Malware installed on your computer may inject advertising into a page on popular websites, such as this Wikipedia article. This is an example that we've seen in the wild. Note the tiny text "ads not by this site" immediately below the ad, which may or may not appear next to these types of injected advertisements.

One example that we have seen installs itself as a browser extension. The extension is called “I want this” and installs itself in Google Chrome. To remove it:

• Open the options menu via the “pipe-wrench” icon on the top right, and choose Settings.
• Open the Extensions panel and there is the list of extensions installed.
• Remove an Extension by clicking the Remove button next to an item.

There is likely other similar malware that injects ads into Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and other popular browsers. If you see examples that you can document, please point them out in the comments.

Ads injected in this manner may be confined to some sites, even just to Wikipedia, or they may show up on all sites you visit. Browsing through a secure (HTTPS) connection (which you can automate using the HTTPS everywhere extension) may cause the ads to disappear, but will not fix the underlying problem.

Disabling browser add-ins is a good starting point to determine the source of these types of ads. This does not necessarily fix the source of the problem either, as malware may make deep changes to your operating system. If you’re comfortable attempting a malware scan and removal yourself, there are various spyware/malware removal tools. Popular and well-reviewed solutions include Ad-Aware and Malwarebytes. But be aware that these types of tools may also bundle software, or leave your computer in an unusable state.

If in doubt, have your computer evaluated for malware by a competent and qualified computer repair center.

There is one other reason you might be seeing advertisements: Your Internet provider may be injecting them into web pages. This is most likely the case with Internet cafes or “free” wireless connections. This New York Times blog post by Brian Chen gives an example.

But rest assured: you won’t be seeing legitimate advertisements on Wikipedia.

We’re here to distribute the sum of human knowledge to everyone on the planet — ad-free, forever.

Philippe Beaudette, Director of Community Advocacy
Erik Moeller, Vice President of Engineering and Product Development

The Architecture of Open-Source Applications is a collection of technical essays detailing the architecture of twenty-four major open-source applications.

The second volume of the Architecture of Open-Source Applications book, which includes a chapter on MediaWiki, is now available online and on lulu.com.

The Architecture of Open-Source Applications is a collection of technical essays detailing the architecture of twenty-four major open-source applications. This is the second volume of a series that aims to help developers understand how great and large programs are constructed, and the decisions (or accidents) that led to the way they now work. The series draws inspiration from books used by architects that feature case studies of the great buildings of history.

This volume contains a chapter detailing the inner workings of MediaWiki, the wiki software that powers all Wikimedia sites, including Wikipedia.

The writing of the chapter was coordinated by myself and Sumana Harihareswara. While I put together the majority of the content, it wouldn’t have been possible without the initial knowledge-sharing effort made by many Wikimedia engineers and volunteer MediaWiki developers, who also reviewed and improved the several revisions the text underwent.

The chapter on MediaWiki is available on the book’s website, along with the other chapters from both volumes. Its content was integrated into the documentation on mediawiki.org (at MediaWiki history and Manual:MediaWiki architecture) when it was completed in November 2011.

Greg Wilson and Amy Brown, the book’s editors, contacted the Wikimedia Foundation in August 2011 to offer to feature MediaWiki in the second volume. We chose a very collaborative approach to writing the chapter to ensure that the content was accurate and thorough, and also to split the workload among subject matter experts.

This volume dives into the inner workings of other tools familiar to the Wikimedia community, like Git, GNU Mailman, nginx and Puppet.

All of the book’s content is released under the Creative Commons Attribution license, similar to the license used on Wikimedia sites. It is freely available for reading online at http://www.aosabook.org, and you can also order a print from lulu.com. E-book and PDF versions will be available for purchase shortly. All royalties from purchases are donated to Amnesty International.

This is the second book published this year that contains a chapter written by Wikimedia staff, after the publication of Open Advice, a collection of essays, stories and lessons learned by members of the Free Software community.

I hope the chapter on MediaWiki, and also the rest of the book, will prove useful and interesting to the Wikimedia community and other developers. If you enjoyed it, learned from it, or would like to see more publications of this type, let us know!

Guillaume Paumier
Technical communications manager

“The Wikimedia Foundation is grateful for this partnership with DigiCert, which will enhance our ability to secure the millions of online exchanges that occur with our websites each day,” said CT Woo, Director of Technical Operations for the Wikimedia Foundation. “It’s important for Wikimedia to identify like-minded partners that value transparency and the privacy of our users.”

DigiCert is an online security provider for many of the most recognized companies and web sites in the world, including four of the top 10 comScore-ranked sites. With 489 million unique visitors to the 285 language Wikipedias and sister sites each month, the Wikimedia Foundation seeks partners who share its mission to ensure transparency and privacy for its users.

