of projects were created, implemented, and demoed using Labs during the hackathon. We also had a project created, implemented, tested, and deployed to production during the hackathon. We are still waiting for the gluster storage to arrive for volume storage; it should arrive early February. There are now 46 projects, 80 instances and 103 users.

Backups and data archives

  • Data Dumps [?] — A problem with the rsync to our mirror site was located and fixed. Another organization agreed to mirror the dumps as well, and we are waiting for their server to come online. Back issues of dumps from 2002 through 2006 were made available, for folks interested in historical data. New hardware has arrived in our Virginia datacenter, and we’ll be copying all dumps over there as soon as it’s ready. We’re thinking about how to provide image dumps in some fashion, even if we don’t keep local copies of the dumps or they are not run on a regular basis. We also cleaned up the dumps documentation and drafted this year’s development plans. Finally, we have a contractor, Christian Aistleitner, who will be working on a test suite for dump generation.

Other news

  • Some users complained of slowness and pages not rendered on Wikipedia in Occitan. Domas Mituzas, one of our volunteers, helped fix the issue temporarily. After further investigation, he found that the root cause was badly constructed templates, which were hoarding up server memory RAM. Fixes are planned to prevent this kind of problem from surfacing again.
  • Some US-based users of Wikipedia experienced slow page rendering time for 10–15 minutes on January 20, 2012; this was due to the bits.wikimedia.org servers in EQIAD being overloaded. The issue was investigated and quickly resolved.

Features Engineering

Editing tools

  • Visual editor [?] — January was a bit slower on the visual editor front, as parts of the team took some well-deserved vacation after the successful prototype launch in December. During the SF Hackathon, a lot of issues were fleshed out. Plans for the second phase of the editor project were formulated. Inez Korczynski investigated a possible use of contenteditable to help with input methods and text selections on mobile devices. Gabriel Wicke extended the parser with the ability to fetch and expand templates in a parallel and asynchronous fashion. The parser now supports most parts of the English Wikipedia Main Page.
  • Internationalization and localization tools [?] — January 2012 was slow on the code production side because of the code slush preparing for the branching of MediaWiki 1.19. The Localization team invested a lot of time in writing user documentation for translation tools, input methods and web fonts. Thanks go in particular to the volunteers that assisted in writing and proofreading the documentation. Much of the user documentation can be translated using the Translate extension. Amir worked to solve the old bug in the EasyTimeline extension, that prevented it from working with Indic and right-to-left scripts. Another focus was to improve test coverage for WebFonts and Narayam. In February we expect to deliver further improvements for the translation process, notably on Meta, with workflow improvements, the introduction of a translation memory and (subject to delay) notifying translators of newly available translations from inside MediaWiki by e-mail.

Participation and editor engagement

  • Article feedback [?]Fabrice Florin led development on the next round of Article Feedback Tool v5 features, including a new feedback page, to be released in early February by OmniTI, our development partner. Aaron Halfaker, Oliver Keyes and Dario Taraborelli continued to collect valuable data from the community about the usefulness of comments coming in from each of the three forms launched in December. A survey to get comments from readers about the effectiveness and attractiveness of each design was also launched, and the team has been compiling the various sets of data to produce a report on the pros and cons of each forms in early February. The target date for an expanded feedback page is Feb. 15 for pre-deployment testing on en-labs, then wider deployment on Feb. 22.
  • Feedback Dashboard [?] — We implemented a leaderboard of recent top responders on the feedback dashboard. New editor feedback is now added to a dedicated log. When feedback is marked as helpful, that fact is displayed on the feedback dashboard itself. Other than a few other smaller changes, we’re now moving the project into maintenance mode to focus on article creation workflow and New Page Triage.
  • Article Creation Workflow [?]Benny Situ, Ryan Kaldari, Brandon Harris, Alolita Sharma, Oliver Keyes, Howie Fung, and Ian Baker met to discuss sprint planning. They mapped out various user flows leading to article creation, agreed on a proposed landing system and defined changes that are going to be required.

