Wikimedia blog

News from inside the Wikimedia Foundation.org

WMF engineering reports

Wikimedia engineering January 2012 report

Major news in January include:

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Wikimedia engineering December 2011 report

Major news in December include:

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Wikimedia engineering November 2011 report

Major news in November include:

  • The completion of the Coding challenge, and two coding events in India and the UK;
  • Continued infrastructure work in our data centers to improve performance and reliability, and on the Labs project;
  • Progress on the Visual editor and its back-end;
  • New versions of the Feedback Dashboard and the Upload Wizard, bringing new and long-awaited features;
  • Fundraising engineering going full-swing, in parallel with the annual fundraising campaign;
  • The final release of MediaWiki 1.18.0.

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Wikimedia engineering October 2011 report

Major news in October include:

  • The New Orleans hackathon, which focused on Wikimedia’s infrastructure;
  • Native HTTPS support on all Wikimedia sites;
  • Progress on the Visual editor project, with the first prototype expected in the coming months;
  • The deployment of the Translate extension to meta-wiki;
  • The deployment of MediaWiki 1.18 to all Wikimedia sites;
  • The completion of the first revision of the MediaWiki architecture document;
  • The ramp-up by the fundraising engineering team, to prepare for the upcoming annual fundraiser.

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Wikimedia engineering September 2011 report

Major news in September include:

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Wikimedia engineering August 2011 report

Major news in August include:

  • Technical discussions at Wikimania and Developer Days;
  • Progress on HTTPS, and generally better processes in Operations;
  • The kick-off of the Internationalization and localization tools project;
  • New features in UploadWizard, including major work on customized campaigns for the Wiki Loves Monuments event;
  • MediaWiki 1.18 and the new Mobile platform approaching deployment readiness;

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Wikimedia engineering July 2011 report

Major news in July include:

  • Ongoing data replication from our primary Florida data center to our new Virginia data center;
  • The deployment of the Article Feedback feature to all articles on the English Wikipedia, and the deployment of MoodBar;
  • The successful implementation of a MySQL-based parser cache on Wikimedia wikis;
  • Mid-term evaluation of our Summer of Code projects.

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Wikimedia engineering June 2011 report

Major news this month include:

  • the network setup in our new datacenter, that opened the way to new server setup and backups;
  • progress on features to encourage and facilitate participation, like the Visual editor groundwork, and the WikiLove button;
  • productive community testing on our now mobile front-end and the Kiwix download manager;
  • the release of MediaWiki 1.17.0;
  • the first commits by our Summer of Code students;
  • major progress on our code review backlog.

Note: This month, we’re trying out a slightly modified format for the report. Hover your mouse over the green question marks ([?]) to see a description of a particular project.
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Wikimedia engineering May 2011 report

Major news this month include:

  • the Berlin Hackathon, where about 70 developers and engineers met to improve our technical infrastructure;
  • the deployment of the Upload Wizard as default uploader on Wikimedia Commons;
  • the continued development, deployment and roll-out of the Article feedback tool on the English Wikipedia;
  • major progress in reducing our code review backlog. (more…)

Wikimedia engineering April 2011 report

Major news this month include:

  • the completion of the editor survey, which was supported by the engineering staff;
  • major progress on Article Feedback 3.0 and Upload Wizard 1.0, which will both be deployed in May;
  • mobile projects taking off, with field research in India and progress on the new mobile platform;
  • work on the budgeting exercise for the 2011-2012 fiscal year.

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