DigiCert has seen consistent growth over time and is currently the world’s third-largest provider of enterprise authentication services and digital certificates, with numerous government, educational and business clients around the world.

“DigiCert is pleased to partner with the Wikimedia Foundation in recognizing the importance of the free and secure flow of information across the Internet and to support the Foundation’s mission,” said DigiCert CEO Nicholas Hales in a press release. “We’re excited to have another opportunity to demonstrate the quality, scalability and flexibility of DigiCert’s products for a continually expanding roster of globally leading organizations of all sizes and industries.”

CT Woo, Director of Technical Operations

• Substantial work on Wikimedia engineering’s goals for the next fiscal year;
• The selection of 9 Google Summer of Code students and the start of their work;
• The shift to a rapid deployment cycle;
• A new mobile skin deployed to Wikimedia sites;
• The Wikipedia mobile app for iOS switching to using OpenStreetMap data.

Events

Recent events

• OpenStack Design Summit and Conference — The Wikimedia Labs team attended this San Francisco event, collaborated on upcoming OpenStack design decisions, spoke to other users, and publicized the Wikimedia Labs project.

Upcoming events

• Berlin hackathon (1–3 June 2012, Berlin, Germany) — The 120 tickets available for this three-day “inreach” hackathon disappeared as the event sold out in April. The Wikimedia technical community, including MediaWiki developers, Toolserver users, bot writers and maintainers, Gadget creators, and other Wikimedia technologists, showed substantial interest in the hackathon. The event, hosted by Wikimedia Deutschland, will mostly involve focused sprints, bugbashing, and other coding, with a few focused tutorials and trainings on Git, Lua, Gadgets changes, security, and performance optimization. Wikimedia Deutschland will also use this event to consult on and discuss the Wikidata structured data project.

• Wikimania hackathon (10–11 July 2012, Washington, D.C., USA) — Katie Filbert, Gregory Varnum, and Sumana Harihareswara are planning the hybrid inreach/outreach hackathon occurring just prior to Wikimania. Experienced Wikimedia technologists will collaborate, while interested new developers will be able to learn introductory MediaWiki development. Accessibility will be one of the event themes.

Personnel

Work with us

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.

• RFP-Lucene Search Operations Engineer
• RFP-Mobile Quality Assurance
• RFP-Wikipedia S40 J2ME Mobile Application
• Senior Software Developer (JavaScript)
• Senior Software Developer
• Software Developer (Backend)
• Software Developer (Fundraiser)
• Software Developer Mobile
• Software Developer (Front End)
• Bug Wrangler
• Partner Engineer
• Systems Engineer- Data Analytics
• UX Designer

Announcements

• Matthias Mullie joined the Features team (announcement).
• Faidon Liambotis joined the Operations team to work on Wikimedia Labs (announcement).
• Chris Steipp joined the Platform team as Senior Security Engineer (announcement).
• Tauhida Parveen joined the Platform team to work on QA and testing (announcement).
• Sumana Harihareswara was promoted to Engineering Community Manager (announcement).

Operations

Site infrastructure

• Servers — We added additional servers to bits.wikimedia.org in our Virginia data center for network capacity growth and redundancy. We also deployed a new udp2log server (in EQIAD) thus providing added extra capacity to collect new data for the Analytics team.

• Search — After months of preparation and refactoring work with our dated Lucene implementation at the Tampa data center, we are glad to report that Peter Youngmeister (with help from Asher Feldman, Robert Stojnic and Jeff Green) successfully built and deployed the new Search infrastructure at our EQIAD data center. The performance improvement is quite amazing, at the 99th percentile level, search latency dropped from a high of 9 seconds to 1 second, and the average search is only 100ms, down from 700ms. In addition, the new infrastructure addresses some of the previous single point of failures and capacity limitations.

• Databases — Asher Feldman completed the database migration/upgrade to support SHA-1 hashes in the coming MediaWiki release.

• Caching — Varnish is now used in EQIAD to serve all upload (images & media) traffic (other than Europe, which has its own servers). Mark Bergsma implemented Varnish to replace our Squid instances running in Tampa. In addition to having consistent hashing, Mark ran half of the EQIAD Varnish instances with the experimental persistent storage back-end. Unfortunately, after a few days, he found showstopper bugs and reverted it to the stable version.

• Networking — A secondary network transit link has been added to our EQIAD network, providing us redundancy and capacity; it comes with IPV6 enabled.

• Media Storage [?] — April saw two areas of progress: the MediaWiki code to allow original media storage in Swift was deployed to production (though it is not yet in use), and further investigation into old corrupted objects continued with new evidence and cleanup. During May, we hope to begin the data migration from the older storage system into Swift, and to deploy improved monitoring and metrics.