Multimedia Tools

  • TimedMediaHandler [?] — The beginnings of a TimedMediaHandler test setup were put into place in Wikimedia Labs, including video transcoding infrastructure, at http://commons.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org. Work on this test setup will continue in February, with the goal to begin executing the test plan in preparation for deployment.

MediaWiki infrastructure

  • ResourceLoader [?]Roan Kattouw and Timo Tijhof fixed bugs that would have affected the upcoming 1.19 deployment, and implemented an experimental asynchronous loading feature that will make JavaScript load faster.

Feature support

  • Wikipedia Education Program [?]Jeroen De Dauw implemented many features, like institution & course management, and instructor & student workflows. He also implemented logging and revision histories.

Mobile

  • Android Wikipedia App [?] — The Mobile team released the first version of the Wikipedia Android application into the Android Market. In just over three weeks, we’ve had over 900,000 downloads, became the #1 search result for “Wikipedia”, became the #1 trending app, and received a consistent 4/5 stars in the Android Market. We released two minor updates to fix bugs, and are processing user feedback to guide our next version.
  • WikipediaZero — We launched our first demo version of WikipediaZero for carrier testing. While there is still much work to be done in order to integrate with as many carriers as we’d like to see, we’re already starting to make progress on how to simplify our implementations.
  • Wikipedia over SMS/USSDPatrick Reilly, along with the PraeKelt Foundation, worked on a demo instance of a SMS/USSD gateway to access Wikipedia. We’re hoping to have a complete demo in time for Mobile World Congress next month.
  • GPS Storage/Retrieval — An early prototype of the GPS storage retrieval API went live this month. We still have a large to-do list in order to roll it out in production, but it’s showing great early stage progress.

Special projects

Fundraising support

  • 2011 Wikimedia fundraiser [?] — After meeting the budget goals, the 2011 Fundraiser was wrapped up in early January, after which the team participated in a two-day retrospective. Work began on the Fundraiser 2011 cleanup, including the addition of recurring donation and auditing support for GlobalCollect. A two-day inception was held for preliminary planning of the 2012 Fundraiser.

Offline

Platform Engineering

MediaWiki Core

  • MediaWiki 1.19 [?] — A new Beta cluster, replicating the production environment, was set up to allow Wikimedians to test upcoming software (including MediaWiki 1.19) on Wikimedia Labs before deployment. A preliminary schedule was drafted, according to which deployment of MediaWiki 1.19 will start on February 13th and complete on March 1st.
  • Continuous integration [?] — The team has rearranged Jenkins jobs to make them easier to manage in the long run, and to add capacity. TestSwarm is pending testing of the new Special:JavaScriptTest page.
  • Git conversion [?] — The MediaWiki phase3 repository has been successfully converted with branches. Another upcoming test repository will include release tags, and extension projects will be set up shortly.
  • SwiftMedia [?]Aaron Schulz added container sharding to FileBackend, and continued to make performance improvements and fixes. The Swift back-end now passes all unit tests; the code is being reviewed and cleaned up. Some of Aaron’s code for purging thumbnails will be backported to MediaWiki 1.18. Ben Hartshorne has prepared interim hardware for production deployment, which will begin the week of February 6.
  • Lua scripting [?] — A team of Wikimedia engineers agreed on Lua as the language to implement as a production-ready replacement for MediaWiki markup-based templates. Tim Starling will lead this effort after the 1.19 deployment and Git migration.

Wikimedia analytics

Technical Liaison; Developer Relations

Future

The engineering management team continues to update the Software deployments page weekly, providing up-to-date information on the upcoming deployments to Wikimedia sites, as well as the engineering roadmap, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts.


This article was written collaboratively by Wikimedia engineers and managers. See revision history and associated status pages. A wiki version is also available.


This article was edited on December 1st, 2012. The following content was changed: the number of processed shell requests was corrected.

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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