Testing environment

• Wikimedia Labs [?] — A new version of OpenStackManager was released, adding project filters for all interfaces, usability fixes and a number of bug fixes. OpenStackManager and LdapAuthentication were switched to Git, allowing a few more changes to be pushed thanks to being able to keep
  a stable master branch. Notable changes were per-project sudo management, allowing sysadmins in a project to manage who gets which sudo permissions in a fine-grained manner for their projects, and a change in how groups are added to LDAP for projects. A compute node (virt5) was added to the compute cluster, allowing for another 40 instances of capacity. We had an outage towards the end of the month, again due to glusterfs. We will start looking for alternatives to glusterfs soon. Sara Smollett added per-project ganglia monitoring, displaying resource graphs for instances in projects. Andrew Bogott finished work on a plugin framework for OpenStack Nova, and has added an example plugin for a SharedFS driver, which would allow us to manage gluster volumes via an API.

Backups and data archives

• Data Dumps [?] — The gluster share with the last 5 or so good dumps for all projects is ready for use by Wikimedia Labs projects. A first copy of uploaded media, accessible via rsync, was announced, and some work was done on the infrastructure to generate downloadable bundles of media per project. We’re working with the Internet Archive to produce media bundles that they can host for download as well. A new version of the dump scripts was deployed with some minor bug fixes. Christian Aistleitner wrapped up work on the PHPUnit tests for the dump maintenance scripts, and discovered a problem with the database schema, which we will
  need to discuss with the user community in order to find a resolution that works for everyone.

Other news

• There was a short site incident at our Amsterdam site on April 26th at around 6:00 (UTC), which lasted for 30 minutes and impacted some of our European users. We experienced an unusual traffic surge that overwhelmed some resources. That was quickly addressed once we found the cause.

Features Engineering

Editing tools

• Visual editor [?] — Roan Kattouw and Trevor Parscal are rewriting the underlying data model (ve.dm) to achieve feature compatibility with the parser and correct a variety of problems that have been previously deferred. Inez Korczynski and Christian Williams have been continuing their work to stabilize and integrate the content editable layer (ve.ce) and have been working with Rob Moen, who has focused on getting the user interface elements
  working with the content editable layer (ve.ui). Gabriel Wicke has been working on improving the parser‘s ability to parse pages more quickly as well as increasing compatibility with existing features such as thumbnails. A big template-heavy page like Barack Obama can now be expanded in similar time as the production parser (80 seconds on a puny laptop) and 340MB of memory. It previously ran out of memory after consuming 1.6G and running for ~30 minutes.

Editor engagement

• Article feedback [?] — Fabrice Florin worked with OmniTi to develop a range of new features for version 5 of the Article Feedback Tool (AFT5). This month, the team deployed the first versions of the abuse filter and
  the relevance filter, as well as new monitoring tools for editors, to help surface useful suggestions and reduce the noise on the feedback page where posts are listed for each article. Pau Giner started designing a new look and feel for that feedback page, as well as a final version of the feedback form, with guidance from Brandon Harris. We also finalized a set of special tools for oversighters, as well as new feedback links. Dario Taraborelli, Oliver Keyes and Aaron Halfaker collected and analyzed data on how prominent feedback links impact both volume and quality of user feedback. Roan Kattouw continued to review our code and
  help deploy weekly releases, and Matthias Mullie contributed new code for this project. We expect to complete feature development by the end of May, with full deployment in the summer.
• Page Triage [?] — The editor engagement team continued to develop its prototype of Page Triage, which provides an enhanced list of pages to be reviewed by community patrollers. Benny Situ, Ian Baker and Ryan Kaldari developed new features for the list view of this feature, while Brandon Harris designed a new curation bar to appear on the article pages. Oliver Keyes acted as community liaison and Fabrice Florin managed this project with Howie Fung. Current goals are to complete development of the new curation toolbar in May, and deploy an integrated release version the following month, along with the Article Creation landing system. The latest prototype is available on Wikimedia Labs; our first incremental deployment to the English Wikipedia is planned for the first week in May.
• Article Creation Workflow [?] — Ian Baker, Benny Situ, Ryan Kaldari and Brandon Harris have developed the Article Creation landing system, while focusing on deploying the New Page Triage (NPT) this month. Oliver
  Keyes prepared new templates for a proposed ‘Create a Draft’ section. Fabrice Florin managed the project and created a workflow diagram to illustrate the interdependencies between ACW and NTP. The goal is to collect and analyze usage data on ACW in May with Dario Taraborelli, in order to plan our next steps for this project, which is likely to be deployed alongside NPT in coming weeks. The current ACW prototype is available for testing on Wikimedia Labs.

Multimedia Tools

• TimedMediaHandler [?] — Michael Dale and Jan Gerber are looking into transcoding bugs in TimedMediaHandler. A lot of issues on beta are hardware- or configuration-related (virtual instances are running out of resources) and more hardware will be going online soon. In the meantime, the client-side playback parts of the test plan are being run by Chris McMahon and Tauhida Parveen.

MediaWiki infrastructure

• ResourceLoader [?] — The team is working on deploying ResourceLoader2′s gadget manager on Wikimedia Labs. They also completed a number of tasks, and are preparing for a ResourceLoader tutorial at the June Berlin hackathon.

Feature support

• Wikipedia Education Program [?] — Jeroen De Dauw has made the project almost feature complete. User testing is now finalized, and the team is still trying to get started getting code review.

• 2012 Wikimedia fundraiser [?] — The fundraising team deployed GlobalCollect recurring functionality, and started transition to using Git and Gerrit for its software development process. They wrote the burn up chart for the next fundraising round (login: guest, password: guest). The team is still working on adding staff.

Internationalization and Editor Engagement Experiments

• Internationalization and localization tools [?] — The team has completed the first round of UI designs for a Universal Language Selector (ULS) for desktop and mobile. UI/UX team members (Pau Giner and Arun Ganesh) are now implementing a prototype to showcase the first version of ULS. The team also added keymaps for language support to Narayam, added notification support to Translate, fixed bugs,
  reviewed code for localization support in MediaWiki 1.19, and discussed language support metrics.

• Editor Engagement Experiments (E3) — Karyn Gladstone, Steven Walling, Maryana Pinchuk and Ryan Faulkner conducted the Necromancy experiment, emailing lapsed editors to encourage them to edit Wikipedia again. Work on the Template A/B testing project is wrapping up; a full report is expected in May. The E3 team will also be publishing details on each experiment on meta and the English Wikipedia. The technical specifications for each implementation will be posted on mediawiki.org. The team also began recruiting for its open positions; the first software engineer for the team will be joining mid May.

Mobile

Mobile Web

• Mobile design [?] — The final selection of section styles was supported by user experience testing. We also added switches between Mobile/Desktop view and Images on/off to the footer. These changes have now been deployed as the default view of mobile Wikipedia. We’re thrilled to get great comments like “Wikipedia mobile has improved its user interface, simple but lovely”, “Who loves the new wikipedia mobile format on your iPhone? I know I do”, and “New Wikipedia mobile website is gorgeous. Sleek and fast”.
  The first working prototype of the new navigation UI has been completed in rough form and sent out for feedback.
• Mobile Contact us [?] — Arthur Richards and Jon Robson finished the first beta version of the new “Contact us” form. It’s been deployed to our beta infrastructure and we’re collecting user feedback both in and about the tool. We’ll be letting this sit for two weeks to collect feedback and then will re-assess for next steps.

Apps

• Wikimedia Apps [?] — Yuvaraj Pandian released new versions of our Android app and our first ever PhoneGap version of the iOS app. Issues were identified with iOS 4.x and we released an update to fix them. Yuvaraj also continued work on the API move branch. Brion Vibber pushed out a final build of the Wikipedia App to the BlackBerry market, and started experimenting with a Windows mobile version.
• Mobile Photo Upload [?] — Development was paused in favor of the new mobile navigation. We explored how to collaborate with Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM), and we have decided that a standalone app for WLM is the best way to go. Our initial development will be for Android, and iOS pending progress. Brion Vibber created a rough demonstration of some of the required features on github.
• UCOSP Spring 2012: Wiktionary mobile app [?] — Wiktionary Mobile RC2 is available for download, and we’re looking for beta testers for this release candidate. Team members are scattering for the summer term; some will be able to continue work on the Android app, while others are beginning to plan an iOS edition. The project will be featured at the Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education on May 4–5, 2012, in Vancouver, with team members participating in a panel for the Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects.

Alternate Access

• Wikipedia over SMS & USSD [?] — Patrick Reilly wrapped up work packaging Vumi and we’re just waiting on the operations team to install the production system. Next, we’ll invite users to test it over Jabber, while we work with our various partners to connect it to mobile phone networks. This will wrap up our initial implementation of this project.
• Wikipedia Zero [?] — Patrick Reilly and Dan Foy have continued to support our Zero partner roll-outs. We’re testing in new countries and are updating the Zero software as necessary. Due to our partners’ confidentiality requirements, we haven’t been able to highlight the specific areas where testing is happening. Moving forward, we are going to work with our partners to be able to disclose more.
• J2ME App [?] — We’ve narrowed down our vendors and are having interviews with the finalists.

Core

• GeoData Storage & API [?] — Further development is still pending testing to see how well it works with our apps.
• Mobile Frontend [?] — Patrick Reilly, Arthur Richards and Max Semenik continued work on moving MobileFrontend to MediaWiki core. We’ve updated its skinning, internals, and general architecture to make it more core-friendly. Patrick also posted a response to a recent news article about
  Wikipedia mobile’s energy consumption.
• Mobile QA [?] — We’ve narrowed down our candidate list and are doing final interviews.
• Mobile support in MediaWiki core [?] — Max Semenik has rewritten MobileFrontend to use MediaWiki’s skin infrastructure. We’re continuing to further remove any Wikimedia-specific code from the extension in preparation for a migration to core. Future work will involve an easy way to create custom output based on the view (mobile, desktop, tablet).

Platform Engineering

MediaWiki Core

• MediaWiki 1.19 [?] — We finished deploying MediaWiki 1.19 to all Wikimedia sites at the end of February. Trevor Parscal, Timo Tijhof and Roan Kattouw solved the last bug blocking the release of the tarball for third-party users. A final 1.19 tarball release was completed May 2.
• MediaWiki 1.20 [?] — As of April 2012, core software deployments to Wikimedia sites are done from git (instead of Subversion) through incremental “wmf” branches. The first deployment of the 1.20 release cycle, labeled 1.20wmf1, was deployed to all Wikimedia sites this month; it notably brought new diff colors for improve readability. The 1.20wmf2 deployment cycle began on April 30. The 1.20.0 stable tarball is expected to be released in
  fall of 2012.
• Continuous integration [?] — Jenkins has been upgraded, providing a nicer GUI. Progress was made on implementing a universal linter for all gerrit changes, and not just those with modified PHP files. The TestSwarm connection with Jenkins has been established, and TestSwarm is now running MediaWiki’s QUnit test suite again. Christian Aistleitner created a test suite for the (rewritten) MWDumper system, and the tests are monitored live on Jenkins.
• Git conversion [?] — MediaWiki core and all extensions deployed on Wikimedia sites are getting into regular development cycles. The second group of extensions were migrated on April 27. We’ve also branched and released 1.20wmf1 to most Wikimedia sites. The priorities for Gerrit are currently fixing our UTF-8 problem, improving Gerrit integration with IRC and e-mail, making project/user information more discoverable, and upgrading Gerrit to 2.3 in the next week or so.
• SwiftMedia [?] — Ben Hartshorne and Leslie Carr have been running a script to clean up corrupted thumbnails in Swift. Aaron Schulz has been fixing bugs, and is now focusing on adding concurrent file operation support to PHP cloudfiles (the PHP interface to Swift) and to MediaWiki’s FileBackend code. This should help alleviate bug 34717.
• Lua scripting [?] — Tim Starling started the implementation of a replacement for MediaWiki markup-based templates, using the Lua scripting language, embedded via the Scribunto extension. The current roadmap aims for a deployment to Labs in May 2012, then to mediawiki.org; full deployment to Wikimedia sites is scheduled for 2013. Tim
  will lead tutorial sessions at the Berlin Hackathon 2012.
• Code review management [?] — The Wikimedia engineering 20% policy is the current approach of the Wikimedia Foundation to improving the code review situation. With the move to Git, we no longer have a code review backlog in trunk, but we are still facing a backlog of patches to review (in Gerrit and Bugzilla), RFCs to comment on, and extensions to review.

Quality assurance

• QA/testing [?] — Testing for MediaWiki 1.20wmf2 is underway, including a community QA project with Weekend Testing on May 5. Tauhida Parveen was brought in to help with Timed Media Handler testing, but blocking bugs are preventing substantive testing. Testing is also being performed on Article Feedback Tool (AFT) and Editor Engagement projects, with an eye toward possible community testing project for AFT early June. Chris McMahon prepared a plan for automated UI testing, utilizing Selenium, RSpec, and PageObject. Work continues on improving the Beta
  cluster, with a sprint in San Francisco planned for the week of May 7.

Wikimedia analytics

• Report card [?] — David Schoonover and Fabian Kaelin continued work on the new Report card, whose prototype is available on Wikimedia Labs. Andrew Otto has been working with the Operations team to puppetize existing services, and to add a third server (Oxygen) to run filters; we are in the process of migrating bayes to stat1. Andre Engels, Erik Zachte and Diederik van Liere have worked on new mobile reports that will be integrated into the new report card.

Technical Liaison; Developer Relations

• Bug management [?] — Mark Hershberger used the deployment of MediaWiki 1.20wmf1 to gather volunteers for the Bug Squad. He has begun working with volunteers on IRC to coordinate bug-grooming activities.
• Summer of Code 2012 [?] — Wikimedia engineers have chosen nine students for this year’s program. For the next few weeks, until May 21st, the students and their mentors are working together to train the students in MediaWiki development, so that they’ll have all the basic domain knowledge they’ll need to succeed during the summer.
• Engineering project documentation [?] — Guillaume Paumier modified the templates used for the Activity pages system to display more relevant information on team hubs like the Mobile team hub. He also wrote specifications for a tool to
  fix bugs and limitations of the current system.
• Volunteer coordination and outreach [?] — Sumana Harihareswara and other members of the Engineering Community Team continued to follow up on contacts, recruit new contributors to the Wikimedia tech community, and mentor new contributors. They granted developer access and planned upcoming events.
• Wikimedia blog maintenance [?] — 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 repositories for the theme and the WMBlog plugin in the Wikimedia git repository, and cloned their history.

Wikidata

The Wikidata project is funded and executed by Wikimedia Deutschland.

The Wikidata team has been working for a month now, and they’ve made good progress on the initial development. They published some initial assumptions and requirements, drafted and implemented the initial API, implemented functionality to enter and edit interwiki links, and started collecting use cases for Queries and Infoboxes. They held the first two rounds of office hours and publish current scrum items at m:Wikidata/Development.

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.

Page views to the Wikipedia mobile site (red: non-English versions) compared to the 2 billion target from the annual plan

How did it happen? As internet usage shifts from a desktop-centric environment to a more mobile-centric one, there’s a migration to smaller screens. Various industries and factors have made that happen, and several things have been done at the Wikimedia Foundation to move with the change. We can’t do justice to all the individual work by attempting to list it here, but amongst the many changes and contributions, a few highlights include the launch of the new mobile site last October, better device detection, and the official Android app announced in January.

Also notable about the 2 billion mark is the way use has evolved globally. A year ago, 67% of all visits to the Wikipedia mobile site were to the English Wikipedia; now that number is 54%. In the Global South in particular, traffic to the mobile sites for certain languages has grown tremendously. Some examples include Portuguese (from 3.9M to 27.4M), Arabic (from 1.7M to 10.2M), and Turkish (from 1.0M to 9.0M). As our partnership programs roll out to allow hundreds of millions to access Wikipedia on their mobile devices without incurring data charges, we expect mobile use to be even more globally distributed over the coming year.

The work on mobile, from both the tech and global development side, is not slowing down in the least however. There’s a lot more to come, but it’s worth taking a moment to recognize the mark we’ve reached, and to thank every community and staff member who played a part.

On behalf of the Mobile Team (Tomasz Finc, Patrick Reilly, Arthur Richards, Jon Robson, André Engels, Kul Wadhwa, Mani Pande, Amit Kapoor, Yuvaraj Pandian, Max Semenik, Phil Chang, Dan Foy):

Amit Kapoor, Senior Manager, Mobile Partnerships

All nine of these students are working on MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikimedia sites.

• Ankur Anand, working on integrating Flickr upload and geolocation into UploadWizard. WMF engineer Ryan Kaldari is mentoring Ankur as they make it easier for Wikimedia contributors to contribute media files and metadata.
• Harry Burt, working on TranslateSvg (“Bringing the translation revolution to Wikimedia Commons”). All readers and editors benefit when we can use a single picture or animation in different language wikis (example, use). Harry aims to allow contributors to localize the text embedded within vector files (SVGs). WMF engineer Max Semenik is mentoring this project.
• Akshay Chugh, working on a convention/conference extension for MediaWiki. Wikimedia conferences like Wikimania often use MediaWiki to help organize their conferences, but it takes a lot of custom programming. Under the mentorship of volunteer developer Jure Kajzer, Akshay aims to create an extension that a webmaster could install to provide conference-related features automatically.
• Ashish Dubey, working on realtime collaboration in the upcoming visual editor.  You may have seen “real-time collaborative editing” in tools like Etherpad and Google Docs.  Ashish (with WMF engineer Trevor Parscal as mentor) will work to bring this functionality to MediaWiki.
• Suhas HS, working on improvements to the OpenStackManager extension. We use OpenStack in our new Wikimedia Labs infrastructure. Suhas, with the mentorship of WMF engineer Ryan Lane, aims to improve MediaWiki’s ability to support the new Openstack API, which provides an interface to manage the virtualized environments.
• Nischay Nahata, working on optimizing the performance of the Semantic MediaWiki extension. In wikis with unusually large amounts of content, Semantic MediaWiki experiences performance degradation. With the mentorship of volunteer developer Markus Krötzsch and Wikidata developer Jeroen De Dauw, Nischay aims to find and fix these issues; this will also reduce SMW’s energy consumption, making it greener.
• Aaron Pramana, working on watchlist grouping and workflow improvements. Aaron aims to make it easier for wiki editors and readers to use watchlists, and to create and use groups of watched items to focus on or share.  Aaron will be working with volunteer developer Alex Emsenhuber.
• Robin Pepermans, working on Incubator improvements and language support. This project aims to improve the usability, performance, and coverage of Wikimedia’s Incubator. WMF engineer Niklas Laxström will mentor Robin.
• Platonides, working on a desktop application for mass-uploading files to Wikimedia Commons.  The application will make it much easier for participants in upload campaigns like Wiki Loves Monuments to upload their photos (and it’ll work on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS). I, Sumana Harihareswara, will be mentoring Platonides.

Congratulations to this year’s students, and thanks to all the applicants, as well as MediaWiki’s many mentors, developers who evaluated applications, and Google’s Open Source Programs Office. The accepted students now have a month to ramp up on MediaWiki’s processes and get to know their mentors (the Community Bonding Period) and will start coding their summer projects on or before May 21st. As the organizational administrator for MediaWiki’s GSoC participation, I’ll be keeping an eye on all nine students and helping them out.

Good luck!

Sumana Harihareswara, Volunteer Development Coordinator

Google Summer of Code 2012

While the Wikimedia Foundation is happy with the talent it gains in this way, it feels strongly that finishing formal education is very important. Some students only work for the WMF in their holidays while others manage regular contributions in their free time as well. Such relations are often strengthened through programs like the Google Summer of Code or through summer internships.

Niklas Laxström recently finished University and this happy occasion is reason enough to interview him. As you may know, he works for the WMF Localisation Team and his claim to fame is that he started what became translatewiki.net. Niklas has been instrumental in much of the internationalisation and localisation development for the MediaWiki software.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

Congratulations, master Niklas. You finished university !! What did you study and what is your exact title (in Finnish)
I studied language technology with minors in Finnish language, Computer Science, East-Asian studies and collection of Russian language courses. I’m now Master of Arts, filosofian maisteri.

You started with what became translatewiki.net before you started university. How did your study influence the development of translatewiki.net
Before university I had a hobby project for inflecting Finnish nouns. It wasn’t successful nor had it a good design, but it started series of events, which caused me to start studying language technology.

My studies were pretty heavily biased in hard language processing: for instance syntactic parsers, finite state technologies and morphologies.  however, the open source language technologies are not yet in a level where that kind of processing can just be plugged into any software.

Learning about variation in languages has been very useful to me. It helps avoiding solutions that only work for limited number of similar languages. I learned most of that in linguistics courses but also by studing several dissimilar languages. l also liked the isolated courses about copyright, terminologies and string processing, which turned out to be useful in different situations.

On the other hand, working with MediaWiki and translatewiki.net has given me enormous amounts of practical experience all over computer
engineering, which helped me to perform better in engineering related courses.

You are now a fully qualified linguist. What do you consider the biggest linguistic challenge we are facing you
Not exactly a linguist, more like a language engineer. The language support in MediaWiki is nothing to be ashamed of. That said, there is a huge difference between languages on how readily they can be used on a computer.

This involves everything from search to fonts and input method and from optical character recognition to speed synthesis. The biggest challenge is to identify solutions that help to bridge that gap for as many languages as possible.

What is it that you do for the Wikimedia Foundation
I continue doing what brought me to MediaWiki: making the translation process easy and fast. This includes a lot of i18n (making the software translatable) and facilitating l10n (adapting and translating the software to particular language and culture).

It is absurd that localisation is simultaneously one of the biggest strengths and weakness of open source. While it enables using computer in anyone’s mother tongue, the processes and tools used for localisation tend to be difficult to use if not outright preventing good localisation.

You participated at the Multilingual Web conference in Luxembourg. What value do we gain from visiting conferences like this
Generally conferences are about discussions and sharing of experiences: we learn what others do and we let others know what we do. The ultimate purpose is to learn new things and find ways to work together to to reach goals we wouldn’t be able to reach otherwise. Meeting new people and enjoying the local culture makes it fun and interesting.

In this case we had a chance to learn, discuss and affect standards that on the other hand let us support languages better and dictate the limits of what we can do in the near future.

Standards play an important part in translatewiki.net and in MediaWiki. What standards do we use and for what
We usually make our own best practices for what we do, to get stuff done. That said, we are not looking to reinvent the wheel just because we can. We rely on standards all over the place starting from basic things HTTP and HTML but specifically we do use and support standard i18n file formats, language codes and other common practices like tagging our content with language codes.

The CLDR repository is especially problematic, because on the one hand it contains lots of data we don’t want to duplicate, but on the other
hand it is missing so much data that we need and could provide, but are currently not able to push back into CLDR.

As a member of the WMF Localisation team you care about language support. How much of a difference does the team make ?
We have talked a lot about how to measure the impact of what we do. We do not have any numbers currently. There are so many things we would
want to fix but we can’t possibly do them all. We have chosen issues that we want to fix: two examples of that are the spreading use of Narayam for inputting text and WebFonts for displaying text. The fact that communities request those extensions to be enabled on new projects says to me that we have made something that is useful and wanted.

It is also worth mentioning that we are raising awareness of i18n and l10n inside Wikimedia Foundation. WMF can sometimes be ignorant about
i18n, especially when it comes to software. Our efforts are not a replacement for the language communities making noise themselves to make sure they are heard. We advise and provide WMF the tools to tackle the complex issues of deep multilingualism.

What language support challenges do you want tackled
I am very much looking towards to implemeting the planned language selector, which has been specifically desgined to fit our special needs.

In slightly longer term, I would be happy to see our lack of support for proper collation (sorting) sorted out.

Now that you finished university, what would you like to study next
I want to upkeep my language skills, especially Russian. I do not have immediate plans to continue with postgraduate studies. But one never stops learning.

Can you tell us a joke about linguists
Not exactly a joke, but I’m not sure whether I should be proud or ashamed of this.

In the Wikipedia Education Program, professors assign their students to edit Wikipedia articles as a grade for class, assisted by volunteer Wikipedia Ambassadors. In fall 2011, 55 courses participated in the program in the United States, with students editing articles on the English Wikipedia. On average, these students added 1855 bytes of content that stayed on Wikipedia, compared to only 491 for a randomly chosen sample of new users who joined English Wikipedia in September 2011. These numbers establish that students who participate in the Wikipedia Education Program contribute significantly more quality content that stays on Wikipedia than other new users.

Examining the distribution of content that survived on Wikipedia for both of these groups, we found that almost half of the Wikipedia Education Program participants added 1,000 or more bytes that stayed on Wikipedia in the first six months. In contrast, more than half of the random sample of new editors added no content that stayed on Wikipedia in the first six months. The targeted recruitment of students, combined with the support provided by the Ambassador Program and instructors, results in a much larger percentage of new editors who contribute quality content to Wikipedia.

To understand the collective impact of the Wikipedia Education Program in fall 2011, we compared the amount of content students added to Wikipedia to the content added by the random sample of new editors. The numbers show that the 920 student editors who participated in the program in fall 2011 added the same amount of content as 2250 typical new editors (editors are defined as users who made at least one edit to an article). In terms of new content, students have twice the impact as typical new editors.

An important consideration for any outreach project is editor retention. Data showed that students who are introduced to editing Wikipedia through the U.S. Education Program are just as likely to continue editing as any other newcomer.

The Wikipedia Education Program has now grown to Egypt, Brazil and other regions beyond North America. With an increased global presence, measuring and understanding the contributions of new student editors (and how they differ from other new users that join Wikipedia) has gained importance. Establishing a common metric for measuring the impact of the Wikipedia Education Program on various Wikipedias is another key motivation for a quantitative study.

There’s a lot more work to be done on measuring the program’s impact. So, stay tuned for more information about these metrics.

Methodology for this research can be found at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Education_Program_evaluation#Methods

Ayush Khanna, Data Analyst, Global Development

(with input from Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research)

We prefer to use standardised information, not only because it is stable and reliable, but because we do not have to collect the data ourselves and also because the data is used by many other organisations and in many other applications. We love the CLDR and we want it to be even better. To make it better we need your help.

Many of the languages that have a Wikipedia and many of the languages that want to have a Wikipedia are not represented in the CLDR. Many Wikipedians know their language really well. They can provide the information about their language and they can verify that the existing information is correct. When there is a need to change things, you will need to create a user.

When a language is not yet supported, you will have to request for the new locale or language to be added. It is expected that you provide at least the core data when you make your request and that you at least complete the minimal data required. One of the questions is: where the language is official, it may be that a language does not have any official status. This does not prevent people from reading or writing that language and it does not mean that information about such a language is not important to us.

When a language is already supported, we want you to verify if the names for other languages exist and are correctly written. There can be issues in any language including English; using the Auracana name for the Mapundungun language is considered an insult.

When you are able and happy to help us in this way, you may be interested in joining our “language support team.” Because of your interest you belong to the group of people we first want to turn to when we have questions about supporting your language. More structured information and room for your reports can be found here. When there are any issues, do not hesitate to report them.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant